effect concerning the difference between men, some of whom take no pleasure in seeing the private parts of their wives or mistresses, while others admire them and delight to kiss them.

    I must add that, however natural or legitimate the attraction of
    the sexual parts may be to either sex, the question of their
    purely aesthetic beauty remains unaffected.

Remy de Gourmont, in a discussion of the aesthetic element in sexual beauty, considers that the invisibility of the sexual organs is the decisive fact in rendering women more beautiful than men.  “Sex, which is sometimes an advantage, is always a burden and always a flaw; it exists for the race and not for the individual.  In the human male, and precisely because of his erect attitude, sex is the predominantly striking and visible fact, the point of attack in a struggle at close quarters, the point aimed at from a distance, an obstacle for the eye, whether regarded as a rugosity on the surface or as breaking the middle of a line.  The harmony of the feminine body is thus geometrically much more perfect, especially when we consider the male and the female at the moment of desire when they present the most intense and natural expression of life.  Then the woman, whose movements are all interior, or only visible by the undulation of her curves, preserves her full aesthetic value, while the man, as it were, all at once receding toward the primitive state of animality, seems to throw off all beauty and become reduced to the simple and naked condition of a genital organism.” (Remy de Gourmont, Physique de l’Amour, p. 69.) Remy de Gourmont proceeds, however, to point out that man has his revenge after a woman has become pregnant, and that, moreover, the proportions of the masculine body are more beautiful than those of the feminine body.

The primary sexual characters of man and woman have thus never at any time played a very large part in sexual allurement.  With the growth of culture, indeed, the very methods which had been adopted to call attention to the sexual organs were by a further development retained for the purpose of concealing them.  From the first the secondary sexual characters have been a far more widespread method of sexual allurement than the primary sexual characters, and in the most civilized countries to-day they still constitute the most attractive of such methods to the majority of the population.

The main secondary sexual characters in woman and the type which they present in beautiful and well-developed persons are summarized as follows by Stratz, who in his book on the beauty of the body in woman sets forth the reasons for the characteristics here given:—­

        Delicate bony structure. 
        Rounded forms and breasts. 
        Broad pelvis. 
        Long and abundant hair. 
        Low and narrow boundary of pubic hair. 
        Sparse hair in armpit.