The Aesthetics of Male and Female Beauty

Being a heterosexual man, I am continually in awe of the female form yet often dismayed at the male counterpart. 

I am aroused at the sight of an attractive woman and if she happens to be nude, more so. I love a beautiful face, I love long legs, a firm buttocks, slim arms, a gentle neck. Though I would say I love beautiful feet, I have no foot fetish I know of. 

In general, the female form is the more pleasing, aesthetically. There are no harsh lines, the balance of flesh and bone being harmonious. Curve follows curve and where bone is present, as in the case of the shoulder blades, the skin manages to soften and diminish the impact of the frame within. 

The female form is a kind of hearth of humanity, a physical, daily ark that is the house of past, present and future. The lineage of the world moves towards and through the shape and beauty of the female form. From desire to birth, we are conceived because the female is beautiful. As Mircea Eliade, Romanian philosopher and historian of religion wrote, the female is a mirror of the universe.

The male is the yearning for the female. Just as the female is the universe, a representation of planet, of beauty and birth, the male is the questing figure. The male is the one looking at awe at the bright starry sky above and wondering why and how. Sometimes he is is fear of this beauty. A woman is a vast landscape, never to be conquered but cherished. From her moods, her storms and still seasons, from the movement of her hips, the close of her eyes, the turn of her head, how can a male not be sensitive and deeply drawn to all the nuances and mysteries that evolve around her features, her limbs and gestures. 

As a heterosexual male my wonder and delight in the female, her form and grace particularly is often immediately challenged and thrown off balance by my distaste and sadness regarding the male form. I simply do not find beauty in the male bearing. I struggle to see beauty. I shake my head at the apparent dichotomy. 

Whereas a woman's breast, her buttocks and genitals are gentle on the eyes, the naked male is an obstruction to beauty. His legs, his arms betray the bones beneath, his feet like harsh pedestals and his penis an impediment to refinement, a pathetic reminder of our human need to procreate. It would seem that the genius of the universe gave all the elegance to the female and left the male ugly and exposed. An unclothed female is nude whereas a man is naked in my mind (thinking of the art historian Kenneth Clark's distinction and taking it in a different direction).

Even without arousal, the female nude is beautiful. Her being is beauty enough. There are times when men become beautiful through body building but it comes only with effort, sculpting and morphing the given body into something else. The shift is dramatic, the change noticeable. Granted, many woman have to stay in shape to retain their waist sizes and such but men must strive. They have to go beyond, almost reinvent and improve what they are given to become closer to beauty. 

I suppose it would make sense in the grand natural selection sense of the word. If both men and women were equally attractive, equally beautiful, we wouldn't be able to keep our hands off each other. Too much focus on procreation would inevitably lead to overpopulation and quite possibly parental negligence - i.e. producing too many kids and not being able to properly raise them because we would spend too much time enjoying each other. 

The male desires the female but the female has to be selective, has to say 'no' many times in order to find the right one to say 'yes' to. If she wants a man, she wants him not only for who he is but what he can provide for her. (And this goes for lesbians as well as gay men: there is still a male-female attraction at work. It's very rare to find a male-male couple because we are inevitably attracted to our opposite - the female towards the male and vice versa.)

Women, however, because they are the gatekeepers, have to endure more fears than men, put up with greater struggles. A man walking down a street may be at risk of being robbed or beaten but a woman faces potential rape if she happens to be approached by the wrong crowd. A woman also has menstruation, she must in some way sacrifice more blood than her male counterpart to provide a potential home for the future fetus of the species. The female has to endure more for the sake of humanity and it wouldn't make sense if both men and women were equally attractive.

I suppose I am grateful for female beauty and my own physical lack. I think I'm attractive but when I see myself naked, I admit I feel a certain melancholy. It's not that I'm overweight, I just know I don't posses the beauty of a woman. I don't want a woman's body but in many ways I want to have that equality, an equal place in beauty with her. 

Is this the reason why men have become artists? Yes, I recognize woman have been suppressed by men throughout the centuries but for me, even in the best female writers and poets like Jane Austen and Anna Akhmatova, I find the male-ghost, that lonely voice striving for the distant home of beauty. I would argue that art is a striving for reconciliation with the broken parts of the artist's own psyche and heart. If you have been given everything, every opportunity to love and caress, if you have been spoiled by excess, then what good are you as an artist? The Marquis de Sade and Casanova both lived fascinating lives but you would never call their output literature.

