I guess women spend all the time doing their hair, putting on makeup, shaving their legs,picking out clothes,wearing painful high heels,etc., so nobody will look at them.
They do it more to compete with each other than to get our attention, IMHO
Well, there are several different things going on here:
1) Of course, women who do the things you mention want to be looked at...by Brad Pitt. And on the off chance he is going to be at the mall this afternoon, she had better be prepared. ;)
2) The day the 16-year-old daughter becomes more attractive to the majority of men than her 40-year-old mother is a terribly traumatic event in the 40-year-old mother's life - thus the unusual sensitivity to men's stares from the author of the article.
3) Men who really do leer at women as if they were looking at porn on their computers are less common, but genuinely frightening to women as other posters have described. I think only a small percentage of them are genuinely dangerous - the rest just have poor social skills and don't realize how they are coming across.
4) And Ms. Politically Correct will never admit it, but a very high percentage of those serial leerers are young urban Black males and immigrants from Latin America.
5) The big difference between the man whose appreciative stares are greeted with a smile from a woman instead of a negative reaction isn't looks or money...it's self-confidence. If he looks away as soon as she makes eye contact (like a very high percentage of men do), it's all over - she moves him into the "creep" category instantly, and there's no road back. If he instead holds her gaze and smiles until she looks away, a remarkably different result will often occur. Of course, doing this requires genuine self-confidence - you can't fake it.
6) The author of the article needs to spend a month in Eastern Europe or Russia, then come back and try to complain about how those awful American men are staring at her...