Sex appeal
Wednesday November 30, 2005
Sex appeal
One trouble with growing older is that you stop being a sex object.
I was walking the dog last summer. A group of girls, probably in their late teens, had spread themselves out on the beach, right across the trail. They noticed the dog; they barely glanced at me.
I was just a grey-bearded geezer on the end of a leash.
The other day, I went to the bank I’ve patronized for 12 years. Most of the tellers recognize me; a few know me by name. But on this occasion, I ended up going to one of the younger tellers. She has worked at that branch for about two years, I’d guess. Certainly she has processed my deposits and withdrawals before.
I handed over my signed withdrawal slip.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’ll have to sign that again. I didn’t actually see you sign it.”
I signed again. The second signature looked more or less like the first.
“I’ll have to check your signature against the files,” she smiled apologetically: “I don’t know you, you see.”
I suppose that someone in her late twenties doesn’t have much interest in a male considerably more than twice her age. So she doesn’t remember me, even though she has seen me many times. I have at least a dozen deposit slips bearing her initials.
Selective blindness
Jay Ingram’s latest book, The Theatre of the Mind, spends most of a chapter demonstrating that we see only what we want to see. “Vision is not like a camera,” he states. The camera captures everything before its lens; the eye sees what it chooses to see. Ingram calls it “inattentional blindness” – that is, we miss things we aren’t actually paying attention to.
In one famous experiment in the 1990s, psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris told subjects to watch a basketball game, paying particular attention to one or other of the teams. Part way through the experiment, a man in a gorilla suit strolled through the middle of the game. About half of the subjects completely failed to notice him. They didn’t believe he had been there at all, until they saw it again on videotape.
I’m often amazed, when Joan and I start reminiscing, how we remember totally different details of the same event.
I’m often equally amazed when two people read the same book, and find dramatically different messages in it. The Bible, for example. Some find it in mainly themes of a God who loves universally and unconditionally; other find only themes of judgement and punishment.
Based on their preconceptions, then, they identify a number of “truths.”
Does that mean that all truths are relative? That what each person sees as truth is just as good as what any other person sees as truth?
Hardly. Because this very diversity of truths demonstrates a more universal truth – the infinite capacity of humans for self-delusion.
As evidence, I offer the continuing conviction of a grey-bearded geezer that young women should find him attractive.
=================================
Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
=================================
PROMOTION PLUGS
To receive this column regularly via e-mail, send a request to jimt@quixotic.ca. E-mail subscribers also get excerpts from correspondence about these columns. Please forward a copy of this column to anyone who might be interested in subscribing. If you want to order my books, you can call 1-800-663-2775 in Canada, 1-800-328-0200 in the U.S., or order them on-line at the Wood Lake Books website. For a lighter look at ethics, faith, and life, I recommend Ralph Milton’s weekly e-newsletter Rumors. You can subscribe to it at the Wood Lake Books home page in Ralph Milton’s Site, or by sending a note directly to ralphmilton@woodlake.com. It’s also worth pursuing Richard Fairchild’s United Online site. Another site worth visiting is David Keating’s “SeemslikeGod” page.