What Is Beauty Based

Every woman wants to be beautiful, and that is why the beauty business is a seven

billion dollar a year industry, and the largest advertiser in America. American women actually

worship beauty. They will do almost anything to attain it, including fasting if it is necessary.

They will try anything, and the result is sometimes tragic. In his book, Love In America,

David Cohn writes, "These martyrs to physical beauty are buried or hustled to hospitals while

millions of their sisters, quite undaunted, continue their fanatically persistent search for the

perfect figure, grimly making their way through tasteless diets, gymnasiums, dancing classes,

and plastics surgeon's offices with a fatalistic tenacity unmatched except by lemmings

marching to destruction."

Why do women have this drive to be beautiful? The answer is very simple-men. A woman's

deepest desire is to be attractive to men, and her greatest fear is to lack that attraction. This

leads to all kinds of vanity. A woman came to a pastor and confessed she had a problem with

the sin of pride. She said, "Sometimes I sit before my mirror for hours admiring my beauty."

The pastor responded, "That is not the sin of pride. Your problem is an over active

imagination."

Many women imagine they are beautiful because they try all the gimmicks, and use all the

products that promise beauty. Arlene Dahl has taken a more logical approach. She wrote a

book titled, Always Ask A Man. She spent years asking men what they felt made a woman

beautiful. She says that by listening to men you can learn what qualities every Adam looks for

in his Eve. She learned that the ideals of men vary, but she writes, "But without

exception-every man put one quality above all others in describing his ideal. That one essential

attribute which all men seek and admire in a woman is femininity." She then quotes a host

of famous men on the subject, and shows that they all agree. Yul Brynner summed it all up,

"Simply femininity is the most important thing about a woman, and it is a quality a great

many women are in jeopardy of losing. Women are being emancipated out of their femininity

in this modern age."

It is not just modern men who feel this way about feminine beauty. We can go back to

Washington, the father of our country, and discover the same feelings. We so often see George

Washington in cold stone, or metal statues, that we seldom think of him as a man with warm

affections, and a love of beauty. From his youth he struggled with his passions for pretty girls,

and he wrote a poem about it.

O ye gods, why should my poor resistless heart

Stand to oppose thy might and power,

At last surrender to Cupid's feathered dart,

And now lays bleeding every hour.

He fell in love several times, but his proposals for marriage were refused. We have other

poems he wrote to his sweethearts. When he fell in love with a widow, Martha Custis, he

finally found one who would marry him, and they had a great love, and a great life together.

So passionate was their love that before she died Martha Washington destroyed all his letters

to her, for she felt such love deserved to be kept secret.

The Song of Solomon, however, records for us the universal experience of love, and the

universal love of beauty. The Shepherd lover of this great song feels toward his shepherd

maiden just like men have always felt about the women they love. Throughout the song he

praises her feminine charms, and expresses delight in every aspect of her beauty. He makes

it clear that beauty does include the physical, for he describes how he adores her eyes, hair,

teeth, lips, cheeks, neck, and breasts. All of these are described in the first few verses of

chapter 4.

Beauty is not only in the eyes of the beholder, but is an objective reality visible to all.

Someone said the average man can tell all he knows in 2 hours, and after that, he begins to talk

about women. Men do not claim to understand women, but they do understand beauty. A

man does not need to know anything about flowers to appreciate and enjoy them. So also,

ignorance cannot rob men of the one thing they do know about women, and that is their

beauty.

Abraham loved Sarah, and she was beautiful to him, but he knew other men could see her

beauty as well, and so when he went to Egypt he said to her in Gen. 12:11, "I know that you

are a woman beautiful to behold, and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, this is his wife,

then they will kill me, but they will let you live." He persuaded her to say she was his sister.