garity;
his like is to be found, not in the Uffizi gallery or among the
harmonies of Brahms, but among the plush sofas, rococo clocks and
hand-painted oil-paintings of a third-rate auction room. All women, save
the least intelligent, penetrate this imposture with sharp eyes. They
know that the human body, except for a brief time in infancy, is not
a beautiful thing, buta hideous thing. Their own bodies give them no
delight; it is their constant effort to disguise and conceal them; they
never expose them aesthetically, but only as an act of the grossest
sexual provocation. If it were advertised that a troupe of men of easy
virtue were to appear half-clothed upon a public stage, exposing their
chests, thighs, arms and calves, the only women who would go to the
entertainment would be a few delayed adolescents, a psychopathic old
maid or two, and a guard of indignant members of the parish Ladies Aid
Society.

9. Men as Aesthetes

Men show no such sagacious apprehension of the relatively feeble
loveliness of the human frame. The most effective lure that a woman can
hold out to a man is the lure of what he fatuously conceives to be
her beauty. This so-called beauty, of course, is almost always a pure
illusion. The female body, even at its best is very defective in form;
it has harsh curves and very clumsily distributed masses; compared to
it the average milk-jug, or even cuspidor, is a thing of intelligent and
gratifying design--in brief, an objet d'art. The fact was curiously (and
humorously) display during the late war, when great numbers of women in
all the belligerent countries began putting on uniforms. Instantly they
appeared in public in their grotesque burlesques of the official garb of
aviators, elevator boys, bus conductors, train guards, and so on, their
deplorable deficiency in design was unescapably revealed. A man, save he
be fat, i.e., of womanish contours, usually looks better in uniform than
in mufti; the tight lines set off his figure. But a woman is at once
given away: she look like a dumbbell run over by an express train. Below
the neck by the bow and below the waist astern there are two masses that
simply refuse to fit into a balanced composition. Viewed from the side,
she presents an exaggerated S bisected by an imperfect straight line,
and so she inevitably suggests a drunken dollar-mark. Her ordinary
clothing cunningly conceals this fundamental imperfection. It swathes
those impossible masses