The pioneering work of Johann Winckelmann (1717-1768) identified a homoerotic appreciation of male beauty in classical Greek sculpture, a fascination that had endured in Western art since the Greeks. Yet after Winckelmann, the value (even the possibility) of art's queer beauty was often denied. Several theorists, notably the philosopher Immanuel Kant, broke sexual attraction and aesthetic appreciation into separate or dueling domains. In turn, sexual desire and aesthetic pleasure had to be profoundly rethought by later writers. (...) Whitney Davis follows how such innovative thinkers as John Addington Symonds, Michel Foucault, and Richard Wollheim rejoined these two domains, reclaiming earlier insights about the mutual implication of sexuality and aesthetics. Addressing texts by Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Sigmund Freud, among many others, Davis criticizes modern approaches, such as Kantian idealism, Darwinism, psychoanalysis, and analytic aesthetics, for either reducing aesthetics to a question of sexuality or for removing sexuality from the aesthetic field altogether. Despite these schematic reductions, sexuality always returns to aesthetics, and aesthetic considerations always recur in sexuality. Davis particularly emphasizes the way in which philosophies of art since the late eighteenth century have responded to nonstandard sexuality, especially homoeroticism, and how theories of nonstandard sexuality have drawn on aesthetics in significant ways. Many imaginative and penetrating critics have wrestled productively, though often inconclusively and "against themselves," with the aesthetic making of sexual life and new forms of art made from reconstituted sexualities. Through a critique that confronts history, philosophy, science, psychology, and dominant theories of art and sexuality, Davis challenges privileged types of sexual and aesthetic creation imagined in modern culture-and assumed today. (shrink)

One of the explicit objectives of Darwin's Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex was to explain cultural differences seen in human beings. Such an explanation, Darwin believed, was to rest upon an understanding of sexual selection. I examine the role that the beautiful plays within the mechanism of sexual selection as it works to differentiate isolated groups. It is suggested that an examination of the relationship between sexual selection and artificial selection — a relationship (...) mediated by the beautiful — will illuminate key issues of the Descent as well as contemporary debates regarding the relationship between evolution and ethics. The beautiful, originally rooted in sexual selection, can become de-coupled from sexual selection and utilized in some selective process which is conscious. (shrink)

One of the key behavioral effects of attractiveness is increased visual attention to attractive people. This effect is often explained in terms of evolutionary adaptations, such as attractiveness being an indicator of good health. Other factors could influence this effect. In the present study, we explored the modulating role of sexual orientation on the effects of attractiveness on exploratory visual behavior. Heterosexual and homosexual men and women viewed natural-looking scenes that depicted either two women or two men who varied (...) systematically in levels of attractiveness (based on a pre-study). Participants’ eye movements and attractiveness ratings towards the faces of the depicted people were recorded. The results showed that although attractiveness had the largest influence on participants’ behaviors, participants’ sexual orientations strongly modulated the effects. With the exception of homosexual women, all participant groups looked longer and more often at attractive faces that corresponded with their sexual orientations. Interestingly, heterosexual and homosexual men and homosexual women looked longer and more often at the less attractive face of their non-preferred sex than the less attractive face of their preferred sex, evidence that less attractive faces of the preferred sex might have an aversive character. These findings provide evidence for the important role that sexual orientation plays in guiding visual exploratory behavior and evaluations of the attractiveness of others. (shrink)

In Zohar al Shir ha-Shirim, the Zohar’s reading of Song of Songs, Shekhinah, echoing themes associated with the Shulamite of the biblical text, consistently initiates cosmic union. Sexual desire in the zoharic texts is a form of capital necessary to facilitate sefirotic intercourse, although scholarly readings of the zoharic corpus often identify Shekhinah as a passive receptacle. This, however, is only true if the endemic contradictions within the texts are glossed over. In Song of Songs, the Shulamite’s sexual (...) ‘initiative’ is core. This was not lost on the author of Zohar al Shir ha-Shirim, who, in struggling to explain Shekhinah’s sefirotic role in line with the erotics of Song of Songs, inescapably echoed the ‘depatriarchalizing’ themes of the biblical text. As this article demonstrates, in Zohar al Shir ha-Shirim, Shekhinah is active and repeatedly encourages and frustrates cosmic sexual intercourse. Zohar al Shir ha-Shirim shows that it is possible to reread Shekhinah’s role beyond the androcentrism of the authors as well as scholarly assumptions about her passivity. (shrink)

The "Introduction" to "Symposium: Beauty Matters" in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Winter 1999), pages 1-10, is presented here. Abstract: The point of this symposium is to locate one trajectory of the new wave of discussions about beauty beyond the customary confines of analytic aesthetics and to situate it at the intersection of aesthetics, ethics, social-political philosophy, and cultural criticism. The three essays that follow, authored by Marcia Muelder Eaton, Paul C. Taylor, (...) and Susan Bordo, represent a conjoined effort to move "beauty" beyond the traditional parameters of past contextual theories of art--theories which in their own right (only decades ago and analogous to art criticism itself) opened up rich philosophical terrain beyond the confines of formalism. This introductory essay offer some guidance as to why a symposium on beauty merits attention. Exploring the ways artists and critics have revived the concept of beauty will provide a point of comparison between artworld practices and recent philosophical literature. Most importantly, a new approach to philosophical theorizing will be recommended: one that places questions of gender, race, and sexuality at the forefront of analyzing our experiences of beauty in nature, the human body, and art. Curiously, this new approach is not so much a radical departure from traditional philosophical aesthetics as it is a return to questions basic to the field since the time of Plato: questions about the types of qualities that inhere in objects of beauty, the kinds of experiences they provoke, and the ways we come to value both. (shrink)

Beauty has captured human interest since before Plato, but how, why, and to whom does beauty matter in today's world? Whose standard of beauty motivates African Americans to straighten their hair? What inspires beauty queens to measure up as flawless objects for the male gaze? Why does a French performance artist use cosmetic surgery to remake her face into a composite of the master painters' version of beauty? How does beauty culture perceive the disabled (...) body? Is the constant effort to remain young and thin, often at considerable economic and emotional expense, ethically justifiable? Provocative essays by an international group of scholars discuss beauty in aesthetics, the arts, the tools of fashion, the materials of decoration, and the big business of beautification—beauty matters—to reveal the ways gender, race, and sexual orientation have informed the concept of beauty and driven us to become more beautiful. Here, Kant rubs shoulders with Calvin Klein. Beauty Matters draws from visual art, dance, cultural history, and literary and feminist theory to explore the values and politics of beauty. Various philosophical perspectives on ethics and aesthetics emerge from this penetrating book to determine and reveal that beauty is never disinterested. Foreward by Eleanor Heartney; "Introduction" by Peg Brand [Weiser] included here. Authors include Marcia M. Eaton, Noel Carroll, Paul C. Taylor, Arthur C. Danto, Kathleen M. Higgins, Susan Bordo, Dawn Perlmutter, Eva Kit Wah Man, Anita Silvers, Hilary Robinson, Kaori Chino, Sally Banes, and Peg Brand's essay "Bound to Beauty: An Interview with Orlan." (available on PhilPapers). (shrink)

“Beautiful – do not touch” – this phrase, appearing in a seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis, is one of the ways in which Jacques Lacan describes the operation in the human psyche of the phantasm principle. It is a construct that I will try to introduce the reader to in this article, describing the direct impact of beauty and the transgression of its principle through the lens of clinical experience. My goal in taking up this “beautiful – do (...) not touch” formula is to show how a concept usually associated with aesthetics has non-obvious but important clinical implications, and even defines a certain ethic of the subject towards sexuality. Another important aspect of this study is the juxtaposition of the problem of beauty with the question of femininity. And not only the one played out through the image, but especially the one that goes beyond representation in the feminine modality of pleasure. (shrink)

There is a deep problem with beauty. Beauty is commonly equated with sexual attractiveness. Yet there is also the beauty of art, which arouses an aesthetic response of disinterested contemplation. As Roger Scruton writes in his recent book, Beauty : “In the realm of art beauty is an object of contemplation, not desire.” Are there, then, two kinds of beauty? By looking back at the classical Greek conception of beauty, we may see (...) how it gave rise to the modern dilemma, and some possible ways of resolving it. (shrink)

The importance of friendship in the later work of Michel Foucault is increasingly being recognized, but the relationship between friendship and Foucault's concept of 'life as a work of art' is not well understood. Friendship, traditionally associated with 'masculine' virtue, can be seen to undergo significant change in connection with the emergence of modern sexuality. I suggest that Foucault's work alerts us to the fact that friendship is a key site for challenging the stability of the modern gender regime and (...) the institution of heterosexuality that underlies it. By drawing on insights from Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, I elaborate upon the significance of both friendship and the work of art in Foucault. I argue that the intrinsic connection of the aesthetic with beauty is central to Foucault's 'aesthetics of existence'. A focus on beauty enables us to see how friendship can be understood in terms of the work of art. Key Words: art • beauty • Derrida • finitude • Foucault • friendship • heterosexuality • masculinity • Nietzsche. (shrink)

Why does lust demand beauty? How does it differ from functional beauty and from the beauty of what is purposive without definable purpose? Does eroticism really aim at visions of immortality ? How does erotic craving differ from the cognitive or practical intentions that aim at objects or objectives ? What is the difference between sexual satisfaction and the erotic transport ? Is erotic passion really a craving for the quiescence of the inert? What is erotic (...) glamour in women and in men ? What kind of animality does eroticism see and crave in human bodies? Why is it youth that inflames the extreme emotions of eroticism ? (shrink)

