If a Man Finds a Woman Sexually Attractive, Does He Assume She Feels the Same About Him?

When a woman's looks or the way she carries herself turns a man on, does he jump to the conclusion that the feeling runs both ways, that she must be interested and ready to play along? Not always, and the gap between the two can hurt. More than once in my life a man was drawn to me while I felt nothing in return, and he behaved as though I either was attracted or had some obligation to be. When those moments turned into advances I never invited, I was left rattled, humiliated, and completely unsure how to back out without making a scene.

Call it sexual harassment, though I lived through it before I had a name for it. Each time I came away embarrassed and muddled, convinced I had wandered into something I never meant to begin, never encouraged, and had no idea how to escape unharmed. I grew up in a time when a situation going too far was automatically chalked up to the woman. But I couldn't tell you how I ended up in these moments or how I was supposed to climb out of them.

Does scripture give cover to this? There's that notion that a man caught in such a spot was simply seduced. I'm not claiming no woman ever does that. It isn't true of all women, and probably not even most. Still, if sex gets treated as a route to safety, or as what's owed after a dinner out, what conclusion is a man left to draw? Attraction and commitment should run both ways. And when the expectation is that the man arrives with experience while the woman has little or none, the outcome almost writes itself.

The whole thing is like handling fire. If getting a woman's cooperation depends on a bit of confusion on her end, even cooperation built on a false impression, is that cooperation worth what it costs? She may already sense the blame will land on her anyway, since she supposedly should have known better, or why would she have gone along at all. Poor sex education, hers and his both, opens the door to men dodging responsibility and to a woman's own desires being spoken for by someone else.

So who were these men? There was the therapist who, in one of our first sessions, announced that he found me sexually attractive and seemed puzzled that I wasn't flattered. At a later appointment, after my therapy had wrapped up, the same man said, come here, lie down on the floor, let me touch you.

There was the pediatrician who preferred to examine my babies while I held them stretched across my lap, the sort of arrangement that would get a different label today.

There was the psychiatrist I worked under as a psychology student, the summer right after college, who liked to pull out Playboy centerfolds to watch how I'd react, and who had me run the mental status exam on our all-male patients while he handled the physical exam on those same men, who were at least partly undressed at the time.

And there was the senior psychologist who rested his hand on my thigh while driving me home from a trip to another clinic. Being newly divorced did not make me available, or interested in an older married man I felt no pull toward. He was known for this. He couldn't hold on to a secretary because of it. Was there something I had done to invite it?

If I had ever entertained the idea of being sexually attractive, episodes like these could have killed the wish entirely. Think how it leaves a woman feeling at the moment she would actually like to feel desirable, when she finally meets a man she's genuinely drawn to. It reminds me of the burglar who asks why the shop puts the costly diamonds in the window if they didn't want them taken.

Yes, some women do seduce men for reasons that have nothing to do with love or real regard. The same is true of plenty of men.

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