f 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. A woman is not necessarily sexually
attractive in the ratio of her beauty, and with even a high degree of
beauty may have a low degree of attraction. The addition of vivacity or
the addition of languor may each furnish a sexual allurement, and each of
these is a translated tactile quality which possesses an obscure potency
from vague sexual implications.[170] But while in the man the demand for
these translated pressure qualities in the visible attractiveness of a
woman are not usually quite clearly realized, in a woman the corresponding
craving for the visual expression of pressure energy is much more
pronounced and predominant. It is not difficult to see why this should be
so, even without falling back on the usual explanation that natural
selection implies that the female shall choose the male who will be the
most likely father of strong children and the best protector of his
family. The more energetic part in physical love belongs to the man, the
more passive part to the woman; so that, while energy in a woman is no
index to effectiveness in love, energy in a man furnishes a seeming index
to the existence of the primary quality of sexual energy which a woman
demands of a man in the sexual embrace. It may be a fallacious index, for
muscular strength is not necessarily correlated with sexual vigor, and in
its extreme degrees appears to be more correlated with its absence. But it
furnishes, in Stendhal's phrase, a probability of passion, and in any case
it still remains a symbol which cannot be without its effect.