"Sex, which is sometimes an advantage, is always a
burden and always a flaw; it exists for the race and not for the
individual. In the human male, and precisely because of his erect
attitude, sex is the predominantly striking and visible fact, the
point of attack in a struggle at close quarters, the point aimed
at from a distance, an obstacle for the eye, whether regarded as
a rugosity on the surface or as breaking the middle of a line.
The harmony of the feminine body is thus geometrically much more
perfect, especially when we consider the male and the female at
the moment of desire when they present the most intense and
natural expression of life. Then the woman, whose movements are
all interior, or only visible by the undulation of her curves,
preserves her full aesthetic value, while the man, as it were, all
at once receding toward the primitive state of animality, seems
to throw off all beauty and become reduced to the simple and
naked condition of a genital organism." (Remy de Gourmont,
_Physique de l'Amour_, p. 69.) Remy de Gourmont proceeds,
however, to point out that man has his revenge after a woman has
become pregnant, and that, moreover, the proportions of the
masculine body are more beautiful than those of the feminine
body.
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