But even in the details of her body a woman is not wholly beautiful, not even if she is a flawless, perfect type of her sex. The genitalia are the chief difficulty in the way of regarding her as theoretically beautiful. If the idea were justified that man’s love for woman is the direct result of his sexual impulse; if we could agree with Schopenhauer that “the under-sized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-limbed sex is called beautiful only because the male intellect is befogged by the sexual impulse, that impulse being the creator of the conception of the beauty of woman,” it would follow that the genitalia could not be excluded from the conception of beauty. It requires no lengthy exposition to prove that the genitalia are not regarded as beautiful, and that, therefore, the beauty of woman cannot be regarded as due to the sexual impulse. In fact, the sexual impulse is in reality opposed to the conception of beauty. The man who is most under its influence has least sense of female beauty, and desires any woman merely because she is a woman.
A woman’s nude body is distasteful to man because it offends his sense of shame. The easy superficiality of our day has given colour to the statement that the sense of shame has arisen from the wearing of clothes, and it has been urged that the objection to the nude arises from those who are unnatural and secretly immorally-minded. But a man who has become immorally-minded no longer is interested in the nude as such, because it has lost its influence on him. He merely desires and no longer loves. All true love is modest, like all true pity. There is only one case of shamelessness--a declaration of love the sincerity of which a man is convinced of in the moment he makes it. This would represent the conceivable maximum of shamelessness; but there is no declaration of love which is quite true, and the stupidity of women is shown by their readiness to believe such protestations.
The love bestowed by the man is the standard of what is beautiful and what is hateful in woman. The conditions are quite different in æsthetics from those in logic or ethics. In logic there is an abstract truth which is the standard of thought; in ethics there is an ideal good which furnishes the criterion of what ought to be done, and the value of the good is established by the determination to link the will with the good. In æsthetics beauty is created by love; there is no determining law to love what is beautiful, and the beautiful does not present itself to human beings with any imperative command to love it. (And so there is no abstract, no super-individual “right” taste).