Emphasizing the human body in all of its forms, Beauty Unlimited expands the boundaries of what is meant by beauty both geographically and aesthetically. Peg Zeglin Brand and an international group of contributors interrogate the body and the meaning of physical beauty in this multidisciplinary volume. This striking and provocative book explores the history of bodily beautification; the physicality of socially or culturally determined choices of beautification; the interplay of gender, race, class, age, sexuality, and ethnicity within (...) and on the body; and the aesthetic meaning of the concept of beauty in an increasingly globalized world. Foreward by Carolyn Korsmeyer. Authors include Noel Carroll, Gregory Velazco Y Trianosky, Monique Roelofs, Whitney Davis, Eleanor Heartney, Diana Tietjens Meyers, Phoebe M. Farris, Mary Devereaux, Jo Ellen Jacobs, Karina L. Cespedes-Cortes and Paul C. Taylor, Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Stephen Davies, Jane Duran, Valerie Sullivan Fuchs, Keith Lehrer, Allen Douglas, Cynthia Freeland, Eva Kit Wah Man, Mary Bittner Wiseman, and Peg Brand's essay, "ORLAN Revisited: Disembodied Virtual Hybrid Beauty.". (shrink)

In this chapterI discuss beauty and youth in Balinese dance, with special reference to Legong. Legong is the "classic" Balinese dance genre for females and is represented by Balinese to the world as the quintessence of grace, charm, and beauty in their performing arts. . . . Apparently, the notion of beauty that is invoked here is not straightforwardly equivalent to the heterosexual male norms for female sexual attractiveness, which may favor younger women but don't require (...) them to be under twenty. What then is the connection between beauty and youth in Balinese legong? (shrink)

In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary work, Frederick Turner presents a new theory of aesthetics based on the argument that beauty is an objective reality in the universe. He identifies the experience of beauty as a pancultural, neurobiological phenomenon. Drawing on recent work in a wide range of fields--ritual and dramatic performance, the oral tradition, paleoanthropology and human evolution, neurobiology, cosmology and theoretic physics, chaos theory and fractal mathematics--the book describes evolution as a self-organizing, emergent process that generates increasingly advanced (...) forms of self-reflection, and proposes that the experience of beauty is the recognition of this evolutionary process and the reward for participating in it. The experience of aesthetic beauty, Turner says, is an adaptive function that drives evolution through sexual selection. Those individuals most sensitive to beauty survived surface cultural changes, excelled in mating rituals, and were participants in the positive evolution of the species. Turner shows how, as a result, neurotransmitters in the brain respond to certain inherited systems by which we appreciate beauty. Turner also presents the implications for theories of art and literature that follow from his identification of the inherent genres of human aesthetic experience. Forms of art cannot be arbitrary but must be rooted in our biological inheritance. This calls into question theories about modern art, and suggests that modernist culture turned its back on beauty in an attempt to repress and avoid the shame of humanness and our biological nature. This book breaks radically with contemporary positions in psychology, sociology, philosophy, andart, and offers an alternative to present trends in literary and critical theory. It should be of interest to a wide variety of readers, including the artistic community, critical theorists, students of oral traditions, philosophers, and aestheticians. (shrink)

This article identifies a prevalent strand of feminist writing on beauty and aesthetic surgery and explores some of the contradictions and inconsistencies inscribed within it. In particular, we concentrate on three central feminist claims: that living in a misogynist culture produces aesthetic surgery as an issue predominantly concerning women; that pain - both physical and psychic - is a central conceptual frame through which aesthetic surgery should be viewed; and that aesthetic surgery is inherently a normalizing technology. Engaging with (...) these ‘myths’, we explore the tensions uncovered through a historical analysis of the practices of aesthetic surgery as well as the challenges to feminist claims offered by post-feminism. In particular we seek to destabilize the connection in feminist writing between beauty and passivity. We argue that through aesthetic references to denigrated black and working-class bodies, young women may mobilize aesthetic surgeries to reinscribe active sexuality on the feminine body. (shrink)

Darwin hypothesized that some animals, when selecting sexual partners, possess a genuine “sense of beauty” that cannot be accounted for by the logic of natural selection. This hypothesis has been notoriously controversial. In this chapter I propose that the concept of agency can be useful to operationalize the “sense of beauty”, and can help identify the conditions under which one can infer that animals are acting as (aesthetic) agents. Focusing on a case study of the behavior of (...) the Pavo cristatus, I identify the types of evidence that would allow for the inference of agency through aesthetic choice. (shrink)

Emphasizing the human body in all of its forms, Beauty Unlimited expands the boundaries of what is meant by beauty both geographically and aesthetically. Peg Zeglin Brand and an international group of contributors interrogate the body and the meaning of physical beauty in this multidisciplinary volume. This striking and provocative book explores the history of bodily beautification; the physicality of socially or culturally determined choices of beautification; the interplay of gender, race, class, age, sexuality, and ethnicity within (...) and on the body; and the aesthetic meaning of the concept of beauty in an increasingly globalized world. (shrink)

Sex is probably the best example of stable biological variation within the human species. Scientists have tried to account for the origin of sex differences in biological terms using evolutionary theory. Although Charles Darwin derived his theories of natural and sexual selection with no consideration for sex, he assumed that the differences he observed in male and female human and animal behavior were variations related to biology. This chapter examines the link between sex and evolution by reflecting on the (...) various resonances between cultural and social norms one the one hand, and biological theory on the other. It first considers scientific explanations of women's nature, or womanhood as a subject of science, before turning to research on female choice and the animal/woman divide in the early twentieth century. The chapter also discusses the use of human and animal models of “natural” sexual behavior after World War II, sexual selection and biological determinism in the 1970s, and efforts to bridge the gap between feminism and evolutionary theory. (shrink)

