I guess my question is ‘who decides what staring at someone is?’ Could someone conceivably get in trouble for staring at something behind someone else? What if someone’s just staring into space, but someone else thinks they’re being stared at?
Come on.
It’s a totally reasonable point.
When I was first dating my now wife, we used to go to something called a mall to people watch. We’d sit up on the upper level and watch people down below to see what they were doing, what stores they stopped at, the weird things they were wearing, etc. It was a nice way to spend no money while having some fun conversation and learning about each other.
I think it’s hilarious that anyone would equate this with staring at the secretary all day.
It’s not much different if you really think about the concepts. Both are incredibly weird and “creepy” if you want to misuse that word. Either way you’re looking at some innocent person who is minding his own business. It’s just that in one situation you’re on the upper level looking down and mocking the clothes of people on the lower level and in the other you’re in a corporate shithole looking at a poor secretary that wished she’d chosen a less demeaning career. In reality, however, it’s actually true that watching people can be creepy, and other times it isn’t creepy. What if you just looked at the secretary for five seconds, and not all day? What about six? What about 4.99 seconds? What if you looked at her for five seconds with a normal expression on your face while someone else looked at her for three and a half seconds with a really threatening look on his face? How about everyone minds their own damn business while simultaneously not freaking the fuck out when some person looks at them? How about that?
This is ridiculous.
Why? Personally, if someone was watching me at the mall I’d be fucking disturbed, or at the very least pissed off enough to commit violence, and I’d be disgusted at the idea of wasting my time sitting with someone and watching others. That’s my subjective take on it, but something tells me that you aren’t clamoring to make life more comfortable for me. And you shouldn’t be. I wish no one on the planet would ever look at me again, in fact, but I realize how selfish and dumb it is to expect people to pander to my hangups. It’s no one’s responsibility to ensure anyone else’s comfort. No one should be expected to alter their totally harmless actions in order to make other people less uncomfortable.