News

The question

I think my girlfriend's going to leave me (if she doesn't gouge my eyes out first).

Actually, both of those things might happen if I can't get my ogling under control. It's crazy - I mean, I love my girlfriend and she's so, so attractive, but everywhere we go she catches me peeking over the menu at another woman or turning my head as we pass someone on the street.

Chalk it up to spring fever, but last week I narrowly avoided having a car accident after my roving peepers locked onto a lady on the sidewalk - and my girlfriend was in the passenger seat. She was furious and now she's got me in her sights.

Can I get this under control and reassure her that I'm committed without becoming a navel-gazing freak show?

The answer

The good news: Ogling's hardwired, it's natural, and everyone does it.

Various studies confirm this fact: Men and women alike are constantly checking each other out.

A Florida State University study concluded this sort of "attentional adhesion"(they're scientists so they had to give it a serious-sounding name) is so automatic it hovers on the brink of the unintentional.

We check out not only potential partners but potential rivals. The brain, the study says, recognizes attractiveness in one 10th of a second, long before any sort of conscious decision has been made.

A recent British study suggests men (or, at least, British men) spend as much as a year of their lives macking the ladies with their booty binoculars. They check out on average 10 women a day for as much as two minutes each (whereas women check out fewer men and for less time) and those minutes add up over a lifetime to nearly a full year.

The bad news: None of this mumbo-jumbo lets you off the hook, sunshine.

Ogling, especially of the classic no-bones-about-it,

up-and-down, prelude-to-a-wolf-whistle variety, has gone the way of the mullet, I'm afraid: no longer cool, if it ever was.

You must train yourself out of this behaviour, Grasshopper.

You must now apprentice in the art of "nogling," a key weapon in the arsenal of any man hoping to sustain a long-term relationship.

I wish I could take credit for that coinage ("no" + "ogle" = "nogle"). But it comes courtesy of The Sun newspaper in Britain, in an article about David Beckham, about whom they still care over there.

Two weeks ago, a photographer snapped him at a Lakers game in Los Angeles, staring at a cheerleader's mini-skirted derriere shimmying a few feet in front of him.

He just gazed at it, looking hypnotized, as if it were a diamond-encrusted soccer ball that glowed and hovered in the air and could speak and tell him the future.

This being 2008, the picture instantly shot around the world and came to the attention of his wife, the artist formerly known as Posh Spice, on her birthday, according to The Sun.

Her reaction is unknown, but it's a safe bet she was not "best pleased" because this week a very similar picture was snapped: Becks at the Lakers game, sans Posh, with his nine-year-old son; once again, the mini-skirted posterior of a Lakers cheerleader wriggled suggestively inches from his face. Even his son, the kookily named Brooklin, couldn't help sneaking a peek.

But in this picture, Becks is staring grimly, resolutely, straight ahead at the game, as if the cheerleader's not even there.

I laughed so hard at that picture because I understood, down to my toes. Becks had grown. He'd evolved. Posh had obviously read him the riot act. And in the two weeks between the two pictures, quick study that he is, he'd mastered the art of the "nogle."

The verb "to nogle" means that no matter what is waved, dangled, unbuttoned, pops out, comes undone or begins to undulate in your field of vision, you must resolutely ignore it.

Resolutely, Grasshopper. Like the feet of a man crossing burning coals, your peripheral vision may be on fire, but do not alter the horizontal axis of your gaze. Look at anything - a flower arrangement, funeral urn, an Edvard Munch poster - but that which is drawing your eyes like iron filings to a magnet.

It can be tough, I know. Especially in the spring, the season when breasts come out from their furry cocoons, all frisky and playful from their winter's hibernation. When that great harbinger of warm weather, the belly button, makes its first shy, tentative appearance. For men in long-term relationships, this time of year can actually be physically painful.

But no matter the circumstances, a gentleman never stares.

At most, as Seinfeld says about the cleavage peek, make like you're looking at the sun: "You get a sense of it and then you look away."

Even if your girlfriend attempts to entrap you, don't take the bait.

For example, if she says: "Did you see how tight that girl's T-shirt was?"

Bad answer: "Yeah, you could actually see the stitching on her bra."

Good answer: "What girl?"

So apologize to your girlfriend, tell her and demonstrate to her you've mended your ways.

Meanwhile, train yourself with Rocky-like intensity in the art of nogling (and improving your peripheral vision. I've heard tell of men who could tell you the date of a quarter on the floor without breaking eye contact, but that may be apocryphal).

You should be out of the doghouse in no time.

Don't listen to people who tell you to be "honest" about it all, either. Disastrous! It only digs a deeper pit from which you'll have to escape.

The only time it's good to get caught ogling is if you're like Chris Martin, the Coldplay singer.

Recently, like Becks, his stalkerazzi snapped him on the street flagrantly eye-dropping and booty-checking the actress Gwyneth Paltrow, who was walking in front of him.

But the thing is, Ms. Paltrow's his wife, and the mother of his children, the kookily named Apple and Moses.

Guess who got lucky that night?

David Eddie is a screenwriter and the author of Chump Change and Housebroken:

Confessions of a Stay-at-Home Dad.

I've made a huge mistake

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