Putting classical art to the side for the moment, the naked and near-naked female body became an object of mainstream consumption first in Playboy and its imitators, then in movies, and only then in fashion photographs. With the male body, the trajectory has been different. Fashion has taken the lead, the movies have followed. Hollywood may have been a chest-fest in the fifties, but it was male clothing designers [e.g., Calvin Klein] who went south and violated the really powerful taboos--not (...) just against the explicit depiction of penises and male bottoms but against the admission of all sorts of forbidden "feminine" qualities into mainstream conceptions of manliness. . . . Images of masculinity that will do double (or triple or quadruple) duty with a variety of consumers, straight and gay, male and female, are not difficult to create in a culture like ours, in which the muscular, male body has a long and glorious aesthetic history. (shrink)

In The Abuse of Beauty, art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto explains how the notion of beauty as anathema to art arose and flourished and offers a new way of looking at art and beauty. He draws on the thought of artists, critics, and philosophers such as Rimbaud, Fry, Matisse, and Greenberg, to reposition beauty as one of many modes -- along with sexuality, sublimity, disgust, and horror -- through which the human sensibility expresses itself. 20 (...) black-and-white illustrations are included. (shrink)

Prior research on facial beauty has suggested that the average female face in a population is perceived to be the most attractive face. This finding, however, is based on an image processing methodology that appears to be flawed. An alternative method for generating attractive faces is described and the findings using this procedure are compared with the reports of other experimenters. The results suggest that beautiful female faces are not average, but vary from the average in a systematic manner, (...) and female beauty can best be explained by a sexual selection viewpoint, whereby selection favors cues that are reliable indicators of fertility. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the genderization of the difference between the beautiful and the sublime as it is stated in Kant's Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and the sublime. This difference is posed under the assumption of sexual difference, and not only a difference is stipulated but a hierarchization that places man in the sublime-rational pole above woman, located in the beautiful-sensitive pole, thus replicating an old metaphysical-androcentric tradition. From this initial proposal, the evolution of the same distinction (...) is analyzed, but in the context of the theory of aesthetic judgment raised in the Critique of judgement. The 1790 work, which continues to replicate the beautiful / sublime difference already operating in the 1764 essay, however, at the same time offers a theory of taste that places aesthetic judgment beyond the masculinist hierarchies of reason and understanding. The text proposes that explicit misogyny coexists in Kant's aesthetics with a theory of taste implicitly profitable for the deconstruction of the metaphysical dichotomies on which that misogyny is based. (shrink)

For a long time, female endorsers in advertising have been doing product information promotion in the market. However, with more and more highly educated women participating in the labor force, the conception of feminist depictions in advertising have become a perplexing issue. The traditional female role portrayals or stereotypes of the past are not able to totally reflect the expectations, behavior, attitudes, and beliefs of contemporary women. The author collected print ads as data from three types of the highest circulation (...) magazines: foreign women’s magazines, domestic women’s magazines, and domestic management magazines subscribed to in Taiwan to investigate what were the favorite feminine patterns and feminist depictions in a traditionally masculine society. The results showed classical beauty and girl-next-door images were “acceptable” gender-role behavior exposed highly in domestic magazines, which might contribute to conservative Confucian beliefs. On the other hand, being trendy was a significantly high preference for contemporary feminist depictions in foreign women's magazines; it might be considered as being due to the increased educational level of women and female labor participation rate in the work place as well as upgrading of social status. (shrink)

It is hypothesized that human faces judged to be attractive by people possess two features—averageness and symmetry—that promoted adaptive mate selection in human evolutionary history by way of production of offspring with parasite resistance. Facial composites made by combining individual faces are judged to be attractive, and more attractive than the majority of individual faces. The composites possess both symmetry and averageness of features. Facial averageness may reflect high individual protein heterozygosity and thus an array of proteins to which parasites (...) must adapt. Heterozygosity may be an important defense of long-lived hosts against parasites when it occurs in portions of the genome that do not code for the essential features of complex adaptations. In this case heterozygosity can create a hostile microenvironment for parasites without disrupting adaptation. Facial bilateral symmetry is hypothesized to affect positive beauty judgments because symmetry is a certification of overall phenotypic quality and developmental health, which may be importantly influenced by parasites. Certain secondary sexual traits are influenced by testosterone, a hormone that reduces immunocompetence. Symmetry and size of the secondary sexual traits of the face (e.g., cheek bones) are expected to correlate positively and advertise immunocompetence honestly and therefore to affect positive beauty judgments. Facial attractiveness is predicted to correlate with attractive, nonfacial secondary sexual traits; other predictions from the view that parasite-driven selection led to the evolution of psychological adaptations of human beauty perception are discussed. The view that human physical attractiveness and judgments about human physical attractiveness evolved in the context of parasite-driven selection leads to the hypothesis that both adults and children have a species-typical adaptation to the problem of identifying and favoring healthy individuals and avoiding parasite-susceptible individuals. It is proposed that this adaptation guides human decisions about nepotism and reciprocity in relation to physical attractiveness. (shrink)

