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