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discreet, and because I lacked all sexual feeling for him, I assumed he had none for me.
    Nineteenth-century conventions for courtship have been largely disassembled in the latter half of this century, bending the codes out of shape. People marry later. The emphasis on virginity for women has changed. Single women work and are not expected to give up their jobs once they marry. Men have been digesting a set of new rules that are nevertheless colored by the old ones. People still court each other, after all. They are still looking for Romance of one kind or another—short or long—and each one of them is alone out there reading and misreading the intentions of others. The Antioch Ruling was clearly a response to the chaos of courtship—a way of imposing a structure on what seemed to have collapsed—but ambiguity remains, not just in interpretation but even in desire itself. There are people, and we have all met them, who can’t make up their minds. There are people who say no when they mean yes, and yes when they mean no. There are people who mean exactly what they say when they say it, and then later wish they had said the opposite. There are people who succumb to sexual pressure out of a misplaced desire to please or even out of pity. To pretend ambiguity doesn’t exist in sexual relations is just plain stupid.
    And then there are moments of interruption—those walls that block desire. I was absolutely mad about a boy in high school, but there was something about his nose when he kissed me, something about its apparent softness from that angle, that I disliked. To my mind, that nose needed more cartilage. I kept my eyes shut. I know of a woman who fell for a man at a party. She fell hard and fast. They returned to her apartment in an erotic fever, kissing madly, throwing their clothes off, and then she looked across the room and saw his underwear. If I remember correctly, it was some male version of the bikini bottom, and her attraction vanished suddenly, irrevocably. She told the poor man to leave. An explanation was impossible. What was she to say? “I hate your underpants”?
    Sexual freedom and eroticism are not identical; in fact, freedom can undermine the erotic, because the no-holds-barred approach is exciting only if you’ve just knocked down the door. And despite the fact that dinner, a movie, and a kiss at the door have taken a beating in recent years, seduction is inevitably a theater of barriers, a playing and replaying of roles, both conscious and unconscious. Sincerity is not at issue here; most of us play in earnest. Through the language of clothes and gesture and through talk itself, we imagine ourselves as the other person will see us, mirroring our own desire in them, and most of what we do is borrowed from a vocabulary of familiar images. This is not a territory of experience that is easy to dissect legally.
    Apparently, there is a new law in Minnesota against staring. It has been duly mocked in newspapers all over the world, but according to my sister, it came about because of the increase in the number of construction sites around Minneapolis, and women were weary of walking past them. Most women have experienced these painful, often humiliating excursions in front of an ogling, jeering crowd of men, and I don’t know of anyone who likes them. This event—the construction crew whooping and hooting at a passing woman—is a convention, a thing those guys do in a group and only in a group, to liven up the job, to declare their masculinity to the world
safely.
It’s the pseudo-sexual invitation. Not a single one of those men expects the woman to say, “Yes, I’m flattered. Take me, now.”
    But staring, even staring in this crude from, does not seem criminal to me. “Officer, he’s staring. Arrest him,” has a feeble ring to it. And I say this despite the fact that twice in my life I found myself the object of what would have to be described as aggressive staring. For several years, when I