Instances of nudity in Westworld can be put into three categories: Nudity as a beautiful art form, nudity as a sign of (male) dominance, and nudity as a sign of humanity or more to the point, nudity as a sign of becoming human. All the hosts presented as nudes in Westworld are idealized. The hosts are always more idealized in their form than either the human guests or the human directors of the park. Kenneth Clark makes a key distinction between (...) being naked, “being without clothes”, and the nude as a form of art. He imagines that the idealized beauty of the nude is analogous to the architecture of a building: It is a “balance between an ideal scheme and functional necessities”. The idealization of the human body and the createdness of the hosts come together in the main human theme of both the park's creators and its visitors: Control. (shrink)

Gender-based differences in body image dissatisfaction are not conclusive. Women’s body experiences and their impact on sexual satisfaction may advance knowledge on how heterosexual, bisexual, and lesbian women internalize heterosexist values. In this study, we quantitatively examined the degree of body image and sexual dissatisfaction experienced by heterosexual, bisexual, and lesbian women, to determine whether body dissatisfaction can predict sexual dissatisfaction. Three hundred and fifty-four women completed an online survey measuring body and sexual dissatisfaction. No (...) class='Hi'>sexual orientation-based differences were observed in body or sexual dissatisfaction; however, body concerns were found to have less influence on sexual dissatisfaction in lesbian women compared to heterosexual and bisexual women. Standards of beauty remain constant among all women, yet removing themselves from the male gaze may be interpreted as a protective factor which shields women from expressing concern about their appearance during sexual activity. (shrink)

Both Plato and Confucius were deeply concerned with moral cultivation and political leadership, topics that were inherently gendered in ancient patriarchal societies. I show that both thinkers focused their discussions on concepts that were associated with male aristocratic ideals of gentlemanliness. Yet while Confucian texts emphasize moral behavior and ritual to beautify the male body (shen 身), Plato focuses on the cultivation of a non-physical soul, which women also possess. Various theories have been proposed to explain this difference in their (...) understandings of the self, but when we bear the gendered nature of their inquiry in mind, an important difference takes center stage: for Socrates, the male body is an object of sexual desire. This paper highlights the influence of homoerotic desire in Plato’s unique approach to gentlemanliness, offering a new perspective for comparing these philosophers' views on gender, cultivation, and leadership. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article looks to Attic comedy to explain Socrates’ first argument in Plato's Hippias Major: his refutation of Hippias’ claim that the Beautiful is a beautiful girl. As part of his argument, Socrates introduces three examples of beautiful things—a mare, a lyre and a pot —all of which are used in comedy as metaphorical obscenities for sexualized women. The author contends that an erotic reading of the text accomplishes what no other interpretation can: a unified account of the passage that (...) allows for Socrates’ successful refutation of a proposal in keeping with Hippias’ character. In addition, it explains Socrates’ choice of examples—in particular, the rarely cited χύτρα—and Hippias’ otherwise inexplicable reaction to the χύτρα, as well as the analogous relationship of monkeys and men to pots and girls. (shrink)

This article considers the role of beauty in Costa Rican sex work. In the context of sex tourism, beauty operates as affective labour performed by sex workers, labour that is mediated by deeply contradictory understandings of race and nation. Theorising beauty as a form of affective labour means thinking about beauty as value, as something that circulates, can be exchanged and is ultimately relational. While Costa Rica's national mythology has long focused on claims to white origins, (...) sex tourists identify local women's ‘exoticism’ and non-whiteness as particularly appealing. Commercial sex does not simply depend on an imperial male gaze, but rather requires us to consider how particular national mythologies about race are linked to ideals of attractiveness in complex ways. I also explore how women experience and manage their sexual attractiveness to foreign tourists in their daily lives and work. (shrink)

Spinoza, according to common opinion, could only have written lamentable platitudes on sexual love, narrowly inspired by the prejudices of his time and without serious philosophical foundation: that for which, in the past, he has been congratulated,1 he is now reproached; or, at best, excused. He would even have, some believe to be able to add, increased the pervading puritanism: sexuality, as such, would give rise in him to a deep repulsion and women would horrify him. The second of (...) these two assertions, if one sticks to the manifest content of the texts, actually rests on nothing; if one calls upon their latent content, it would require, to be established with a minimum of rigor, a study of which we will not dispute the theoretical possibility, but which, in fact, has not yet been undertaken. The first, on the other hand, has all the appearance of the obvious: that men love women for their beauty and do not support their attachment to someone else,2 that they desire them more the more admirers they have,3 that the jealousy of the male is exacerbated by the representation of the pudenda and of the excrementa of his rival,4 that sensual attachment is unstable and conflictual,5 that it often turns to obsession,6 that Adam loved Eve because of their similarity of nature,7 that he who remains insensitive to the generosity of a courtesan does not offend by ingratitude,8 that only free men and free women can marry one another and only if they want children,9 well, it seems, that isn’t anything sensational; now these eight passages, if the two definitions of the libido are added to them,10 are the only, if I’m not mistaken, that Spinoza expressly devoted to the question! He would therefore, apparently, only have drawn up a report of deficiency. (shrink)

