"So what's on your minds, guys?" It was a really open-ended question to ask a group of incarcerated teenage boys, and the range of answers I got pretty much lived up to my expectations;

"Eatin' Pizza;" "Girls;" "Eatin' Pizza with girls!" There were a few other topics that I am probably better off leaving to your imagination.

Josh White, Jr. and I were working our way through the first session of a new idea we were developing, helping severely troubled young people explore some of their deepest feelings by writing and performing folk and blues songs. At the time we were calling the program "Project Roots," referring to the fact that traditional folk and blues, or "roots music," forms the foundation on which all other American music is built.

Who'd have thought good crops
Could come from a bad seed?

It was a pretty good line in a really good poem, entitled "Look At Me," by a seventeen year old African-American poet named Donald. This young man was theoretically every bit as dangerous as he was gifted; he was incarcerated in the WJ Maxey Boys Training School as a violent offender.

I was working with Donald on a documentary called "Young Poet Incarcerated," helping him polish some of his work and rehearse it before we rolled the camera. We had been given some money by the National Endowment for the Arts through the Michigan Humanities Council and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs to cover some of the costs of making our movie.

She wore a baggy purple shirt over baggy purple sweat pants. Her hair was chopped short and her body was padded with a layer of soft flesh that bore tribute to the starchy diet of incarceration. She had her arms folded across her lap, her gaze fixed on the floor in front of her, and she was almost imperceptibly rocking to a rhythm that only she could hear.

She was maybe sixteen years old.

I can't use her real name here. Let's call her Krissy. I have no idea how she came to be locked up. It is not a question we ever ask. We can safely assume that at some point in her short life everything just spun out of control, to the point that it no longer worked for her to be out in the world.

Last week I mentioned that men can't help looking at women, especially when a little bit of cleavage is involved. I admit that this is about as startling as saying that the sun rises in the East or that Glenn Beck is daisy-plucking, talking to imaginary hummingbirds crazy. Still, it had to be said.

Now we are going to explore ways for men to follow their natural instinct to peek without getting pepper sprayed.

To start with, try to understand that to some extent this is all mostly a matter of being polite. A woman, unlike a man, generally has a pretty good idea what she is wearing and what it looks like. And unless she was raised by wolves (female ones), you can be fairly sure that she knows about guys and cleavage.

OK, this is going to come as a shock to a lot of you. It is not the kind of thing I ordinarily discuss here. In fact the only reason I'm doing it at all is that, now that President Obama has everything in the world pretty much under control and Sarah Palin is leaving the public eye to spend more time with her family, there is not really all that much for us to talk about. So here goes:

Men look at women! They do it a lot!

I know, right?

And the thing is, when we do it, we are apparently just responding to our genetic programming. In hundreds (probably) of psycho-neurological studies (why not?), it has been proven (I'll bet) that a man's response to visual sexual stimuli is almost completely involuntary (yeah, that's the ticket).

What this boils down to, in layman's terms, is that guys just can't help looking at girls. Especially when it comes to gazing at the naughty bits.