Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4: Sexual Selection In ManEllis, Havelock
Science
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4: Sexual Selection In Man
Ellis, Havelock
Sex; Sex (Psychology)
The distinction between the man's view and the woman's view, here pointed
out, is not, it must be added, absolute. Even for a man, beauty, with all
these components which we have already analyzed in it, is not the sole
sexual allurement of vision. A woman is not necessarily sexually
attractive in the ratio of her beauty, and with even a high degree of
beauty may have a low degree of attraction. The addition of vivacity or
the addition of languor may each furnish a sexual allurement, and each of
these is a translated tactile quality which possesses an obscure potency
from vague sexual implications.[170] But while in the man the demand for
these translated pressure qualities in the visible attractiveness of a
woman are not usually quite clearly realized, in a woman the corresponding
craving for the visual expression of pressure energy is much more
pronounced and predominant. It is not difficult to see why this should be
so, even without falling back on the usual explanation that natural
selection implies that the female shall choose the male who will be the
most likely father of strong children and the best protector of his
family. The more energetic part in physical love belongs to the man, the
more passive part to the woman; so that, while energy in a woman is no
index to effectiveness in love, energy in a man furnishes a seeming index
to the existence of the primary quality of sexual energy which a woman
demands of a man in the sexual embrace. It may be a fallacious index, for
muscular strength is not necessarily correlated with sexual vigor, and in
its extreme degrees appears to be more correlated with its absence. But it
furnishes, in Stendhal's phrase, a probability of passion, and in any case
it still remains a symbol which cannot be without its effect. We must not,
of course, suppose that these considerations are always or often present
to the consciousness of the maiden who "blushingly turns from Adonis to
Hercules," but the emotional attitude is rooted in more or less unerring
instincts. In this way it happens that even in the field of visual
attraction sexual selection influences women on the underlying basis of
the more primitive sense of touch, the fundamentally sexual sense.
Women are very sensitive to the quality of a man's touch, and
appear to seek and enjoy contact and pressure to a greater extent
than do men, although in early adolescence this impulse seems to
be marked in both sexes. "There is something strangely winning to
most women," remarks George Eliot, in _The Mill on the Floss_,
"in that offer of the firm arm; the help is not wanted physically
at that moment, but the sense of help--the presence of strength
that is outside them and yet theirs--meets a continual want of
the imagination."
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