Beauty therapy is part of a vast multi-national, multi-million pound beauty industry. The beauty salon lies at the heart of a complex set of discourses and practices. Research conducted in the salon sheds light upon a number of key sociological debates including; issues of health and well-being; gendered employment practices; the construction and maintenance of gender identity and sexuality; body practices; and leisure activities. In this sense the salon may be used as a microcosm in which to (...) investigate wider sociological concerns. In this paper, I will draw upon the testimonies of beauty salon clients, and beauty therapists. I describe four areas of treatment: pampering; routine grooming; health treatments; and corrective treatments. These areas are investigated in depth and related to different spheres in the woman's life. In particular, I show how the beauty salon is drawn upon in helping to negotiate the balance between these competing arenas. The ambivalences of achieving an ‘appropriate’ appearance in these differing spheres is investigated. Their implication in the self-surveillance of the client is also discussed. (shrink)

Where does our sense of beauty come from? Traditional interest in evolutionary aesthetics has proceeded by an almost exclusive focus on Darwin’s Descent of Man, which theorizes the origin of the human aesthetic sense as an instrumental feature of sexual desire. But what if the Descent only gives us half of the story? I argue that we have overlooked a key element in Darwin’s aesthetics that is more readily available in On the Origin of Species, a form of (...) aesthetic experience he associates with “cultivated men.” Instead of an explicit scientific theory of aesthetic pleasure, the Origin provides evidence of this “cultivated” beauty as a narrative practice of aesthetic judgment with specific reference to an evolutionary phenomenon Darwin calls “coadaptation.” I conclude by addressing the demands this new evidence makes on any valid understanding of evolutionary aesthetics and suggest a preliminary model of aesthetic education that could facilitate collaborative dialogue in an increasingly recalcitrant two-cultures debate. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Courtesans and Tantric Consorts: Sexualities in Buddhist Narrative, Iconograhy, and RitualRita M. GrossCourtesans and Tantric Consorts: Sexualities in Buddhist Narrative, Iconograhy, and Ritual. By Serinity Young. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. 256 pp.This book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on Buddhism and gender. It presents information and explores issues on this topic in new and innovative ways. It is also well researched and well (...) written. Part of Young's innovation is her use of Buddhist art and iconography, which she takes as seriously as textual sources are usually taken in Buddhist studies. Many of her most interesting suggestions and conclusions result from the seriousness with which she takes Buddhist art as resource for understanding Buddhism more accurately and completely. The other foci are clear from her subtitle: narrative and ritual. There is much less attention to the canonical and philosophical texts of Buddhism that are so often invoked in studies of Buddhism and gender.Studies of sexuality or gender often end up primarily discussing new information about women and new ways of understanding women's participation in or exclusion from religion. This study is no exception, which is not in any way to fault the book. Young's analyses center on ways that women have been both included in the Buddhist world and excluded from that world. Among the many varieties of Buddhism, Young primarily focuses on early Indian Buddhism and Tantric Buddhism, which have the most provocative teachings about gender and sexuality. In Young's analyses, we see how women participated in early Buddhism in ways that have not been recognized in most earlier scholarship and ways in which they are excluded from Tantric Buddhism and most later forms of Buddhism that have not always been acknowledged.Young's interpretations of the traditional life stories of the Buddha are extremely innovative and interesting. She argues that the future Buddha's rejection of women when he left his home and family must be balanced with his reintegration into the world of women before and during his enlightenment experience. She argues that this reintegration is evidenced especially in his acceptance of food from Sujata and in the help he received from the Earth Goddess during his trials with Mara. Young argues that many Buddhists throughout the ages have focused on episodes in his life that deal with rejection of women but have not fully taken in the implications of the stories in which women become important allies in the mission of the Buddha.The sources for early Indian Buddhism most invoked by Western scholars of Buddhism are textual. These textual sources present a very mixed picture of women's lot in early Indian Buddhism. On the one hand, the Therigatha and some stories from the life of the Buddha present a relatively optimistic picture of women's possibilities and their acceptance in the early Buddhist community. On the other hand, texts present a constant message of the importance of renunciation, and much of the recommended renunciation involves women. Texts written by and for monks frequently conflate women with sexuality and hold women responsible for wayward monks' sexual temptations. Against this widely known material, Young calls upon the evidence of early Indian Buddhist art to argue that the monks' anti-women texts [End Page 174] do not tell the whole story about women in early Indian Buddhism. The art work, which was much more important for tutoring largely illiterate Buddhist laypeople, consistently portrays women voluptuously and positively. This contrast between text and art is so great that recently, during a slide show in a class I taught on ancient Indian Buddhism, a student asked point blank how monks could possibly sanction the voluptuous portrayals of women common in early Indian Buddhist sanctuaries. I didn't remember Young's cogent analysis at first, but eventually did reply, using her analysis. The monastic establishment controlled the discourse that eventually became the texts of early Buddhism, but the lay donors controlled the visual representations that decorated the sites where Buddhism was preserved. The lay donors were more than happy to represent the fecundity and beauty of women, without whom there would be no future donors or... (shrink)

