The choice of a mate.

  • Anthony Ludovici
Date:
[1935]
Catalogue details
    494/546 (page 464)
    collars and furs high up against the back of the head. A necessary counterpart of this seems to be the habit of raising and projecting the chin, and holding the nose where normally the fringe should be. It is a hideous, unhealthy habit, probably connected with modern feelings of inferiority and the effort to appear as if one rose superior to them. It means that the thoracic cage is made rigid, breathing is inadequate, and the heart movements constricted. Girls who have the habit usually have protruding abdomens (below the navel) with lordosis. The fashion plates which imitate average poise reveal all these faults so accurately that a good orthopaedic surgeon might easily use one of them as a pathological chart. Choose a girl, therefore, who habitually carries her head with a graceful inward poise of the chin, whose shoulders are down, who has no ewe curve at the back of her neck, whose back is straight and whose arms hang loosely at her side. Education. Not important, unless it means a difference of class. As the desirable mate should be too young to have gone to a University, there is no need to expand on this subject. Erotic Disposition. Balzac says profoundly that “ a man cannot marry unless he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one female corpse ”, because “ the fate of a marriage depends upon the first night.” 1 Allowing for the amusing exaggeration in the first statement, I entirely agree, and I think it lamentable that most men can talk intelligently and knowledgeably about the smallest structural detail of their cars, and are yet ignorant of the most necessary knowledge of all—human structure and mechanism. On the other hand, however, while I too emphasize the importance of a man’s being equipped to master the love-technique, particularly of the first night, I deprecate the modern tendency to make sexual congress loom so conspicuously in the life of the female spouse. In spite of the howl which I know will be set up in many hedonistic quarters, I maintain, both from my personal experi ence, which is not small, 1 2 my reading and my conversation, that concentration on the voluptuousness of sexual congress is, generally speaking, in inverse ratio to femininity. I will try to avoid misunderstanding. I am not saying that the 1 P.M., p. 79. 2 It has been intimate in regard to three types—the English, French and German woman.