How Men See Women

Okay, another post on #MeToo but today I read an article I just couldn't ignore. It is not often that you read an article that puts into words what you had a vague instinctual awareness of and takes that thought much further. I am going to quote from the article:

As a smart and funny woman, who is a conventionally non-hot type, I have seen the barely disguised glazed look of feigned cocktail party interest in the eyes of many a male filmmaker-writer-musician type while I was talking about cinema, law, culture or any other area of mutual interest... I have understood, at first with anger, then with amusement, that men are not interested in what women have to say... A man who does not see women when he is not interested in sex with them is not going to see women when he wants to have sex with them either... every story one reads always features the internal moment of assault, what I’ve begun to call the moment of rape: the moment when the woman realises that this man does not see me as a person. 

The article goes on to talk about consent and "liberal" sexual norms before returning to the subject of how men, and the world in general sees women. 

We will have no consent till we also have a culture which loves women, which teaches us to love women, to really, really see them — not as examples of their gender, as victims or supergirls, but as self-contained beings of brightness and power, unpredictable charm, complex inner lives and fascinating opinions. 

The question is how do we men see a woman whom we don't want to have sex with? Do we see her as full human beings or just something of little interest which has to be tolerated? Because how we men see women we are not romantically or sexually interested in is a good guide to how we see women in general. This is not just a question about our behaviour towards women but a question of vision, a way of seeing, which is a pre-behavioral stage. In my own life, I am seeing what I think is a case of a man turning cold towards a woman after realizing he doesn't have a chance with her. That is, of course, infinitely better than him reacting with anger or harassing the girl. But, such an attitude reduces women either to trophies or to wallpaper, and neither is a great thing to be. And this is not just a moral issue. At the risk of sounding "woke", in my experience, seeing women as full, complex and self-contained human beings opens a whole new world of deep and enriching relationships, platonic and non-platonic.