A long and scholarly piece by Eva Kitt WahMan covers the history of Chinese conventionsgoverning female “beauty” from Confuciusthrough Maoism to the present day. Classicalmanuals provide highly specific requirements forcourtesans and concubines. The shrunken, pulpyappendages produced by foot-binding practiceswere regarded as the most sexually stimulatingfeatures of the female body. In 1949, following theinauguration of the Communist regime, womenwere expected to shun ornament and make-up, tohave short hair, wear party uniforms, and to lookas much like men as possible. The ideal (...) for thecontemporary Chinese woman is quite a lot likethe ideal for the courtesan of tradition, but the de-tails are drawn from western fashion magazines.Wah believes that such liberation, although it hasits advantages, is mainly nominal and fosters con-fusion. She writes: “Although Chinese womentoday are developing new self-confidence, they donot seem to be aware of the fact that one can be-come a slave of the fashion industry, which merelyrepeats the bodily constraints of past times in anew form” (p. 194). [review by Mary Mothersill, 2001 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 (2):211-214.]. (shrink)

Passionate and rollicking personal and intellectual essays by philosopher Crispin Sartwell. Philosopher, music critic, and syndicated columnist Crispin Sartwell has forged a distinctive and fiercely original identity over the years as a cultural commentator. In books about anarchism, art and politics, Native American and African American thought and culture, Eastern spirituality, and American transcendentalism, Sartwell has relentlessly insisted on an ethos rooted in unadorned honesty with oneself and a healthy skepticism of others. This volume of selected popular writings combines music (...) and art criticism with personal memoir about addiction and rebellion, as well as cultural commentary on race, sexuality, cynicism, and the meaning of life. “Crispin Sartwell deserves to be recognized as the heir to a distinctively American intellectual legacy. Like the American ‘cynics’ he loves—Twain, Bierce, Mencken—he is fiercely individualistic, deeply antiauthoritarian, and slavishly aligned with no creed or academic discipline. He uses his significant erudition not to escape the ordinary or himself, but rather to let loose riches—of insight, suffering, and beauty—through a relentless examination of life, culture, and reality. Sartwell is also, in my opinion, the best philosophical prose stylist of his generation. His writing—crystalline, vivid, and intoxicating—is an uncontrollable substance. And though Sartwell swaggers, provokes, and sometimes infuriates, he does so with a tacit humility and self-scrutiny, which empowers readers to follow his example and convert their own rage into beauty.” — Elizabeth Walden, Bryant University “Crispin Sartwell is the most important philosophical voice of his generation. He has risen into the public consciousness in the last two decades due to his controversial views on social, political, and cultural subjects. Through television appearances, journalism, and blogging, along with his numerous scholarly books, he has made a reputation as a thinker of serious thoughts. Yet, there is a lightness to his world that is irreverent, fun, and entertaining. These essays reflect some of his best writing from the past fifteen years. They are highly readable, but they are also profound reflections on the subjects that will draw many of us into deeper ponderings about the meaning of life, or, more to the point, the meaning of our lives.” — Randall Auxier, author of Time, Will, and Purpose: Living Ideas from the Philosophy of Josiah Royce. (shrink)

We propose a model which argues that aesthetics is based on biosemiotic processes and introduces the non-anthropomorphic aesthetics. In parallel with habit-taking, which is responsible for generating semiotic regularities, there is another process, the semiotic fitting, which is responsible for generating aesthetic relations. Habit by itself is not good or bad, it is good or bad because of semiotic fitting. Defining the beautiful as the perfect semiotic fitting corresponds to the common conceptualisation of the aesthetic as well as extends it (...) over all umwelten. Perfection is not omnipotence, it only means the omnirelational semiotic fitting in the umwelt, or harmony with context. The process that presents something to be perceived as beautiful is of the same kind as the semiotic process that builds something to become beautiful. The argument is based on the observation that learning has a tendency towards perfection, until it is grounded. Semiosis is usually biased towards semiotic fitting, which stepwise leads towards perfection, and thus towards beauty. Such a general semiotic model implies that beauty is species-specific; that it is not limited to the sphere of emotions; that the reduction of the evolution of aesthetic features to sexual selection is false; and that humans should learn the aesthetics of other beings in order to avoid destroying valuable biocoenoses. (shrink)

We trained chickens to react to an average human female face but not to an average male face (or vice versa). In a subsequent test, the animals showed preferences for faces consistent with human sexual preferences (obtained from university students). This suggests that human preferences arise from general properties of nervous systems, rather than from face-specific adaptations. We discuss this result in the light of current debate on the meaning of sexual signals and suggest further tests of existing (...) hypotheses about the origin of sexual preferences. (shrink)

