The Shemale As A Figure in Art

Especially with white men, the haired male body strongly contrasts with the alluring beauty of a completely hairless-nude-female body." To prove the truth of this latter assertion, he invites the reader to "measure the effect of the hairless smoothness of the nude by imagining a woman with hair on her breasts, womb and buttocks." In addition, the softness of the female form, with its curves, invites touch, whereas the relative hardness and angularity of the male form does not.

In depicting male beauty, Beyst points out, artists often exaggerate the feminine aspects of the masculine form; however, since the penis remains, this attempt to feminize the masculine causes "the opposition between male and female" to coalesce "around two oppositions: the female genitals as negation of the penis, and the male body as negation of the female nude." It is not the male body as a whole that opposes the female body; rather, it is the penis per se that opposes the female body as a whole.

The more dedicated lovers are to one another, the more attracted to each other they will be, Beyst argues: "Ideally, sexual and economical coitus reinforce each other. Sexual attraction is an expression of the overall reciprocal dedication of the partners to each other." However, the emphasis on the beauty of the female body results, in erotica, in the depiction of the faceless female, of her as "a body without a face." This reduction has the corollary of reducing the male to being a disembodied eye.

In erotica, according to Beyst, body parts take on multivalent significance as one part reminds the voyeur of another, a situation that can be compared to "a text in which the words have more than one meaning. Thus, the lips often remind of the vagina, or a muscled and veined arm of the penis," and "the erotic charge of one element is often displaced to another." This tendency toward the "displacement" of one body part by another is sometimes immortalized, as it were, in language, as when "labia," which literally means "lips" refers to the folds of flesh at the sides of the vagina.