Updating Willendorf

"The connection between beauty of form and sex is extremely obscure, and is perhaps one of those subjects better left alone." - Kenneth Clark, The Romantic Rebellion

 [Note: I say "we" a lot in this essay.  This is because I'm male, and while there may be female readers my primary audience is that of other heterosexual males.]

I recently put up a post about prehistoric art, and just this week I had a curious comparison.  While wandering around the University of Lausanne campus during a scientific conference I came across this sticker on a urinal divider:

Just a porny little anime-based drawing, the sort of thing that somewhat humorously, somewhat worrisomely, is beginning to overtake actual images of women in our world.  But it oddly reminded me of the original above with her hand positioning, and I thought to myself, "Willendorf is alive and well."  Since then it's been in the back of my mind and I've realized it's an ideal jumping off point for a wider discussion.  But first, jewel beetles.

 

Giant jewel beetle (Julodimorpha bakewelli)
males on a beer bottle

Bugs First, Always

Animals don't really perceive the world.  Or, to be more precise, perception consists of ordering their input, and of extracting from that the patterns they most care about.  This process can be streamlined to save quite a bit of neurological processing if the analysis eschews constructing a complex interpretation in favor of using a few simple stimuli that act as cues for relevant factors.

In insects, fertility of the female is a function of her size: larger females produce more eggs.  Therefore, it behooves males to seek out the largest females they can find, since those are the ones that will produce the most offspring and maximize the males' reproductive fitness.  These, you could say, are the most attractive females to their little beetle brains, and since size is limited by nutrition it can't be falsified.  Female size is a true signal of their potential fecundity, and the program need do nothing more than identify fellow beetles and then pursue the sexiest ones.

In its natural habitat this system worked just fine; there was nothing else resembling the jewel beetle in the surroundings so only focusing on a few simple features was sufficient.  But then humans came to Australia and manufactured beer bottles.  These orange, shiny, dimpled, and above all large objects check every box in the male jewel beetle attractiveness inventory.  The result was that male beetles swarmed the bottles littered along the roadside, ignoring real females in the process because they couldn't compete with this impossible standard.  They were actually at risk of going extinct due to the males' neglect.  Luckily for the beetle, the story ends happily because the Australian government recognized this threat and mandated a change in bottle color so it would no longer be so alluring to the beetles.  The males returned to chasing actual females and the species has since recovered.

Now, this phenomenon of being over-stimulated by an exaggerated cue is not isolated to insects, and is common enough to receive its own term: "supranormal stimulus."   It is when something "cracks the code" of an organism's perceptual system, whether intentionally or not, and gets it to respond more strongly than it ever would to the naturally-occurring version.  You can probably see where this is going.

Male humans are as interested in mates as male jewel beetles are, and we share at least one major criterion: mate fecundity.  For primates this is not directly related to size but more nebulous qualities such as health and youth; a young woman is far more likely than an older one to conceive and carry to term, and it is around about 20 years of age that she has the highest potential lifetime reproductive potential.  This is the pivot point which male interest focuses, and while we're a bit more sophisticated perceptually we nonetheless rely on a few basic cues to assess this trait.

 Getting Waisted

Lets start at the hips.  Males like wide hips, presumably because they indicate not only sexual maturity but good childbearing potential.  But width is not assessed on an absolute scale, since as I mentioned before it isn't large women who are necessarily more healthy.  Instead it is measured as a ratio between the circumference of the woman's waist to her hips (known as the waist-to-hip ratio, WHR).  Given that vision from a single perspective cannot directly measure circumference, we effectively estimate it instead by a pair of lines, one measured roughly at the narrowest point of her torso while the other at the widest point of her hips.  Comparing these two gives an immediate sense of the woman's shape, which mathematically is expressed by dividing the upper length by the lower.  In cross-cultural studies, a WHR of about 0.7 +/- 0.1 is considered about normal/attractive, with some cultural variation:

From Wikipedia

Our anime girl, who I'm going to call Lausanne, is on the extreme end of what would be considered attractive (it is, however, closer to the cultural norm of East Asia).  This is really pushing the impression of how wide her hips are, and so tantalizing us with extreme femininity; she screams "woman" more than an actual woman does.  But an artist has to be careful here, because going for a supranormal stimulus by simply exaggerating traits risks passing the invisible line from arousing to amusing, the girl becoming a bobble-bottomed doll instead of a potential mate.  Luckily for the artist, there are a few tricks they can employ.  