The challenge of teaching classic religious texts with flawed moral messages from a contemporary point of view is examined in the case of the Beautiful Captive of War (Deuteronomy 21:10–14). A moral dilemma is generated by contradictory ethical stands within the Jewish tradition, between which students have to choose. This dilemma is explored in the context of a kind of religious education which strives for critical commitment to sacred tradition. That kind of education is analysed for its roots in self‐persuasion, (...) moral agency in complex social settings and an educational philosophy based on norms and conscience. Other issues explored are sexual education, international human rights, the relationship of abstract moral vignettes to real‐life situations and behaviour and the relationship of religious to moral education. (shrink)

Several scholars (Bartoloni 2019, Bukdahl 2017, Vogt 2019) focused on Mario Perniola's perspective on art, post-human sexuality and political theory. Yet little has been written on the philosophical and literary sources - specifically Stoicism, the Baroque and the Avant-Gardes - which influenced his standpoint. The objective of this paper is to develop Perniola's conception of a strategically oriented beauty, which implies a connection between the aesthetic element and the political-effectual one.

If desire is conceived as investment in a sex object, why is sexual objectification regarded as intrinsically degrading? The distinction between the "objectification " of pornographic depiction and the "beauty " of erotic depiction can be understood as a difference in degree between the uni-dimensional enframing of one treatment and the multidimensional enframing of the other. The phenomenon of context includes the anticipations of the participating witnesses: the object of pornographic or erotic depiction cannot be isolated from the (...) posture, situation, and desire of the persons participating in the revelation. Erotic depiction which strives to represent the full range of structures, connections, and relationships constitutive of sexlove-that is, forms of mimesis that elaborate the horizons of erotic encounter, that seek to contextualize the intertwining of flesh rather than focus on the slappings of meat-might well meet the most discerning standards of artistic production. (shrink)

Alan Turing is known for both his mathematical creativity and genius and role in cryptography war efforts, and for his homosexuality, for which he was persecuted. Yet there is little work that brings these two parts of his life together. This paper deconstructs and moves beyond the extant stereotypes around perceived associations between gay men and creativity, to consider how Turing’s lived experience as a queer mathematician provides a rich seam of insight into the ways in which his life, relationships, (...) and working environment shaped his work. (shrink)

This article describes the use of idealised women's bodies as avatars of national identity and morality in early twentieth century Venezuela, as evidenced in works of classic literature from the period 1929–1949. Referencing two of Venezuela's most prominent authors, Teresa de la Parra and Antonia Palacios, the article describes how young girls in Venezuela in the first half of the twentieth century were enculturated to pursue ‘white’ ideals of beauty perceived as morally superior. Using the examples of Parra's semi-autobiographical (...) novel Memorias de Mamá Blanca and Palacios’ similarly autobiographical Ana Isabel, una niña decente, this study investigates the topic of identity formation and the state, especially in regards to the control of women's sexuality and women's bodies in state ideologies, while exploring the specific racial overtones of beauty practices and education. (shrink)

The year 2014 marked the 50th Anniversary of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. I argue that SISI is problematic for the continued struggle of women in sport given the nature and the extent of sexual objectification. The SISI has evolved over the years from a bathing suit fashion spread to a contemporary multimedia colossal. For example, to help celebrate the 50th anniversary, SISI teamed up with Mattel and featured Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Barbie in the February 2014 issue, and a special (...) collector’s item Barbie doll was produced and sold exclusively at Target. Sport is a celebration of human variety, yet Sports Illustrated rarely includes female athletes on their covers, and instead pushes a product that celebrates heterosexuality and sexual objectification of females. (shrink)

Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct succeeds admirably in showing that it is possible to think about art from a biological point of view, and this is a significant achievement, given that resistance to the idea that cultural phenomena have biological underpinnings remains widespread in many academic disciplines. However, his account of the origins of our artistic impulses and the far-reaching conclusions he draws from that account are not persuasive. This article points out a number of problems: in particular, problems with (...) Dutton’s appeal to sexual selection, with his discussion of the adaptation/by-product distinction and its significance, and with drawing normative conclusions from evolutionary hypotheses. (shrink)

In the wake of modernity, women's sexuality was positioned in a way that created a beauty/narcissism double bind that is still with us today. My concern in this article is that the subject position of “fashion model” serves as a constant reminder of this split, which is directed at all women and weakens the generalized woman's political agency. Fashion models themselves experience harassment and humiliation as well as pleasure and desire in their work as fashion models. However, the small (...) portion of feminist work that has engaged explicitly with the fashion-model business sees it mainly as an enterprise that is alienating and hostile to women. Although I do not entirely disagree with this analysis, it neglects the meaning of beauty and what beauty does to us with regard to creativity and pleasure. I wish to explore how some of the work experience of fashion models intersects with and challenges the beauty/narcissism double bind. I suggest that rather than grounding our understanding of the subject position “fashion model” and the fashion business solely in their reinforcement of the beauty/narcissism double bind, we should pay attention to the importance of what beauty and aspects of narcissism may mean. (shrink)