Masculinity and Beauty

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine said that he didn't think men were drawn to beauty as much as women. This surprised me, with him especially, because I always thought of him as someone with a longing for beauty. Maybe what he meant is that women desire to be beautiful more than men, and to this I would agree. But that's not the same thing.

Whenever I've interacted with women in my life (especially my mom and sister growing up), I've thought that women don't understand beauty like men do. It's almost as if, when they use the word, they mean something totally different than men do. The fact that so many women can't empathize with men's tendency to have wandering eyes makes me wonder that these women possibly have never recognized beauty in anything they saw, because once you have an encounter with beauty, you look for it everywhere and at all times, and it takes real discipline and self-control to practice custody of the eyes. It can be a real struggle for men seeking virtue and purity of heart.

I think that beauty is attracted to masculinity and masculinity is attracted to beauty. The more masculine a man is, the more he desires to possess what is beautiful, and the more beautiful something is, the more it yearns to be possessed by a masculine man. I think it's interesting that heaven itself is called the Beatific Vision, as if God, who is Beauty itself, desires to make Himself beheld in the end. Men long to see the face of God, and God longs to have his face seen by men, so much that he became man and died to make it possible.

I think that the neglect of beauty in Catholic art and liturgy is a direct result of the increased feminine influence in the Church's leadership (or the absence of masculine leadership).

I know I might be wrong about this. I think it would be interesting to read what a woman thinks about beauty: i.e. what she finds beautiful and how she knows it's beautiful and why she is drawn to it.

Or, if women aren't drawn to beauty like men are, what might they have a keener sense for than men? Perhaps goodness. (I don't know; I'm not a woman).

I was thinking of these things today, because I was making a list of what I want in life, and what I would need to do to achieve it, and beauty kept coming to my mind. What must I do in order to be worthy to behold beauty with purity of heart? Whom should I become? And the answer - a man in the fullest sense.