FALL is here at last and I've been looking forward to it for a number of rea- sons: crisp autumn air, orange leaves, pumpkin pie, and the probability that the sexier women on our city streets would begin to put their clothes back on again. By winter, they may be fully dressed.

Don't get me wrong. I like female bodies. But over the last decade, every heterosexual man with fully oxygenated blood must have noticed the gradual disrobing that has been going on among women in major metropolises. The recent dust-up about Calvin Klein's soft-core photo ads missed the point. Women well above age 17 are wearing less today than at any time since I entered puberty in 1976.

The male instinct tells us to celebrate this. Recently I conducted a survey of my male friends, in their twenties and thirties, and found they had all taken note of the evolution in fashion: shorter shorts, shorter skirts, chiffon-type skirts that are long but see-through, suggestively ripped Levis, very tight and small white T-shirts baring eight inches of tanned stomach, very thin loose T-shirts worn without a bra. No shape or location of anything, no ques- tion as to firmness or softness, is left ambiguous.

"Lately I can't keep my eyes in my head," Glenn, a 29-year-old graduate stu- dent, told me appreciatively. "I'm walking down the sidewalk just memorizing what these girls look like."

"You know the scene in Desperado?" asks Perry, a book agent. "This girl in a mini-skirt crosses the street. Two Mexican guys in cars are staring at her and they crash head-on, but she just turns around and smirks. It's like that for me all the time."

Surely there are fewer bras on big-city streets than at any point since the bra-burning Sixties. I mean, leave Calvin Klein out of it. His ads were tame enough to be reproduced in full in the print and broadcast media. Some of the outfits I've seen on a balmy Saturday night on Manhattan's Upper West Side could not be fully described -- in words, never mind pictures -- in the respectable press. Can it be more than a decade before women stroll topless in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles?

Yet when they are done rejoicing at the unfolding vistas, my buddies start to voice certain doubts. "I mean," Ira, a commodities trader, says uncertainly, "what the hell do they want, anyway?"

The problem is, after you've thanked Providence for all the previously hidden body parts, you realize that the parade of them has turned you into an oaf, a creature of incessant ogling. Danny, a lawyer, explains poignantly: "It's got- ten to the point that, when I see someone coming down the street and I think she's going to knock my socks off, I turn my head. Or cross the street."

I have also talked to women about the subject, and their annoyed response to men forever checking them out pretty much comes down to: Well, if you would all just look straight ahead like West Point cadets, you wouldn't have a prob- lem. Danny accepts this reasoning. Referring to the rules of modesty that used to govern dress among men and women, he asks, "Why should we penalize women because we're dysfunctional?" Being an oaf, in other words, is a matter of free choice.

Is it really? When you describe something as dysfunctional, you mean it doesn't work the way nature intended. A dysfunctional heart pumps too little blood. Dysfunctional lungs don't process enough oxygen. Yet for millennia, when any generally healthy heterosexual male has been confronted with a woman's almost-naked body, he has reacted the way a man hungry for food does when you wave a pizza under his nose. There is something essential in men that makes them want to look. And look and look. It's a desire that can be trained, not extinguished.

Which is to say, ladies, that you are pushing our buttons. "Sometimes I try not to look," explains Mike, an editor. "But it's like when I tried to quit therapy. The shrink knew every button to push. Guilt, anxiety. He almost talked me out of quitting, but then I got mad at being manipulated and quit anyway." Some buttons produce guilt or anxiety; others the thrill of titilla- tion. Probably resentment exists below the surface in more than a few men.

Nor does the sight of half-dressed women merely turn men into boors. Worse than that, frankly it's a bore. With all the interesting things to think about in the world, when the weather is fine and we walk outside we are stuck gazing at successive pairs of thinly draped bosoms. No doubt the United Nations took so long to arrive at a coherent Bosnia strategy partly owing to the proximity of the male delegates to the streets of New York.

If it is any comfort to us heterosexuals, a homosexual friend of mine says that he and his comrades have it just as bad. I don't buy it, though. At gay parties and rallies, he complains, guys are constantly taking their shirts off, and they'll take yours off too if you don't watch out. That must be annoying. On the other hand, I haven't encountered a gay man walking down Broadway with his fly open or a hole in the crotch of his jeans. Yet.