Page:Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment.djvu/27

 Rh find its ready explanation when we consider the positive side of beauty.

4. Misplaced sex characters. A specific form of the abnormal, but one which is important enough to justify separation from the foregoing class, is the possession of individuals of one sex of characteristics properly belonging to the other. This is an invariable negative qualification in the eyes of healthy observers. The effeminate man and the masculine woman can be beautiful only to the moral pervert. The importance of this indication is very great, as we shall see later, and however little it may mean consciously to a given individual, the habit of reacting against it has been strongly developed in the human race.

So much, in brief, for the general negative characters of beauty. We come now to more detailed characters, which have on the whole a positive value, although some of them have negative aspects as well.

1. Stature. From the point of view of the female, the male must be large, although not a giant, since, as we have seen, too great a deviation from the usual is a negative condition. I have at various times overheard women, who were discussing the relative handsomeness of two or several men, settle the point by such an observation as