On Sex Appeal

Two Things do not necessarily go together, chivalry or true respect for women and allowing women to spend money, to go where to please, to hold executive jobs and to vote.

American women are far ahead of their sisters all over the world in all things that don’t matter, and remain very much in the same situation in all things that do.

Women at home are like fish in water, submitted to business routine, women are disciplined quite easily and make better routine workers than men, but the moment the office atmosphere is changed, as when a business staff meet at a wedding tea, and you will find that woman immediately come into their own by advising their men colleagues or their bosses to get a hair cut, or where to get the best lotion for curing dandruff.  In the office, they talk with authority.  Appearance of women in public life has added greatly to the charm and amenities of life, life in the office and in the street, for the benefit of men, that voices in the offices are softer, colours gayer and the desks neater.

In the west, people think too much of sex and too little of women.

Western women spend almost as much time fixing their hair as Indian or Chinese women used to do, attend to their make-up more openly, constantly and ubiquitously, diet, exercise, massage and read advertisements for keeping the figure more assiduously, kick their legs up and down in bed to reduce their waistline more religiously, lift their faces and dye their hair, at an age at which no Indian or Chinese women ever think of doing such a thing.  They are spending more money, not less, on lotions and perfumes, and there is a bigger business in beauty aids and day creams, night creams, vanishing creams, foundation creams, face creams, hand creams, pore creams, lemon creams, sun tan creams / oils, wrinkle oils, turtle oils and every conceivable variety of perfumed oil.  It is simply because American women have more time and more money to spend.  Perhaps they dress to please men and and undress to please themselves, or the other way round, or both.  Perhaps the Indian or Chinese women have fewer available modern beauty aids.

Art has made modern man sex conscious.  I have no doubt about it.  First art and then commercial exploitation of the woman’s body, down to its last curve and muscular undulation and the last pruned toe-nail.  I have never seen every part of the woman’s body so completely exploited commercially and find it hard to understand how American women have submitted so sweetly to this exploitation of their bodies.

To an Oriental, it is hard to square his commercial exploitation of the female body with respect to women.  Artists call it beauty, theatre goers call it art, only producers and managers honestly call it sex appeal and men generally have a good time.  It is typical of a man-made and man ruled society that women are stripped for commercial exploitation and men almost never, outside a few acrobats.

The less clear minded think that the only way of getting a man and holding him is by sex appeal.

To me any wife without children is a mistress, and any mistress with children is a wife, no matter what their legal standing is.  The children ennoble and sanctify the mistress, and the absence of children degrades the wife.

It is foolish, dangerous and hopeless for middle aged women to meet younger men on the issue of sex appeal.  It is also foolish because there is more to a woman than her sex, and while wooing and courtship are necessarily largely based on physical attraction, mature men and women should have outgrown it.

Man, we know is the most amorous animal in the zoological kingdom.

The ideal woman, then becomes a young woman with perfect physical proportions and physical charms whereas for me, woman is never more beautiful than when she is standing over a cradle, never more serious and dignified than when she is holding a baby in her breast and leading a child of four or five years by the hand, and never more happy than, as I have seen in a western painting, when she is lying in a bed against a pillow and playing with a baby at her breast.

Woman is made of water and man is made of clay.  Water permeates and moulds the clay and the clay holds the water and gives its substance, in which water moves and lives and has its full being.