One key is in the paragraph under the Giorgione:

“… The female figures in the foreground are the Muses of poetry, their nakedness reveals their divine being.”

Whenever you see an ancient Greek statue of Zeus, Venus, Aphrodite,…, they’re all buck-naked – because they’re gods. The Roman emperors liked to have statues of themselves, nude, to show that they were gods, too.

I think the Greeks thought that the gods, immortal and ageless, embodied the ultimate in beauty and perfection; they appreciated the body in ways we probably can’t understand, so to put clothes on them (even the ageless toga) would have been “gilding the lily”.

One also thinks of Rubens (whose “Daniel” is practically naked, surrounded by a lot of grumpy-looking lions), whose ladies were more ample than skinny.

Well, now that I think about it, I realized that Ancient Greece held that beauty was actually evil in a woman. They just did.

Maybe that was why so many Greek men and Roman men were gay. They thought female beauty was an evil thing of temptation and degradation. While they exalted the male’s form.

Now we have the exact opposite. Male strength is viewed by feminists as evil, brutish, and violent. While female beauty is viewed as pure, pristine, and Good.

So no, the “perception” of female idealness through the ages by men or others, have most definitely not been the same.

– In the time of Ruben, getting enough to eat was a key issue, so “Rubenesque” women were the ideal everyone thought was great. Now, eating too much is a greater health risk than not getting enough, so being near ideal body weight is what we want.
– For centuries, having a tan was evidence of being a peasant/farmer, so the ladies of Louis XIV powdered their faces to appear whiter. In the 70’s and 80’s, having a dark tan was ideal because it reflected a healthy, athletic, outdoorsy lifestyle. Now that tanning means skin cancer and wrinkles later, pale white is back in.
– Men prefer women with small noses because they are a sign of youth, and youthful women are more fertile (http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3225/is_n4_v43/ai_10676120).
– Small firm breasts can be a sign of youth, but larger ones are a sign of higher progesterone levels and thus higher fertility (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3682657.stm).
– Large, dark eyes simulate dilated pupils which are the brain’s autonomic reaction when something interesting is viewed, signalling possible openness to mating.

In the course of Natural Selection, men looking for ideal partners to make maximal numbers of maximally survivable children gravitate to the mates considered “best”. Making maximally survivable girl children also means making ones who themselves are considered desirable by the next generation. We men are evolved to like what we like. And we women are evolved to fulfill this standard. (Equivalent standards on other measuring sticks apply for how women evaluate men, so it goes both ways.)

In reality, we humans are not that different from the preening peacocks with their spectacular tail feathers, preening around for the peahens to choose from. I’m sure if peahens published magazines, the most fascinating covers they could produce would be of extravagant peacocks, showing off their goodies for all to see, posed in echoes of classical art.

The feminists position, if true, seeks to give women all they would ever want in return for the destruction of free will. Meaning, for such a philosophy of feminism, happiness is rote and preset, rather than the result of individual actions and desires.

This idea of ‘presetting’ things ahead of human desires, human nature, and human urges is a theme I am noticing.

The femnists, if their position can be taken at face value, believe a woman can have it all. As Maureen Dowd does. She believes she can have a career from 20s to 40s and then get married to the person she desires. If you ever saw her on fox News, you would notice one of her comments to be, “Why can’t we get rid of men, we’d be fine without them”.

Happiness and perfection is preset, and if it is preset, then it is also malleable. It can be whatever you want it to be, and hence, it can be whatever you want for someone else as well. But the primary purpose is for their own selves in Dowd’s case.

The female form seems to be another thing, given that it comes from Hollywood and not fly over country.

Many men have noticed that women in Asia and Eurasia countries like Russia act differently than Western women.

It really is a difference in our cultures, and Hollywood has a lot to do with it.

The perfection of the female form obviously appeals to women simply because women have a desire for happiness as much as men do, it just seems to take different forms.

