by Matt Benoit
Clothing. It’s been a part of daily human life ever since Eve, after eating the forbidden fruit, looked at Adam and remarked, “Um…your junk is showing.”
From that pivotal first realization that exposed genitals can indeed be distracting, clothing and the perceptions of “style” and “fashion” have dominated our species.
And over the centuries, those perceptions and ideals have changed in immense and dramatic ways. In the Middle Ages, for instance, most fashionable people walked around wearing frocks or chainmail and getting the bubonic plague. But now, hundreds of years later, we’ve become a much more liberal and sanitary world, which would help explain perhaps the most amazing fashion invention ever devised: cleavage.
For many decades the female population has expressed their amazing physical beauty by tastefully revealing—as President John F. Kennedy once stated in a famous speech—“the goods which make our world worth saving from the evils of communism.”
These days, female cleavage is virtually everywhere. I should know. I’m a guy who has to look at it (not that I, for the most part, have a problem with this).
So, you might ask, where did cleavage come from? Well, first of all, good question, and secondly, who cares?
However, for the sake of the historically-minded reader who does, I can tell you that not much is known about the origins of cleavage, and most men don’t really care so long as it never goes away.
Men, of course, have themselves dabbled in cleavage over the years, most notably in the forms of “plumber’s crack” (also known as “reverse cleavage”) and “exposed chest hair,” but both experiments were deemed overall failures.
The most important aspect of staring at…I mean, examining the topic of cleavage, is that as the temperatures warm up heading into spring and then summer, many a woman tends to dress less and less conservatively. And the hotter it gets, the more cleavage they tend to display.
This important observation was first noticed by sociologist I.C. Cleavage in 1959, right after he saw Marilyn Monroe in “Some Like It Hot.”
Through grueling hours of field research, some of which resulted in him being repeatedly maced, this brave scientist developed the Heat to Cleavage Ratio (HCR), now widely accepted in the scientific community as the “gold standard” in measuring the relationship of temperature to exposed bosoms.
But amid all this glorious cleavage, one must remember that it has its proper time and place in our world. That time, I believe, should not be during the school day.
Because when a guy is sitting in a classroom and seeing—without a map—London and France (and possibly even all the way to Berlin and Poland), the lessons from that day’s lecture tend to be forgotten about relatively quickly.
I once saw a young woman standing outside Whatcom’s Syre Student Center wearing what I can only describe as a “half-shirt.” Her entire mid-riff and lower back (which, I can tell you, looked pretty healthy) were totally exposed for the viewing pleasure of the campus community.
I wondered what happened. Did she buy something almost too small and then shrink it in the wash, only to look at the shrunken fabric and go, “Eh, I’ll just wear it. It’s not like I look slutty or anything.”
Personally, what I want to ask women on our campus who dress like this is: I only have $20—how much will that get me?
No, wait, that’s not it. What I really mean is: Are those real?
Again—sorry, not what I meant to say. What I mean to say is: What makes you want to come to a place of learning dressed in a way that devalues your beauty while simultaneously distracting discerning males to the point where they walk into large, stationary objects?
The same question can also be posed to girls who choose to wear sweatpants with words such as “Juicy” or “Bootylicious” over their posterior regions (note: the latter word requires either smaller font or a larger butt).
When I see these kinds of things (and it is rare, as a 21-year-old single male, that I don’t notice them), it makes me think about the oft-failing concepts of female modesty and male discretion in our society today.
While I know many women wish that guys would, in the made-up words of Queen Elizabeth II, “refrain from perversion and just drink their tea like proper men,” I have news for some of them: Men prefer beer, and if you actually expect them to not stare at your butt after you’ve turned the area over it into a jiggling message board, you are gravely mistaken.
In fact, come to think of it, I think this practice of butt messaging, or “buttvertising,” could well be the next big trend in advertising (“ADVERTISE…HERE!”). Because if you’re a company wanting men to know about a product they could use, this would be a surefire way to get your message out there.
Anyway, the point I’m trying to make here, ladies, is that while most of us men appreciate your incredible beauty, some of us would also appreciate more modesty when we’re supposed to be focused on the angle of a triangle’s sides instead of the angle of vision of…well, you know.
But, if you still insist on coming to school dressed like a streetwalker and you’ll take this $20, I do have some time before my next class starts.
