ABSTRACT
Beauty attracts. At a most basic level, and without resolving puzzles of objective criteria, we can say that if we find something beautiful we are drawn towards it. We pause to watch a sunset or a rainbow; we walk in the woods to enjoy the colours of the autumn leaves; we listen gladly to music that we find beautiful; we take pleasure in beautiful objects or paintings. We are attracted to them and give them time and attention, not because we must but because we want to do so. What we find beautiful stimulates our desire. That is exactly why Augustine and his followers are so afraid of beauty.
At least since the time of Plato, desire has been characterized paradigmatically in sexual terms: desire is Eros. In Plato’s mythological rendition, Eros is ‘the follower and servant of Aphrodite’, the beautiful, and ‘is born to love the beautiful’ (Plato, Symposium 203c). It is not simply that some forms of beauty, the beauty of human bodies, stimulate sexual desire. In Plato’s representation, sexual desire is the pattern for all desire: Eros is modelled on sexuality. Not only so, but beauty, also, is thereby modelled as that which arouses Eros, understood in sexual terms. ‘Sexual terms’, moreover, are never gender neutral. In Plato’s myth, Eros is
masculine, and enacts masculine desire and masculine characteristics. Eros is aroused and tumescent; his longings are urgent, but, once satisfied, ‘ebb away as fast’ (203e). ‘He is gallant, impetuous, and energetic, a mighty hunter, and a master of device and artifice’ (203d). There is no representation here of female desire, or even acknowledgement of it, sexual or otherwise. Do women also have desires? If so, are they modelled upon male sexual desires, or could they be characterized differently? Indeed is it accurate to take sexual desire, male or female, as the paradigm of all desire? Questions about Plato’s representation of desire lead at once to questions
about beauty. If beauty attracts, and if attraction is understood in terms of male sexuality, then what must be the nature of beauty? At a most basic level, and assuming (as Plato did not, but as Augustine and Christendom with him did) that heterosexuality is normative, beauty also will be understood in gendered terms. Beauty will be represented as female, attracting masculine Eros.
