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I'm not. But maybe we could try an experiment. Let's take a large sample of men from a conservative, old-fashioned society where porn and sexy clothes are strictly forbidden. Let's bring them into a modern western society where it's normal for women's bodies to be on display all the time. Since they've never watched porn, they should have no problem with it right? They should easily adjust to this new society and not even notice the wanton display of sexuality, since they didn't have porn to hijack their brains, so they'll just be pure and innocent and oohhhhh crap that experiment didn't work out very well.
Are you under the impression that historical modesty and sexiness exists on a simple linear scale from burqas to tank tops? Probably there's a universal thrill with full view of certain parts of the anatomy, but past that, modesty norms and male perceptions of "sexiness" are very much in the eye of the beholder. Plenty of extremely "conservative, old-fashioned societies" in equatorial regions have far less covered-up norms of dress than we do. Public breastfeeding used to be far more common in the West, while there's a huge amount of historical hand-wringing about the immodesty of women showing their sexy, sexy free-flowing hair, which today men view in their co-workers without experiencing unmanageable erections.
My point is that there is underlying instinct, but then there's a huge amount of situational conditioning on top of that. If a man complains that he feels uncontrollably, painfully aroused and frustrated by the tops of a woman's breasts at work, then goes home every night and deliberately stimulates himself while looking at images of the tops of women's breasts, then all I'm saying is that he's clearly the dog AND Pavlov in that situation.
No but I feel like you're overthinking this. Nobody (well, hardly anyone) is going crazy over seeing a woman's hair or the idea of her breastfeeding. But when you see a woman wearing a super cut low tank top with a pushup bra and high-heeled pumps, and the absolute tightest pants she could possibly wriggle into... cmon. That's sexy. She isn't wearing that "just to be comfortable." She, or some fashion influencer, designed that outfit to sexually attract men. It's not "uncontrollably, painfully aroused and frustrated," It's more like a mild discomfort. It's just a feeling that never, ever goes away when you're surrounded by women like that at work and in daily life, constantly, and you're expected to not hit them with the dreaded "male gaze." Sometimes I feel paranoid that I might accidentally look in a way that makes someone feel sexually harassed. I feel like I need to get one of those eye trackers that some streamers use, to record my eye movement, in case I ever need proof that I wasn't ogling them.
Again, I'm not saying that there isn't a hardwired component to sexual arousal. But organisms are very good at using environmental information to upregulate and downregulate behavioral programs depending on what's most reward-rich at the moment. The dynamics of this are pretty consistent; remove a reward and there's an extinction burst of increased drive to regain it, then after a while that program gets turned down as temporarily no longer profitable.
So if someone expresses that their constant impulses toward free-floating sexual opportunism with random women are troublesome and uncomfortable to them, BUT also a primary leisure activity is protracted rubbing of their genitals while they look at a bunch of images of random women in postures that suggest sexual opportunity, then I feel like they clearly aren't doing all they could to persuade their bodies to turn down the constant sex-seeking.
OP: "Sometimes I feel paranoid that I might accidentally look in a way that makes someone feel sexually harassed."
You: "So if someone expresses that their constant impulses toward free-floating sexual opportunism with random women are troublesome and uncomfortable to them"
Way to miss the point. The problem isn't men's impulses, it's women being empowered to interpret men's behavior as explicitly sexual even if he doesn't view nor intend it as sexual and use that interpretation to exert power over him via creep shaming or other social bullying. The more we crack down on "creepy" behavior in men, the more we incentivize women to interpret even more innocuous behaviors as creepy in order to abuse that power. Cracking down on sexy dress (EDIT: by saying she "deserves" to be leered at and thus can't exert social power over men if she dresses that way) is one way to dis-incentivize such abuse.
I think I was responding to this bit:
I'm not seeing the concern in the passage above that one's strictly chaste, "accidental" and "innocuous" glances toward women might be misinterpreted as sexual; it seems more about someone who is annoyed that they get a constant arousal response, to an "uncomfortable" extent, from any visuals that show the shape of a woman's body? Thus, the opening of this conversation was about whether it's fair to complain about constantly getting aroused around boobs, while also deliberately entraining that exact response pattern, and keeping oneself in a state of artificial sexual hyper-sensitivity, through regular masturbation to porn.
If it's pivoting instead to a conversation about how women overestimate the perviness of the male gaze, then I don't see how clothing is relevant one way or the other. Men can look at women lustfully no matter what they're wearing, so presumably a woman could also level a wrongful accusation of ogling regardless of her dress.
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