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hourglass curves too. If we may take the imposition of tight corsets on ‘O’ as any guide, we might assume that the tiny waist is chiefly valued as a point of
    frangibility for the female frame, so that it gratifies sadistic fantasies. 3
    Buttock fetishism is comparatively rare in our culture, although Kenneth Tynan did write a connoisseur article for a girlie mag on
    the subject not so long ago. 4 Subpornographic magazines still carry
    advertisements for girdles with built-in cushions for inadequate arses, but generally the great quivering expanses of billowing thigh and buttock which titillated our grandfathers have fallen into oblo-
    quy. 5 Instead, the cheeky bottom in tight trousers, more boyish than
    otherwise, attracts the most overt attention. Girls are often self-con- scious about their behinds, draping themselves in long capes and tunics, but it is more often because they are too abundant in that region than otherwise.
    There is a kind of class distinction in sexual preferences. The darling of the working class is still curvy and chubby, but the fash- ionable middle class are paying their respects to slenderness, and even thinness. For women, there is one aspect which is common to both situations: demands are made upon them to contour their bodies in order to please the eyes of others. Women are so

    insecure that they constantly take measures to capitulate to this de- mand, whether it is rational or not. The thinnest women either diet because of an imagined grossness somewhere or fret because they are not curvaceous: the curviest worry about the bounciness of their curves, or diet to lose them. The curvy girl who ought to be thin and the thin girl who ought to be curvy are offered more or less danger- ous medications to achieve their aims. In each case the woman is tailoring herself to appeal to a buyers’ market; her most exigent buyer may be her husband, who goes on exacting her approximation to the accepted image as a condition of his continuing desire and pride in her.
    Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women’s bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them and their owners. Whether the curves imposed are the ebullient ar- abesques of the tit-queen or the attenuated coils of art-nouveau they are deformations of the dynamic, individual body, and limitations of the possibilities of being female.

    The schoolboy who wrote to the Sunday papers asking why his headmaster was so agitated by the brown stuff that he had growing down his neck and on to his collar was being disingenuous. When men began to grow their hair in our generation they were not acting motivelessly, as they afterwards tried to maintain. Their hair was a sign that they did not accept the morality of the crop-haired genera- tion of bureaucrats which sired them. By growing their hair they managed to up-end some strange presupposition about its sexual significance, for many young men sported full heads of tossing curls and long glossy tresses which their sisters tried vainly to emulate.
    The old supposition that women grew thicker and longer hair on their heads than men could did not die painlessly. 1 The long-haired
    men were called freaks and perverts, and the women resorted to immense cascades of store-bought hair to redress the balance. While they built up the hair on their heads and festooned their eyelashes they were resolutely stripping off every blade of hair in their armpits and on their arms and legs. When the summer brought the freaks out in the parks and gardens in singlets, they noticed that many of them had smooth arms and chests and scant beard; instead of under- standing what this proved about the maleness of hairy chests, they took it to be further proof that these men were degenerates. Not so long ago Edmund Wilson could imply a deficiency in Hemingway’s virility by accusing him of having crêpe hair on his chest.
    The fact is that