On the Meaning of Sex by J. Budziszewski

Author:J. Budziszewski [Budziszewski, J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute
Published: 2014-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

5

The Meaning of Sexual Beauty

Reveal your presence,

And let the vision and your beauty kill me,

Behold the malady

Of love is incurable

Except in your presence and before your face.

—John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle

Dinner would be served in a few minutes. Over glasses of wine, the women were exchanging compliments about their appearance. Cora told Kathryn she looked sexy. Kathryn was pleased. I was much younger than I am now, and something of a boor. Something got into me. I turned to Cora.

“Both of you are lovely—”

“Thank you.”

“—but what do you mean when you call Kathryn ‘sexy'?”

“I mean attractive. Desirable.”

“Forgive me if I'm too literal,” I answered, “but what desire do you mean?”

“Sexual desire. What else would I mean?”

“So the basis of your compliment is that the way Kathryn looks makes men want to get in bed with her?”

“Sure.”

“All men?”

“Sure.”

“That's good?”

Cora and Kathryn glanced at each other and laughed. “Is it strange that a woman would want to be desirable?”

“Well, you wouldn't want to have sex with all men, would you?” I asked.

“No,” Kathryn said.

“Then why would you want all men to desire to have sex with you?”

“Don't you understand a woman wanting to be beautiful?” asked Cora.

“Sure,” I said.

“Well, then?”

“But you didn't speak of beauty. You spoke of sexiness.”

“Aren't they the same thing?” they both exclaimed.

“I don't think so,” I replied. “A man can be moved by a woman's beauty without wanting to go to bed with her.”

Chris, Cora's husband, broke in. “That's impossible,” he said.

Michael, the other husband, suggested, “No, I get it. You're thinking of her attraction as a purely aesthetic quality, completely unrelated to sex. Right? So for you a woman's ‘beauty' is like the beauty of a sunset, of an abstract painting, or of a mineral formation.”

“Not at all,” I answered. “The beauty of a woman affects me in a way that the beauty of a man doesn't. Obviously the experience is sexual, in the sense that it's connected with the difference of sex.”

“If it's sexual,” agreed the husbands, “then it's all about sex.” Their wives thought so, too. Such as it was, the conversation was over.

Well, the young oaf got what was coming to him. As someone more discreet laughingly pointed out to me later, I should have known better than to mix it up at a wine and dinner party. If Socrates and Alcibiades had been there, then maybe yes. Otherwise, no. That was all true.

But the dinner-goers had only delivered opinions; they hadn't solved the puzzle. What is the solution? A normal man, for example, finds it highly interesting to contemplate womanly beauty, and obviously it is all related to the difference of sex. But is it “all about sex”?

How can one explain something that is so obvious to some and so invisible to others?

To a man, women seem to glow in more hues than men do, and in different ones. The spectrum is wider, the world has more music and color, just because there are women in it. Of course there are certain things a normal man rightly prefers to do with other men, like playing tackle football.

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