Ogling you

If you use public transport to get to work, then you'll be familiar with the annoying behaviour of your fellow commuters. They will play their music too loudly. They'll wear a pongy perfume that makes you sneeze. They'll rummage noisily through their belongings, engage in grooming sessions (which may include fingernail or even toenail clipping) and heedlessly fling their bag or backpack in your face as they stand up to get off the bus or the train.

But some people can enrage us without making a noise, wearing a foul fragrance or ever laying a finger on us. To all the world they seem to be leaving us entirely alone and unmolested. Except for one thing.

Their gaze.

One of the more benign starers.

If another person stares at us – and we become aware of the staring – we can feel profoundly unnerved. Is the starer sizing us up to figure out if it's worth the effort of robbing us? Are they ogling us with unwholesome and lewd thoughts, deciding if they're going to ravish us? Perhaps they just hate the look of us. We might be too expensively dressed for their liking or be from the wrong race or ethnic background – whatever that may be.

Even if we're not frightened or discomfited, being stared at by another person in a public place can annoy us. Yet the strange aspect of being stared at is that nothing from the person who stares at us necessarily impinges upon us. It's purely an act of reception – not transmission – yet it can be the most disturbing of these mild annoyances that other people perpetrate upon us. They're not emitting annoying sounds or odours and they're not touching us. The act of staring is entirely contained within the starer. Yet most of us find it profoundly disturbing to be stared at, and we can instantly feel anxiety or hostility  well up inside us.  It could be an idle gaze, but many of us feel that an element of malevolence is contained in the look of someone who stares.

But what can you do when someone stares at you in a public place, especially when they are a long way from you and probably out of earshot, unable to hear any reprimands you might want to make? I have experimented with a technique that has always worked for me, so allow me to share it with you. 

Most of us, when stared at, don't want to match the starer in their pointless and intrusive activity. We tend to look away for a few moments, then look back at the starer to see if they're still ogling us, which they invariably are. So here's what I do to stop starers: even if they are not within earshot, I look at them and start talking to them. I usually say something like, "You've been staring at me for some time now. Why are you doing it? It's extremely annoying and it's perverse. Stop doing it." 

I usually make sure that I'm enunciating clearly, to increase the chance that they can lip-read my message. Occasionally I might include the f-word. Even poor lip readers seem to have no trouble in deciphering this word with its unambiguous fricative. Placing your top teeth on your bottom lip followed by the opening of your mouth doesn't leave much doubt about what you're saying, even if the other person can only see your mouth and not hear the words coming out of it.

The starer invariably seems to find this speaking directed at them to be disturbing enough to make them quickly desist; they usually look away within seconds. 

So try this speaking strategy next time you feel a pair of eyes boring into you. And let me know if you are successful with it.