255.
Women admire a man's strength rather than his beauty. This statement is
commonly made, and with truth, but, so far as I am aware, its meaning is
never analyzed. When we look into it, I think, we shall find that it leads
us into a special division of the visual sphere of sexual allurement. The
spectacle of force, while it remains strictly within the field of vision,
really brings to us, although unconsciously, impressions that are
correlated with another sense--that of touch. We instinctively and
unconsciously translate visible energy into energy of pressure. In
admiring strength we are really admiring a tactile quality which has been
made visible. It may therefore be said that, while through vision men are
sexually affected mainly by the more purely visual quality of beauty,
women are more strongly affected by visual impressions which express
qualities belonging to the more fundamentally sexual sense of touch.
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.
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