The Dignity of Feminine Beauty
By: Chris Isadorian
Tags: Lust, Women, Beauty, Sexism, Respect

Photo by Javier Martínez on Unsplash

Why would anyone mistreat a woman?

Women are people. Each of them have their own unique talents and dreams and are far more than their mere looks on a given day. Even so, I believe it ought to be impossible to mistreat a woman simply on account of her natural beauty. The concepts of beauty and abuse simply do not go together.

What is beauty? Everyone has an instinct to recognize it, though defining what it is is not so simple. There can be a tendency in some to have a reductionist view of feminine beauty from a merely sexualized perspective, as though it does not have value in itself but only in reference to some male sexual drive to find females of their species. But is a woman’s attractiveness merely a result of animal attraction?

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In some communities, there is a temptation to take the perspective that the way a woman dresses will “tempt men to lust.” I remember my mother asking me whether a girl she noticed in a halter top at my college had negatively affected my male psyche! In all frankness, I barely noticed her, and it was not that she was not beautiful. For all I cared, she might as well have been a radical nudist, and short of inquiring whether she was drunk and needed assistance, I would not have thought very long about it. It might have had something to do with the fact that I was trying to not be late for class, or that I had a crush on someone else. Ironically, my crush happened to never wear such “revealing” clothing, not that it would have mattered at all. What makes a woman valuable is so much more than how little or how much skin she happens to be showing. It seems to me that an encounter with a human woman affects a human man in a far more holistic fashion than that.

Imagine that you were digging in the ground. It was dusty, or muddy, or both. You encounter some gravel and stones in the ground, and this makes it especially difficult to finish your task as you have to toss the rocks out of the way before you can proceed. Suddenly, as you are tossing these stones, you encounter a diamond. What would be your gut reaction? Would you toss it with everything else?

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Rather, you would drop what you’re doing and immediately dust it off. You would take it home and polish it until it shone in the light. Then you would make for it a special felt-lined jewelry box like a shrine or palace. It wouldn’t matter who you were, even a murderer would probably take care of a diamond instinctively.

Or take the case that a person was walking in a desert and they encountered a rose. Of course they would not simply toss it in the compost pile. Instead, they would go out of their way to buy a clear glass vase for it. They would give it clean water and set it in a place that best blesses their home. What is most interesting to note, however, is that neither roses nor diamonds do anything for humans from a survival standpoint. A mere animal cannot find these things valuable the way a human does. There is something intuitively sacred about the soft glow of rose petals or the illuminated facets of a crystal that causes humans to very nearly worship these impractical objects like ethereal gods.

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Now, of course, the analogy only goes so far. Women are by no means pretty objects to be kept in a box. If you consider the mythology of any pantheistic religion, the gods are the personifications of each of the realities of the human experience. Athena is the Greek goddess of wisdom and handicraft. Pluto was the personification of the wealth of the Romans. Venus is that of beauty.

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Imagine if all those concepts could be somehow bundled up and made into their own person, if Beauty itself could be made to be starkly self-aware, utterly intelligent, and to have a will of her own. If she could have her own hopes and goals for which to strive, and sacrifices and losses to bear. That is what a woman is, in essence.

And, surely, it is impossible for a human to do anything harmful to a being like that?