First, you'll notice that I didn't draw my measurement line at the hip's widest point but where the underwear straps reach her outline.  That's actually me highlighting a trick: the contrast of black-on-pale draws our eyes, and so we measure her there rather than at the widest point. The result is that despite her extraordinary proportions, which we take in at a glance and generally regard favorably, our subconscious arithmetic is not outraged by the excess, causing us to both appreciate her width while still finding it safely reasonable.

The second artistic device is the use of contrapposto, or an uneven pose where most of the weight is placed onto one leg:

From Pahoozi et al. 2017: Waist‑to‑Hip Ratio as Supernormal
Stimuli: Effect of Contrapposto Pose and Viewing Angle

Exactly why this is effective is not known, but from a glance at the images above it is obvious, at least to heterosexual males, how much more attractive the bottom row is than the top.  It is funny, but you'll notice below that I use Lausanne's left side, the one with the raised and emphasized hip, in my figures; I did this unconsciously, without premeditation, and it was only later that I noticed my "choice."  I just knew it was right.  Now, if I had to venture a guess as to why this stance is so pleasing, it is because it emphasizes the curviness of the woman's outline, which is another powerful stimulus alongside the WHR, to which it is closely linked.  This exaggeration of the curve makes her body all the more shapely between waist and hip, but it does so without tripping our "eerie" sense even as the girl pushes into unrealistic dimensions.  The result is a genuine supranormal stimulus, where Lausanne has a body structure beyond what we would find attractive in real life but in art is distilled sex.

Looking at the original Willendorf by comparison it is clear she doesn't match this at all.  Attempting to measure from her narrowest waist to the hip (which isn't even her widest point) you get an appalling 1.08.  What does this mean?  It could suggest that standards have changed, and that all this talk of evolutionary preference is bunk, but considering the global nature of WHR preferences mentioned above I would be surprised by that.  I suspect in this case that people who have suggested she was not crafted for attractiveness but abundance and long life are correct.  It reminds me of the depictions you see of Maitreya, or the Buddha of the Future, in Chinese restaurants: 

Nobody looks at this and thinks, "Yeah, this is a depiction of ideal male physique."  But that's not his purpose.  He's fat to represent the goodness of the future; things will be better even if we're suffering now.  I can't help but feel that the original Willendorf's proportions were probably meant to invoke similar, if more primitive, sentiments.  She'll involve some attractive elements here and there, because why make a woman ugly when she could be otherwise, but when you're living near starvation at the edge of the European ice sheet your dream is first of women who are fat and fed, not lovely.

But if there's a difference between Willendorf and Lausanne in the hips there's an agreement in their treatment of the thighs, legs, and feet.  While wide hips with a concave midriff are #1, plump thighs are not far behind (as are shapely buttocks, which produce curviness from a side view, but as the anime image is frontal we'll be neglecting those in this discussion).  Lausanne is not so ample as Willendorf, but she's still plenty soft, and with her legs pressed together they produce a lovely slope away from her hip.  In fact, another diagram is in order:

By making her stand with her feet together her leg turns inward, which produces a clear, compelling art which our eyes trace with ease.  There is no doubt at a glance what shape this woman has, an effect that would not be so nice if she were standing with legs straight (again, see the contrapposto above).  

On top of this, the diagram shows why what little clothing she has is where it is.  Thigh-highs are odd if you think about them; why would covering skin be a turn-on for so many males?  This image helps answer that: because it's not about what they cover but what they emphasize that's important.  Like with the underwear straps mentioned above they produce an eye-catching visual contrast, here at the mid point of her thigh.  Above this point she only gets more interesting and below it males become increasingly bored; knees and calves elicit no intrinsic sexual interest, so the best way to artistically utilize this "worthless" space is to have it emphasize what is above (feet are in a strange spot due to foot fetishes, which are likely the result of the feet and genitals lying next to each other on the somatosensory cortex; a case where a wiring error, not evolutionary psychology, is the explanation).  There's a good reason designs like Rin Tohsaka are quite popular with the boys even if there's only a little bit of skin between skirt and sock.

This is all good biology, but I think there is also something "artistic" going on here: she's got a bit of vertical symmetry.  There's about as much skin between her breasts and hips as there is between her hips and thigh-highs, the region of interest again being roughly bisected by her hip joint.  I'm unaware of any evolutionary argument for why this would be important, and since thigh-hights weren't around the last few million years it's hard to believe this is adaptive.  Instead it seems to me one of those first whisperings of where our sense of raw physical eroticism runs into one of the elements of beauty, and that while her sex is clearly carrying the image something small is also gained by this element of pictorial construction.

The last topic to cover in this region are the lines extending up from her mons pubis: 

Males like a smooth curve and a slight bulge between the pubic region and the navel.  However, emphasizing this presents an interesting artistic conflict.  There are really two V's in the region, both with their vertex at the point of maximum sexual interest, yet trying to accomplish two separate things: her hip (underwear) line needs to be obtuse to emphasize her width, while her pubic mount and vulva have a plunging motion from being narrower. The latter in particular is quite important; it shows up everywhere in nude art, and in fact has allowed for the omission of many other details (like the labia) while still keeping the figure somewhat convincing and arousing.  However, it's not so simple in real women, and this is better seen in the Willendorf:

Although she is extreme, her artist has nonetheless stayed closer to anatomical reality.  In real women the hip line is synonymous with the public line, at least at first, and there is often no natural extension of the pubic shape up toward the navel.  This is made clear with how my annotations don't follow the lines of the Willendorf's body; the hip joint is curved, not straight, sharing the pubic line at first and only diverging higher, while the pubic lines simply end with the belly fat.  But for whatever reason this construction doesn't appeal to us as much; like with the clear curve of the hip above, we are more engaged by the emphasis of simple features than complex constructions.  As such, while Lausanne lacks both realism and detail, she has a few key lines in just the right spots, and by honing in on these cues evokes the effect more powerfully than real anatomy.  I suspect this is the attraction of narrow bikini bottoms, which also differentiate this pair of lines (again, with real hip-thigh junctions being a curve):

It's a summary of this section in a single image.  WHR of 0.75, contrapposto that produces an arc, a picture framed from mid-thigh to mid-upper torso, and a clear differentiation of the key lines in the genital region.  But Lausanne has one final advantage: she is not real.  Even models must have their bikini strings go upward, past the widest point, to hold the garment on, but in fiction they are free to be placed wherever we derive the most pleasure.

 

Insert Boob Joke Here

Moving to the upper body now, there's simply and most obviously the breasts.  You can't miss 'em.  But unlike curviness and WHR, large breast size is not universally associated with attractiveness; hers are just large because the Japanese seem to have imported the American standard since WW2, a fact that is somewhat funny considering the East Asian body type is rarely so buxom (nor, of course, is the Caucasian).

However, what does seem to be universal is that attractive breasts are shapely, specifically conical-spherical.  That is, when they are smaller they form gently convex cones, something easily seen even in ancient Egypt (Tomb of Nebamun, New Kingdom):

The dancing girls possess this smaller, youthful shape to their breasts (I also did some quick measurements, and even from the side they have a near-0.7 WHR; in life their single waistband would have alluringly emphasized this).  But this isn't necessarily an indicator of age, and can also be applied to more mature women with good effect (Woman in a long undergarment, Hashiguchi Goyo, 1920):

As breasts become larger it is infeasible for them to retain this shape.  Instead they are drawn with a conical "cap" but gain width to match their length.  The result is that they become more spherical, expanding from their base on the chest before tapering again at the end (detail from Femme Nue, Thomas Couture, 1855):

India's artistic history has taken this to even greater extremes, with the well-endowed goddesses of its temples and shrines having practically spherical breasts (as well as WHR's of a nearly-disturbing 0.6):

Despite the overall differences in size, the breasts in each case remain geometric amalgams of sphere and cone.  My guess is that this exists because younger women tend to have firmer breasts, so there's a certain basic delight in that shape, but I don't know if there's any data to support that.  I just know that I find the shape pleasing (especially in the wood block cut by Hashiguchi Goyo, which is one of my favorite nudes/semi-nudes in art).  Then, as they get larger, the spherical rendering helps convey a sense of mass while still retaining some of the shape, as perfect spheres would just be odd.

Now, I'm taking this time here to detail artistic breast structure because we're about to run into some issues.  In the pornographic modern race for greater stimulation we've been led into depicting ever larger breasts (I'll let you google "large breasted anime girl"), and there's a problem with having breasts both large and shapely: gravity.

Breasts don't have much supporting internal structure; no bones, no cartilage, they hang by skin and loose connective tissue.  This means that real breasts of any size quickly lose their conical-spherical shape and become flattened-cylindrical.  In the Willendorf this effect is not particularly appealing but is somewhat compensated for by an appropriate physique; she's heavy, so her breasts are heavy too.  At least they match.  But as moderns we don't want large girls, we want thin ones, and though a slender creature such as Lausanne would never sport such melons they are nonetheless expected to retain their idealized shape and appeal.  After all, she's not supposed to simulate but stimulate, and for this an artist cannot look to life but must bridge the gap with pictorial construction instead.

First, there's how to indicate their size.  All breasts start in about the same place on the chest so from a frontal view it's how far down they go that's the measure.  Here they reach all the way to the waist, at which point they exhibit the desirable spherical shape to emphasize heft.  But this makes no sense.  It means that her tremendous breasts were flat against her chest for several centimeters then mysteriously expanded outward into spheres when they reached her stomach as though that were their starting point.  This just... doesn't happen, and would be extremely unattractive if it did; hanging breasts are concave on on top, not convex, and even if they were this "ideal" shape the resulting dumbbell would not be a turn-on in a real woman.  In fact, if you look closely you can see an aborted bit of cleavage between her hands where the breasts should have begun:

It's like the artist started drawing the breasts in their proper location, with the curvature beginning near the base like it should, and then realized something was amiss with trying to maintain that all the way down.  There's simply not enough room on the chest to fit two balloons like that, and any attempt to do so looks absurd since they would not only have to be comically spherical but also filled with helium to defy gravity with such a shape.  

But speaking of the hands, though, they do help give a kind of false justification for this arrangement.  As with the knee and lower leg, males have little sexual interest in the upper arm (except in proximity to the chest), and none in the more distal portions; no one ever wrote an ode to an elbow.  The Willendorf is an honest admission of this: her arms are nothing more than undetailed coils of Play-Doh, irrelevant for attractiveness or health, whose only purpose is to drape across the breasts in emphasis of their size.  This was the pose that originally caused me to make the comparison with Lausanne, and in her the function remains the same.  Arms hanging straight down aren't attractive, and even interfere with the sense of curvature, so they need to be put to work somehow, and here it is to frame the breasts by subtly pushing down and pressing them inward while giving a measure of their girth (the spherical portion is as wide long as her forearm is long).

But I find this cover up interesting, because despite their location she's not actually exerting any pressure with them; they're just resting on the shelf, as it were, indicating in anime language her slight modest uncertainty (see below).  Yet by being where they are they nonetheless provide us with an artistic justification for both why the breasts are so low on the body as well as why they would be squeezed enough to produce such appealing cleavage (which we are given a special window to view); without this rationalization, or clothing to force it, breasts like this would naturally swing wide.  In fact, this is another strange error in her construction: her left nipple is pointed straight forward while her right nipple is almost 45 degrees to the side.  This is to try and suggest that just as her lower body is turned slightly to her left, so her upper body is turned slightly to the right in a seductive twist, but the breast has gone too far relative to the shoulders and the result is perspectival nonsense.

In sum, unlike her hips which could be drawn from (exaggerated) life, this portion of her body is one long string of artistic coverups to adjust for the fact that innate preference for shape and cultural preference for size do not mesh.  No flesh-and-blood girl could be built like this.  In addition, the attempt to produce all the desirable effects in a single image is not even coherent; like Egyptian art, where multiple viewing angles are combined into a single perspective, it emphasizes what we find important in the subject but not how they actually appear.  You couldn't even create a satisfying plastic figurine of her shape.  Yet nonetheless it works, at least for me, and once again what would be repulsive in reality becomes sexy in art.

 

The Top of the Matter

Now we're onto the last section, the head and face.  Surprisingly, despite the amount of attention we give to faces as humans there seems to be relatively little in terms of innate preferences.  More symmetrical is better, and studies suggest that rounded eyes and lips may be more attractive, but beyond this cultural influence and personal preference run the show.  Once again, the ancient and un-self-conscious Willendorf demonstrates the issue best: she has no face.  It has no bearing on fertility so she gets the equivalent of a bag put over her head.  It's not that I don't think ancient men couldn't find women's faces attractive, but that if she is really more of a token, a distillation of the idea that she stands for, then just as her feet became knobs and her arms limp ropes, so too does she not require a face to exemplify either bounty or fecundity.

So looking at Lausanne, the question is not what she can tell us about biology but what she reveals about the particular preferences of her intended viewership.  But before I go on to that, I want to indulge myself in an extraneous detour about hair because I find it interesting.

---

When you present to tribal peoples images of those from other cultures and record where they point, you find that most of the time is spend scrutinizing the hair.  Body hair is a protective structure in mammals, both against physical abrasion as well as for general thermoregulation.  Humans likely kept our head hair because it shielded the exposed top of our body and sensitive brain from the sun.  Yet far in excess of the needs of this basic function hair styles exhibit incredible variety across the globe, and even between neighboring peoples.  Why?  One argument I find interesting is that we have secondarily co-opted it for group identification.

As you walk around, hair is one of the most easily-identifiable aspects of a person.  It can be seen at a distance and is on display almost continually.  Similarly, what styles of hair people use is a clear marker of what group they belong to.  In the past this was primarily dictated by one's tribe, but in the individualistic modern world it has become a way to for us to advertise our values and who we identify with (our "ideological tribe" if you will).  For instance, males in the West use relatively short hair with a clean trim to suggest a kind of unassuming conformity with the status quo, while crew-cut suggests a military-conservative outlook and longer hair a kind of liberal individualism.  In contrast, medium-long hair in women is the default, with very long being a kind of ultra-feminine princess (like Lausanne), and short/asymmetric tending to signal the "opposite" in lesbian or bi (these currently being in vogue even for heterosexual women due to cultural trends):

If this is the case, then it reinforces why there would be no innate preferences for particular styles.  We want healthy hair, because we want healthy mates (notice how glossy Lausanne's hair is), but beyond this it doesn't contain any reproductive information.  It's more important that we're open to internalizing our tribal marker, and this wouldn't work if every tribe liked the same thing.  Which, it's times like these that I'm reminded of ants.

All insects are coated in waxy molecules called cuticular hydrocarbons (CHCs) for protection against desiccation; think of it like an equivalent of hair, except for water regulation rather than heat.  Just like hair it is presented on the outside of the organism, which makes it easy to assess on another individual, and as a result has been repeatedly co-opted by different insect groups for communication.  Social insects have done this in the extreme, where CHCs not only play a role in life-stage and caste identification, but differentiation of nestmates from non-nestmates: if you smell right you're admitted to the colony, but if you don't you are attacked without restraint.  And the interesting thing is that just like hair, ants don't come wired to like a particular smell; after all, that would make no sense when what they really need to do is adopt a preference for their colony (tribe) and discriminate against others.  A curious case of convergent evolution if this thesis on hair is true in humans as well.

--- 

Returning to the issue of sexual interest, the most salient aspect is the face, specifically her expression.  It is a long-standing puzzle in the history of female nudes (and Lausanne is close enough to nude) to find an appropriate attitude for the subject to have.  Women don't expose themselves casually, and typically are not happy having their body gazed upon by unknown males.  Therefore, in order for any nude picture or painting to make sense there has to be some kind of implicit explanation, and hence justification, for the situation.  Historically this was often accomplished using Classical settings or myths, but in the case of a solo image like this there is no context.  All we have is her attitude, which with her eyes locking with ours she is clearly aware of being looked at, and so we need some idea of what our relationship is.

First, the fact that she's not outraged or mortified would suggest that she's willingly put herself in this situation.  Yet she also has a slight blush of shyness, which suggests she's not used to it, and a quizzical tilt of the head, as though she's asking for an opinion.  Combined with the pseudo-modest position of her hands "covering" her breasts, she's like a shy girl asking of her boyfriend, "Does this please you?" and just a bit worried about the answer. 

I've encountered similar constructions before, rather common in anime, and it seems to me that what we're seeing is a compromise between the socio-biological preferences of submissiveness and purity.  This girl placed herself under our power of scrutiny; she wants to please us and so we have the right to examine/ogle her and even make further demands.  Moreover, she is "ours".  While she's bearing her body, her attitude toward it is decidedly virginal: she's not used to being exposed, doesn't particularly like it, and despite her body being out there for the world to see is really only directing it at "me".  This is a powerful cocktail, because human females are picky and human males unusually jealous (for reasons I will be passing over, but it's a fascinating topic in its own right); getting to this stage signals success and sex in the not-too-distant future.

However, before everybody reads the above as a litany of slavering male passions infringing on female autonomy, I think it's worth backing up and examining how these same building blocks are key to intimacy as well.  In private interactions these are tender signals: "I trust and care about you enough to do something that is a little hard but I know you will appreciate."  It's only when they're dragged into the light and exploited for pornographic purposes that they become degraded.

Similarly, the hard truth is that for somewhere between 1/3rd and 1/4th of males, domination is linked to sex.  There is no shortage of pornography out there in which the girl is unwilling, hurt, and humiliated.  Even the original Aphrodite of Knidos was unhappily exposed in her bath:

 

At the end here, I want to go philosophical, and it seems appropriate considering how we've steadily ascended.  Starting at the hips near the locus of sexual activity the demands were fairly pre-programmed; the hip-to-waist ratio, the curviness, the soft thighs and the triangular vulva, these are essentially non-negotiable.  Moving upward to the breasts culture and personality began to play a larger role, but there were still certain key constraints.  I've never met a heterosexual male who said he didn't like shapely breasts or an hourglass figure.

But on reaching the head, and particularly the face, we begin to encounter something higher and more malleable.  I hardly touched on evolutionary explanations, and those that I did are really only one option; the "shy girl" motif here is far from the only attitude that males may find attractive, and may not even be the only one that appeals to the same person.  I, for one, simply cannot enjoy any abusive pornography, and while Lausanne's permissive gaze is clearly pandering, it is most important to me that she not be an unwilling participant, and for this I have my culture to thank.  It brings us to a differentiation I made in a recent conversation: that what is beautiful, what is pleasant, and what is erotic are not unlinked... but not synonymous either.  Take for instance this shot from Hyouka:

I love this image because whoever planned it knew exactly the feeling of looking at the nape of the neck of the girl you care about; there's something about that little stretch of skin that is just so wonderful in that context.  You could try to hammer it into some evolutionary psychology mold (neck muscles are the most sexually dimorphic in the body, so this is a signal of sexual difference and femininity, therefore fertility, etc. etc.) but I think it just fails.  Something in the experience does not reduce to eroticism; it is simply pleasant, even if not completely separate from the whole dance of bonding and sex.  It reminds me the issues of emergence we now face in many areas of science: that there are levels of complexity, and that these beget levels of causality, where it no longer is informative to explain things by reducing them to lower/simpler phenomena.  The next few decades I suspect will be revolutionary and I hope help salvage sexuality from the Freudian pit it has occupied for the last century.

I started this off this essay with a quote from Clark about the mysterious link between beauty and sex, and how it might be best left alone.  It's honestly good advice; more than a few artists have been dragged over a cliff by it, starting with what they found beautiful or pleasant in the feminine form but ultimately losing control and being overwhelmed by the eroticism.  It's not that sex is bad in itself, but that, to quote Clark again, "Eroticism is so strong a flavor that it [destroys] the balance of sense and form [necessary for good art]..."  This applies to the balance of one's own thought as well.  You're playing with fire as a male, and even working (somewhat) academically on this piece I found the topic soon began to feel "sticky"; dwelling on it too much it becomes like a cloying smell that you can't shake even when you're done, and your thoughts turn to it once again in spare moments.  It's just too easy to convince yourself that the pursuit of further erotic imagery is for beauty or understanding when it is nothing more than stimulation.

From Sabishisugite Lesbian Fuuzoku ni Ikimashita Report,
notably written by a woman (read right to left, forgive the language)

But the reason I think it is worth the risk nowadays is because of the rise of feminism.  It's too late in the essay to enter into the subtleties of this vast topic, except to say that I think we're far from working through all the implications of both sexes having equal input on society and that one of those is how men are to frame their feelings toward women going forward.  The vulgarity with which women are often regarded is appalling, but as I've tried to emphasize above we can't just declare such sentiments off-limits and be done with it.  A woman with a good figure will continue to elicit a mental wolf whistle, if not an audible one, and this impulse needs an outlet which is acceptable to both parties.  Otherwise repressed feelings putrefy and ooze forth in increasingly disgusting forms.  Similarly, it represents a challenge to our art, for like the jewel beetles we can now produce artificial forms which are impossibly more stimulating than the reality can ever be; how we address this going forward will be as important for female self-esteem as it will for male satisfaction.

So while I've flown a bit high starting from a bit of softcore anime porn, and I certainly wouldn't give Lausanne credit for being anything more than that, it's an important topic to me both personally and socially.  There needs to be some respect for the intense sexual response males have to the female form, and that it cannot be switched on and off at will; to carelessly stimulate it as our society does has side effects for us all.  But it isn't just a negative.  It needs to be appreciated for what it is, which is what I have started with here, but also allowed to be more than what it is currently granted, for it is the foundation and gateway to tenderer feelings as well. That remains for the future.