Female beauty is a problematic subject.  Men will become interested in or fall in love with women they wouldn’t be interested in or fall in love with if the women weren’t exceptionally beautiful.

There is deep biology at work here.  Studies have shown that conventional attributes of beauty in women deliver messages of evolutionary import — signs of health and vitality in a potential reproductive partner.

There is social conditioning at work here.  Possessing conventionally beautiful women confers social status on a man.

There are aesthetics at work here — a physically beautiful woman is one of God’s highest achievements, one of the glories of nature.

Beauty is only skin deep, they say, but this says little, because much of life involves interactions of skin with skin.

The subject is impossibly complicated, but there are a few guidelines through the thickets of it.  Intelligence in a woman, courage in a woman, generosity in a woman are reflected in her physical persona.  They inflect her beauty.  Men who are blind to this phenomenon — and there are many — have only the crudest concept of what female beauty is.

The intoxication of female beauty for men can be regulated by having exceptionally beautiful female acquaintances who are friends and not the objects of erotic ambition.  The ability to appreciate female beauty with joy but without the desire to possess it creates its own kind of delight.  Many men are incapable of friendships with exceptionally beautiful woman because they mistrust their ability to regulate their admiration of beauty.

To say, however, that female beauty can become irrelevant to a man, that he can see past it, that he can be neutral in the contemplation of it, is madness.  He must pay it its full tribute, must worship it, before he can give it its due place in a humane intercourse between the sexes.

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