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, but a 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.