8. The Male Beauty
This disdain of sentimental weakness, even in those higher reaches
where it is mellowed by aesthetic sensibility, is well revealed by the
fact that women are seldom bemused by mere beauty in men. Save
on the stage, the handsome fellow has no appreciable advantage in
amour over his more Gothic brother. In real life, indeed, he is
viewed with the utmost suspicion by all women save the most
stupid. In him the vanity native to his sex is seen to mount to a
degree that is positively intolerable. It not only irritates by its very
nature; it also throws about him a sort of unnatural armour, and so
makes him resistant to the ordinary approaches. For this reason, the
matrimonial enterprises of the more reflective and analytical sort of
women are almost always directed to men whose lack of pulchritude
makes them easier to bring down, and, what is more important still,
easier to hold
down. The weight of opinion among women is
decidedly against the woman who falls in love with an Apollo. She
is regarded, at best, as flighty creature, and at worst, as one pushing
bad taste to the verge of indecency. Such weaknesses are resigned
to women approaching senility, and to the more ignoble variety of
women labourers. A shop girl, perhaps, may plausibly fall in love
with a moving-picture actor, and a half-idiotic old widow may
succumb to a youth with shoulders like the Parthenon, but no
woman of poise and self-respect, even supposing her to be
transiently flustered by a lovely buck, would yield to that madness
for an instant, or confess it to her dearest friend. Women know
how little such purely superficial values are worth. The voice of
their order, the first taboo of their freemasonry, is firmly against
making a sentimental debauch of the serious business of marriage.
This disdain of the pretty fellow is often accounted for by amateur
psychologists on the ground that women are anesthetic to
beauty--that they lack the quick and delicate responsiveness of man.
Nothing could be more absurd. Women, in point of fact,
commonly
have a far keener aesthetic sense than men. Beauty
is more important to them; they give more thought to it; they crave
more of it in their immediate surroundings. The average man, at
least in England and America, takes a sort of bovine pride in his
anaesthesia to the arts; he can think of them only as sources of
tawdry and somewhat discreditable amusement; one seldom hears of
him showing half the enthusiasm for any beautiful thing that his wife
displays in the presence, of a fine fabric, an effective colour, or a
graceful form, say in millinery. The, truth is that women are
resistant to so-called beauty in men for the simple and sufficient
reason that such beauty is chiefly imaginary. A truly beautiful man,
indeed, is as rare as a truly beautiful piece of jewelry. What men
mistake for beauty in themselves is usually nothing save a certain
hollow gaudiness, a revolting flashiness, the superficial splendour of
a prancing animal. The most lovely moving picture actor,
considered in the light of genuine aesthetic values, is no more than a
piece of vulgarity; his like is to be found, not in the Uffizi gallery or
among the harmonies of Brahms, but among the plush sofas, rococo
clocks and
hand-painted oil-paintings of a third-rate auction
room. All women, save the least intelligent, penetrate this imposture
with sharp eyes. They know that the human body, except for a
brief time in infancy, is not a beautiful thing, buta hideous thing.
Their own bodies give them no delight; it is their constant effort to
disguise and conceal them; they never expose them aesthetically, but
only as an act of the grossest sexual provocation. If it were
advertised that a troupe of men of easy virtue were to appear
half-clothed upon a public stage, exposing their chests, thighs, arms
and calves, the only women who would go to the entertainment
would be a few delayed adolescents, a psychopathic old maid or
two, and a guard of indignant members of the parish Ladies Aid
Society.