Being a member of the unattractive sex, I recognize the physical faults of my gender. I know that the phallic has reigned on this planet, that it is ugly and we see its representation in things like skyscrapers, towers, bullets, guns and missiles. The hunger in the male species is exposed in the erection. His arousal is plain and embarrassing while the woman's is hidden. Standing naked, a horny male is vulnerable. If he satisfies himself with a partner, we play up to his ego, call him a stallion or a stud. If he is alone in his nakedness without a partner or rejected by a partner, we call him a failure or loser. A lone female still has a place of dominance because she can chose. The male has no choice in his being excited. 

Being on the outside of beauty, the male can only strive and continue to strive to find beauty within. If we think of Freud and sublimation, the energy for sex is channeled to art. The lonely make beautiful works of art. It is by feeling broken that we put the imaginary pieces together. 

It is a positive that the male physique is unattractive. He doesn't have the peacock's array of feathers but he can write poems, books and plays. He can compose music, sculpt and paint. The man serenading in the street, the lowly man, the troubadour becomes in our time Mick Jagger. And though we see Jagger as a dynamic soul, a powerful stage presence, take away the music and the movement and present his naked figure to an unknowing female audience and they would be hard-pressed to deem him attractive.

I think of Artistotle's book, The Metaphysics. Not so much the content but the title. In antiquity, Andoronicus of Rhodes, Aristotle's editor, placed the chapters that dealt with questions about things transcending the natural or physical after the sections of physics. The 'meta' or after physics went beyond forces and matter into subjects dealing with the intangible. The question of God, the soul, how we think, our certainty are all discussed. 

In a sense, women are the physical, the reality of life. They are Its beauty - the It-ness of being, the universe, of God, the planet and creation itself.

Men have to go beyond the physical to be beautiful. Their striving, the force of their being, either in procreation or persuasion bring them closer to elegance and grace. By body-building, by shaping their character through art or learning, by becoming successful, the male hopes to become beautiful beyond his basic role of provider. I would argue a lot of what men do is to be better than themselves for the other, the one they want to attract. Men cannot be dormant in their being. They have to be cautious and conscious of their limitations. Women are the unconscious and if they are insecure about their bodies it is because they allow their treacherous magazines and the media to sculpt their opinions of themselves. They are beauty. Period.

Sadly - and I add this more as a side note - of the two genders, women have more enemies among other women. I find men are rare to criticize each other in buddy groups. I don't think I've ever heard one guys say to another, "Say, Frank, you're getting a little chunky in the butt" or "You really should moisturize more." No. But women will find ways to undermine each other.

I would even suggest their curiosity of each other, their gossip and celebrity magazines do greater damage than good. But successful syndicates know, an insecure consumer, in this case a female, will make them more money if they can keep giving out stupid sexual tips and how to lose twenty pounds step programs. There is no sadder or more sexist place than the front of the cash aisle at our super markets.

Furthermore, the profession of being a model is a betrayal of female hood because the successful model not only has to starve themselves and strive to be perfect but by doing so and having their picture taken suggests other do the same. The fashion model - never a role model - along with female pop stars are lower than the prostitute for at least the woman of the night provides physical comfort, servicing a human being instead of infuriating one half the species with envy and the other with ungrounded desire. At one point in history, long before we came up with the pejorative term, prostitute, the profession was more a form of sexual educator. In ancient tribes, the men on the verge of manhood went off with the female sex teacher to learn how to make love, how to please a woman, etc... Nowadays we have the Internet, backwards morality and hip hop music. Porn teaches us nothing about lovemaking while pop music, especially popular rap and R & B offer us degrading images of women with a subtext that would appeal to our lowest, neanderthal selves.

In some way female beauty can be a hazard if it inflicts itself on others. It can also be smeared and polluted by the darker male psyche. Instead of artists, these record producers and fashion designers have degraded their models, their inspiration into a commodity, the singular, the individual and particular being used to appeal to the muddied universal of human fantasy and desire.

Women, despite the morass of modern life, remain the more beautiful sex. And when men move towards their better selves, they attract the female, not by their physical appearance but by their own interior beauty. (Popular music promoters continually devolve because of their involvement in degrading female human beauty.)

We find meaning in responding to the mystery of existence. Our answers are personal and universal. Even should a poet or a philosopher never gain the attention of the fairer sex, their work edifies their being so long as they produce for the sake of finding, uncovering, or putting together beauty. The fragmentation of male beauty should strive to become whole within.

The female is beautiful without but the male has to work towards becoming beautiful within. The female inspires, the male is inspired. Beauty shapes beauty. The moving towards and through beauty becomes a means to personal edification. Learning to accept my physical limitations I can evolve towards bettering my interior self. 

Hopefully, my dismay can be removed about the male being and even if seeing my form, I can look beyond, (after) my physical form to feel an awe for what I can't see.