However, if you combine perfection of form, an impossible goal, with the perfection of feminism’s career and marriage, then you might have some societal problems. Namely teenagers taking steroids to get thinner and build muscles that are “shaped” according to the perfection standard of Hollywood and feminists. Or perhaps bolemia and anorexia. Or perhaps a higher incidence of female suicides than men.

Human society is symbiotic, meaning if you make the females unhappy then you automatically make the other 50% unhappy as well.

It would be fine if the feminists had ultra power to shape human destiny and human nature. It would be like the Democrats in control of 99.999% of the government. It would work since all obstacles and dissension would be crushed, so everyone’s energies are contributed to the perfection of the human race.

However, Human nature is a very competitive and conflicting entity. It cannot be molded easily. And anyone who tries to achieve perfection through molding people as raw materials, will encounter difficulties.

Some things were not meant to be.

A woman has to be less than perfect. She has to choose between benefits and risks, opportunities and disasters. But for some women, as in Hollywood, choices don’t mean anything compared to their religious perfection.

Art is as far as I know, an expression of humanity’s desires. Sometimes, those desires are unrealistic and sometimes they are so common that many people may feel emotionally touched when seeing it.

Maybe this will illustrate the distinction a little better. This is a fertility symbol. I suspect that few people would describe it as “veneration of female beauty” though. Similar types of male symbols were also common in the ancient world.

I would think a woman’s beauty is directly related to her presumed receptiveness to advances ..

Then you would be mistaken. And as I mentioned, women are some of the biggest consumers of female imagery. Who reads VF? Check out the womens magazine rack next time you are in the bookstore. Don’t tell me they all have latent homosexual urges?

my response is, what are their birth rates?

An interesting point.

I am not sure what the “Venus of Willenberg” is about. If it is a fertility goddess — which it might be — then I still see it as a veneration of female beauty as such. But again we may be looking at this from different perspectives.

Also, I have always considered Marian devotion a facet of ennobled motherhood. I don’t know if this can be proved one way or the other.

Then you comment The striking thing about the modern woman fetish is that it is divorced from procreation, and even in many cases from any sexual activity at all. I would think a woman’s beauty is directly related to her presumed receptiveness to advances, and the extent to which the impetus to make such advances is visually aroused by her beauty. Again, I think we are talking about different things.

Finally, I think your theory is also undermined by the fact that much of the non-Western world does not share our fetish, to which my response is, what are their birth rates?

Female nudity goes in cycles, all you have to do is think of such bare-breasted periods as Ancient Crete Minoan, and 17th Century Restoration. My theory is that nudity is an unconscious attempt to inspire sexual activity in a similar unconscious attempt to inspire baby-making. But, again, I’m just guessing.

On the other hand, the “fetish” of female figures you describe, and which both men and women admire, seems to me something altogether different, but I do think it is not an attempt to “rediscover the sacred” in the feminine form.

But anyway …. best regards.

Men have always worshipped female beauty..

I don’t think that is true, at least not in the sense we are discussng here. Clearly men and women have always been interested in attractive members of the opposite sex, but that is distinct from the kind of veneration I’m talking about, which seems to have begun in Europe sometime in the late Middle Ages, and at first appeared as Marian devotion. For the most part, people were too busy trying to survive to worry about finding the perfectly shaped nose.

The Venus figure you mention, along with the (in)famous sheila-na-gigs, are fertility symbols, similar to the great many phallic symbols which have survived from the same period. Nobody could mistake the picture at the top of this post for anything like this.

The striking thing about the modern woman fetish is that it is divorced from procreation, and even in many cases from any sexual activity at all. Many of those who revere beautiful women are women themselves.

I think your theory is also undermined by the fact that much of the non-Western world does not share our fetish. I share in this fetish (or is it addiction?), but it strikes me as obvious that in world historical terms we are the odd ones out. And I womder what it says about us.

http://www.mappingveronica.com

Jamie Irons