Psychology of sex - Total No. of Records in System :: 2032

PSYCHOLOGY OF SEXact as gross sexual incitors can be emphatically answeredin the negative.Brill justly concludes that both kinds ofdances are outlets for sexual tension, only differing indegree, and for nervous and hyperchondriacal womenoften of great benefit. Even when dancing becomes anepidemic not in itself desirable, it still deserves to bebetween thecultivated in so far as it acts as a compromisetwo opposing streams of desire and repression, and servesas a safety valve for repressed tension.It must be added finally, that while beauty is primarilya qualityof woman, being as such a perpetual meditationof men and even for women still a feminine qualitywhich they admire the normal woman experiences nocorresponding cult for the beauty of man. The perfectionof the body of man is not behind that of woman, butthe study of it only appeals to the artist or the esthetician;it arouses sexual enthusiasm almost exclusively in themale sexual invert. Whatever may be the case among animals,or even among savages, in civilization the man whois most successful with women is not usually the mosthandsome man, and may be the reverse of handsome."It is passion" Stendhal remarks, "which we demand;beauty only furnishes probabilities." Women admire aman's strength, physical or mental, rather than his beauty.The spectacle of force, while it remains within the fieldof vision, really brings to us, although unconsciously,impressions that are correlated with another sense thatof touch. We instinctively and unconsciously translatevisible energy into energy of pressure. In admiringstrength we are really admiring a tactile quality which hasbeen made visible. It may therefore be said that, whilethrough vision men are sexually affected mainly by themore purely visual quality of beauty, women are morestrongly affected by visual impressions which express qual-[76]