Oink, Oink . . .

Ah, it is finally June. The days are getting warmer as we move toward Summer, soft breezes gently ripple through the newly-green trees, and the girls . . .

Okay, I'll be the first to admit it. I am a walking HR specialist's nightmare.

It occured to me this afternoon, as I was wandering through the grocery store and noticed all the women decked out in chest-hugging shirts that they must have painted on, and little almost-there shorts with cutesy slogans emblazoned across their bums, that I must be the kind of man that sends HR people screaming for the Valium and seriously reconsider their profession.

Not that I need a sign hung around my neck that reads "Caution: Pedophile At Work," but I really don't seem to remember teenage girls being built that way when I was that age. Curves in all the right places, sure, but not that curvy . . . nor that eager to show said curves off. And then there are the twenty- and thirty-somethings . . .

Oy.

The thing of it is, we men are constantly told not to objectify women. We are constantly told that putting a woman and the idea of sex into the same thought is a bad thing, the greatest of social sins, and that only a severely intellectually-handicapped, knuckle-dragging pig - in other words, a man - would do something like that. Humans, after all, are intelligent beings, right? So, naturally, political correctness trumps evolution.

Oops. Guess I'm just a pig, and a rather unevolved one, at that. Reality, meet political correctness. And do try not to drool on the floor, please.

Women, I suppose, should hate Lycra. Because, when a man sees a really cute woman in the grocery store wearing bike shorts and a sports bra that do absolutely nothing to conceal all the right curves being in all the right places, just what does she think that guy is going to think about? Biking? Please . . .

And, really, is just looking cause enough to scream "Animal! Off to sensitivity training with you at once!"? I mean, if you don't want us looking, why do you wear those little tube-tops and wonder bras? Or the little low-riding shorts with the writing on your butts? I'm so confused. My little porcine brain hurts.

Personally, at this point in my life, I've been through quite a few HR specialists. I'm sort of the Mount Suribachi of that profession, only the Marines had an easier time of it with theirs than HR folk have with me.

Q: "What do you think about when you see a woman?"
A: "She's cute. I'd like to meet her."

Q: "What do you think about when you see a woman's breasts?"
A: "Umm . . . sex."

Q: "And why do you think about sex?"
A: "Because I'm a man?"

Q: "But don't you think about that woman as a person?"
A: "Sure. I think of her as a person I'd like to have sex with."

Q: "No! Bad dog! No biscuit! Thinking of women and sex is wrong!"
A: "If it were that wrong, neither you nor I would be here . . ."

Don't get me wrong. There are a lot of things I value in a woman, such as intelligence, wit, a sense of humour, the ability to carry on and hold her own in a conversation . . . But, let's face it. When a man first sees a woman in a thong bikini, that's not what he's thinking about. All due apologies to the sensitivity trainers out there, of course.

Yet it still seems to me that there's a double-standard out there. It seems that it is perfectly acceptable for a group of women to look at a man and talk about how cute his buns are, or what a ripped six-pack he has, and so on. But, if you reverse the genders of everyone involved in that scenario, all of a sudden it's like the Japanese are bombing Pearl Harbour.

I'm all for equality here, really. But at times it seems like as soon as a man looks at a woman, sirens start going off, red lights start flashing and you're sitting in a class about sexual harrassment before you even know what's going on.

Ah, well. I can't help it. It's a hard-wired thing, I suppose. Personally, I'd be ecstatic if a woman looked at me and thought "Sex!" But that's just me. I mean, just looking never hurt anything, did it?

Looks like it's going to be another long Summer . . .