Nowhere is the biological imperative of art more vividly exemplified by the
many worlds of feminine beauty. This is a broad historical thread running
from prehistory, where the emphasis was on physical attributes of fertility,
through norms of artist's models of the Renaissance, which were
developed to codify female gender signals, to the female cannons of the
modern fashion industry, where bodies are used, for the most part by
males, to display creativity in the clothing trade. This historical perspective
has been primarily an illustration of the progression of a male-dominated
heterosexual culture, where the biological focus is on the principles of
sexual responses of men towards women. Men have argued for centuries
over the finer points of feminine perfection but no one has ever succeeded
in settling the matter. Beautiful women, usually girls, persist in changing
shape as epoch succeeds epoch, or as the specialist woman-watcher
travels from society to society. In every instance fixed ideals emerge which
are hotly defended. This variability does not mean that there are no
fundamental sexual female body signals, or that males are necessarily
lacking inborn responses to such signals. Gender signals and sexual
invitation signals are present in our species, just as in any other. They are
present in all human females regardless of how an individual fits the local
rules of beauty. In any case, the way these rules are defined means that
the ideal beauty is a social entity deliberately defined to be rare, and so is
inaccessible to most men.
On a prehuman level, zoological research has shown that a male monkey
does not consider the comparative beauty of his females. There are no
ugly monkeys. Likewise the human male is attracted to all the females
around him as members of the opposite sex, and also as beauty-rated
individuals. It is in the latter context that taxophilia runs wild amongst
female imagery, invading most of his areas of interest, from responding to
adverts, to working up a general sexual desire in the absence of the real
thing. In art galleries, a naked body, no matter how small relative to the
picture plane sends out a sexual signal, which conditions a male viewer’s
response, for better or worse with respect to the artist's own intentions.
