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Monday, February 24, 2020

Sex appeal

1. It's a truism that men find pretty woman attractive while women find handsome men attractive. That's the physical dimension of sex appeal. Some Christians neglect their appearance because they focus on "inner beauty."

There's certainly something important to be said for that. It depends on part on natural endowment and the aging process, as well as priorities in life. It is, however, unrealistic to think members of the opposite sex are blind to physical appearance. So one needs to make allowance for the consequences. 

2. That said, attraction runs deeper than physical attraction. An attraction to something more abstract than bodies: men attracted to femininity and women attracted to masculinity. While those properties are literally embodied, they are not identical with their embodiment. 

In addition to the physical side of things, normal men and women have masculine and feminine psychological traits. And a deeper part of sex appeal is the appeal of masculinity to women and femininity to men. Psychological traits that translate into corresponding actions. 

3. Moreover, it isn't essentially romantic, although it figures in romantic dynamics. Young boys are drawn to manly role models while young girls are drawn to womanly role models. So unlike sex appeal in the narrow physical sense, masculinity and femininity can be appealing to members of the same sex. An ideal to emulate or aspire to. 

Masculinity and femininity have a platonic appeal as well as an erotic appeal. The erotic is more physical, concrete, and geared to attraction between the sexes whereas the platonic is more generic and abstract. The kind of man a man or boy would like to be. The kind of woman a woman or girl would like to be. To exemplify distinctive masculine or feminine virtues.  

2 comments:

  1. Piggybacking off this, I suspect many if not most homosexuals either never had good male or female role models in their lives or had bad male or female role models in their lives (e.g. absentee parents, daddy/mommy issues, sexual molestation). As such, they can't well differentiate between platonic and erotic appeal. Their wires have become crossed. Something along those lines. That's why many if not most homosexuals (along with the rest of the LGBTQ alphabet) should be regarded as people with psychological or psychiatric problems and compassionately helped in that way rather than normalizing their psychological or psychiatric issues.

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    1. To be fair, many heterosexuals had bad parents, siblings, or other role models too, but these heterosexuals still know enough not to confuse or conflate the platonic and erotic in the same sex. That doesn't mean they don't have other psychological issues to deal with (e.g. depression), but they're of a different kind, I think.

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