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In every age a general misdirection of what may be called sexual “taste”… is produced by the devil and his angels. This they do bu working through the small circle of artists, dressmakers, actresses, and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely. Thus they have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male such as the beard disagreeable to nearly all the females-and there is more in that than you might suppose. As regards the male taste they have varied a good deal. At one time they have directed it to the statuesque and aristocratic type of beauty, mixing men’s vanity with their desires and encouraging the race to breed chiefly from the most arrogant and prodigal women. At another, they have selected an exaggeratedly feminine type, faint and languishing, so that folly and cowardice, and all the general falseness and littleness of mind which go with them, shall be at a premium. At present they are on the opposite tack. The age of jazz has succeeded the age of the waltz, and they now teach men to like women whose bodies are scarcely distinguishable from those of boys. Since this is a kind of beauty even more transitory than most, they thus aggravate the female’s chronic horror of growing old with many successful results and render her less willing and less able to bear children. And that is not all. They have engineered a great increase in the license which society allows to the representation of the apparent nude not the real nude in art, and its exhibition on the stage or the bathing beach. It is all a fake, or course; the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them to appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being “frank” and “healthy” and getting back to nature. As a result they are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist-making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters