The enjoyment of pleasure derived from basking in the presence of an alluring feminine beauty is perhaps one of the most emotionally salient peak moments of experiential life.
Men are hardwired and predisposed to the influences of feminine beauty. We have probably all heard the trite clichés: “Don’t judge a book by its cover” and “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” While beauty is certainly subject to our individual tastes and desires, we surely shall readily admit that whatever we each individually regard as most beautiful, we all “know it when we see it.”
The encounter of feminine beauty at its highest peak is perhaps the best, most refined and infinitely perfect qualitative essence any male could ever hope to experience in life. Such are the neural-correlates-of-consciousness that makes life worth living. Perhaps only the feeling of mutually reciprocated “true love” can ever come quite as close.
Beauty and the enjoyment of beauty is a hedonistic pleasure, not always associated with things like love, lust, infatuation or the want of a relationship. Like most people, I take it in and remember the visual and aesthetic pleasures. I want beautiful women to stay in my memory forever. There seems to be an overarching neurological or biological imperative to view as many forms of female beauty as possible.
To give one passing example, I would sit in a class and try to get pass the boring tedious lecture and by sheer luck (or misfortune) an exceedingly (by any stringent standards) attractive girl would come in late and sit next to me simply because it was a large class and most seats were already taken. I never allow myself to directly stare and always maintain and uphold propriety. Getting caught would be utterly embarrassing and totally humiliating for me. Even before she finishes taking her seat the encounter has already become nerve-wracking, distraught-ing, and emotionally devastating for me. Within a split second later I’m totally overwhelmed by and painfully aware of the state-of-mind she has unknowingly put me in, and suddenly all my other cognitive processes have been seemingly displaced, and instead my focus lost and thoughts have peripherally shifted onto her. Even though I know absolutely nothing about this girl (or next to nothing, except how absolutely mesmerizing she appears) subliminally I am already actively equating her physical beauty to “value” and conveniently both extending and projecting her physical beauty to other areas such as her personality, character, identity and the way she carries herself. I become helplessly stranded on my own island of existential dilemmas of both wanting to look and afraid of getting caught; and of being happy that the universe afforded me another ‘stamp-collecting’ instance of a distinctive type of female beauty to savor, to imprint and to remember, whilst simultaneously cursing the universe for yet another distraction that will cause me to be distraught and leave me with the disappointment in not being able to capture or obtain a memorable and satisfactory glance. The end result is I'm left with an empty vacuous feeling.
I find that (selectively attractive) girls that I run into in 'real life' to be far more alluring and beautiful than those on the covers of magazines or the actresses and models of hollywood. There must be some kind of bias effect at work. I think it has something to do with the fact that once a male looks at a girl enough times - whether in real life or otherwise - he "adapts" to her beauty. It is precisely those very attractive girls whom one has not previously encountered - and has no visual template of her facial features and bodily physique stored in memory - that are most subjectively striking and appealing. When we can only get access to a quick glance, our brain fills in the gaps and we project the most perfect ideals. Then when we get a closer look we usually find that we had set ourselves up for disappointment. In the rare cases where the girl is actually as attractive (or sometimes even more attractive!) as we believed her to be, then that other kind of heartbreaking disappointment sets in as well.
In general men are hardwired to copulate and impregnate as many different varieties of high fitness and healthy, youthful, beautiful women of excellent reproductive quality as possible. Since men compete with each other for access to desired mating opportunities, the average man is less able to have sex with as many attractive females as his biological hardwiring would ideally like him to achieve. In modern times this is compounded by the institution of marriage and the social stigma, cultural norms and religious moderators that comes with cheating, infidelity and physical or emotional polygamous behaviors. Beauty, being is one of the most valued signals that a female can send to a male, is an efficient proxy indicator of other desirable traits. Thus, men evolved to place feminine beauty above all else.
There will always be a natural and instinctive impulse to "look”. It is guided by the evolutionary forces of life and it cannot be avoided. Even when we try to override (or at least curb) our genetic predispositions, there remains the problematic fact that we adapt and become desensitized to pleasurable experiences over time. Familiarity breeds indifference and contempt, and as human beings we are always on the lookout for new, fresh, exciting experiences and emotional states. Men, just like women, do things based on how it makes them feel. Rationale and logic are blunt instruments deployed retroactively once we have already made our decisions and based our actions on subjective emotional desires. We are slaves to our emotions. This problem is compounded by the fact that our own internal desires evolve, change, and are often conflicting, mutually exclusive and divergent. Even if a male was lucky enough to obtain an exceedingly attractive girl as his girlfriend or wife, over time diminishing marginal utility/pleasure will dictate that even though her objective attractiveness stayed roughly the same (more or less), his subjective intensity and interest towards her wanes and cannot be long-lasting nor sustainable.
By wanting to "look", perhaps this compulsion of visual aesthetic is a means of short-circuiting one's own biological imperatives. Instead of going into the trouble of trying to score with multiple attractive women, men who are satisfied with merely enjoying a variety of attractive women visually and from afar in effect are providing their emotional sensors with the decoy that they are perhaps "genetically successfully implanting their seed into attractive women" but without the added expense of actually attempting – and often failing – to do so. Like masturbation, this could be yet another form of simulation and emulation. Since obviously only the most attractive top-echelon of healthy and virile men can "bed a lot of attractive women" this invariably leaves most men (the vast remainder majority) unable to satisfy their genetic imperative of ‘manifest destiny’, so the ones that evolved appreciation for aesthetic beauty can emulate (through vicarious empathy and mirror neuron processes) the overall happiness-factor of those successful alpha-males without expending the futile energy and resources in unsuccessfully trying to woe and mate with women who are simply outside of their reach. It also has the effect of curbing a man’s desire to actually cheat on his mate, for if merely “looking” at other attractive women provided his brain with the same or similar sets of emotional pleasures and rewards as physical infidelity (albeit in significantly less intensity than the real deal) it would cause him to be less motivated and less compelled to carry out such an act.
Maybe it is the intensity or valence of a particular "feeling" (whether it be the pleasures or happiness derived from the aesthetics of beauty, the intimacy of love or the exhilaration of passion or lust) that moves us to declare (when poignancy, passion and wonderment seemed like reality and truth itself) that basking in the realms of romantic beauty, love, and passion is the greatest, highest, more refined and noblest way and that it alone remains the highest truth, the greatest principle, purpose, cause, and meaning of life. After all, everything else we do in life just serves this one ultimate teleological purpose. We are born, grow up, learn, work, shuffle through the days of our lives, and deal with all the realities of existence, grow old, and all for what if not but for those fleeting little moments of heaven-on-earth? Yes, these most salient and prominent experiential pleasures and compelling moments are the true end to all our other means.
Some say that variety is the spice of life. We all invariably adapt to pleasurable sensations and become desensitized to similar experiences over time. If life boils down to experiences and the pursuit of such profound experiential essences, then perhaps the only "constant" is perpetual "change". And maybe the best any of us can "do" is to endlessly run on this hedonistic treadmill and just passively enjoy the flow of each infinitely unique experiential moment to the next.
Human nature is inherently polygamous. The whole social construct of marriage goes against the natural instinct for members of both genders to stray and seek new and fresh opportunities for different varieties of experiences. No one can reasonably deny that there is indeed a natural impulse and effortless compulsion to look at, and interact with, and perhaps fall in love, and have sex with many different attractive members of the opposite gender. For me, the existential conflict and dilemma stems not so much from the constraints of religion or the mores and norms of society but from an intrinsic struggle for unity.
Part of us actually wants (on our own volition, and not because we were told or instructed to do so) to be with "one" special person and love that individual forever. There is a sort of endearing, gingerly, intimate and fervently intense "immersiveness" that emerges when one delves deeper and deeper into the essence and being of another person. And although such highs are so high, this peak intensity can only be achieved at the expense of exclusivity and by being totally dedicated and devoted towards one singular person through commitment, attachment, devotion, loyalty, love and dedication.
Yet on the other hand part of us wants to seek variety, we enjoy associations and interactions with multiple different and distinctively unique individuals. It seems "not enough" just to be with someone "good enough" or even someone truly great and awesome - someone who by any standards would exceed our threshold of compatibility and we'd count our blessings or our lucky stars to have found them. We seek not only attraction and love, but also the excitement of new and refreshing scenery, of resplendent beauties and distinctive varieties. It feels like an innate, intrinsic or instinctive compulsion to discover and explore and to expose ourselves to as many different expressions and manifestations of combination of experiences as possible.
And yet these two higher-ordered overarching goals, imperatives and desires are divergent and at fundamental conflicting odds with one another. We perpetually want what we cannot have. There can be no happy reconciliation. Some call this the struggle-for-existence; others say it is the failure of our triune brain to normalize, but whatever it is, it just feels so darn unpleasant.
Each emotional experience, feeling and state-of-being, during its peak intensity and valence always feels like “the singular one”. And while we are under its influence we attach a certain intangible “specialness” to it. It feels like it is the only truly great and unique feeling in the world. We say to ourselves: THIS is THE moment, or SHE is THE ONE, or NOW should last FOREVER. Today the girl who sat next to me felt like the most attractive girl in the world, tomorrow it will be someone else. Yesterday it WAS someone else. We convincingly tell ourselves that if we could just get the object of our affections (and continue to experience such an emotional state into perpetuity) we would be happy forever, and would love for nothing else than to bask in that moment for the rest of eternity and be perfectly content and in want of not one thing more. We act entirely based on the way we feel. But even feelings themselves are apt to often change.
When we are infatuated we don’t have the mental capability to focus on the attractiveness of any other person, and when we are in love we attempt to guard and protect that loving relationship by making vows of commitment to restrict our individual freedoms. There are so many astoundingly beautiful people in the world - and so many attractive personalities that would be utterly compatible with our own - that whom we meet or end up with is largely an arbitrary and random function of chance. While we fall in love with idealistic archetypes, in the end we have to make a decision and pick and choose one person to be the physical embodiment of our wants and wishes so that we may have something real to hold and to show for. We make promises and vows partly because of our own feelings of insecurities, but also because when we have finally found a happy feeling we want to hold on to it with every ounce of our being and never let it go. We do these things ( we make rules) in order to stay in that pleasant and pleasurable emotional-state for as long as possible.
As emotional beings we cater to our desires but use logic, rules and rationale as justification for our behavior, feelings and beliefs. Yet every now and then (largely unbeknownst to ourselves) our emotional center of desire involuntarily shifts from one state and one place to another, from one interest or one particular person to something or someone else. No one “plans” to fall out of love or to become infatuated or involved with another person who is not one’s original mate or partner. It just so happens.
In the end, it is never so much the actual person that we love, rather it is a set of ideals, we love the feeling of love itself, and any convenient placeholder or proxy that fits the bill will surely make do. We seldom see the truly fickle nature of our own emotional lives. In essence, the “rug gets pulled out from under our feet” and there is nothing we can do about it but to go along with our new feelings, new emotions and new desires. There seems to be no experiential unity, no holistic convergence of differentiated desires. Beauty - even one single instance of the greatest most beautiful feminine beauty, essence and form - is not always enough.
