I just finished rereading C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. I didn’t love it the first time and was no more thrilled with it a second time. But one part caught my eye this time around. In Chapter 20, the demon Screwtape writes his nephew Wormwood, a novice demon, offering advice on how to tempt his “patient” through sexual desire. Screwtape launches into an interesting aside about the contributions Hell and its minions have made to human impressions of beauty.
In a rough and ready way, of course, this question is decided for us by spirits far deeper down in the Lowerarchy than you and I. It is the business of these great masters to produce in every age a general misdirection of what may be called sexual “taste”. This they do by working through the small circle of popular artists, dressmakers, actresses and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely. …As regards the male taste, we have varied a good deal. At one time we have directed it to the statuesque and aristocratic type of beauty, mixing men’s vanity with their desires and encouraging the race to breed chiefly from the most arrogant and prodigal women. At another, we have selected an exaggeratedly feminine type, faint and languishing, so that folly and cowardice, and all the general falseness and littleness of mind which go with them, shall be at a premium. At present we are on the opposite tack. The age of jazz has succeeded the age of the waltz, and we now teach men to like women whose bodies are scarcely distinguishable from those of boys. Since this is a kind of beauty even more transitory than most, we thus aggravate the females’ chronic horror of growing old (with many excellent results) and render her less willing and less able to bear children. And that is not all. We have engineered a great increase in the licence which society allows to the representation of the apparent nude (not the real nude) in art, and its exhibition on the stage or the bathing beach. It is all a fake, of course; the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being “frank” and “healthy” and getting back to nature. As a result we are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist—making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible. What follows you can easily forecast!
Yes, Hell is still busily tampering with the human mind where beauty is concerned. Actress Kate Winslet corroborates Screwtape’s observation that the human body in “art” is a fake, and condemns the pressure on women to conform to the fashionable figure.
If one is full-figured (i.e. normal), it’s a comfort to know that they STILL sell corsets.
This piece is written for women “blessed with a boyish figure,” and consists of suggestions for clothing to counteract that boyish figure, making it appear more rounded and feminine!
The advice for those with boyish figures must be out of date, though, because based on the pictures of Hollywood actresses on this website, those flat chests are fast-disappearing (as is the planet’s supply of push-up bras and silicone). And talk about women’s chronic horror of growing old—even dear J.K. Rowling, who I always cheered for looking like a real, normal woman, has shelled out some of her considerable fortune in an attempt to look more glamorous. Doesn’t talent count for anything these days?
And for the matrons among us, there is even a “mommy makeover.” Just think—I can go from slumped, stretched, deflated baby-maker to, well, still pretty matronly. Just not AS matronly.
Indeed, it would seem that Hell still has a firm grip on humans where beauty is concerned. Whatever happens, it seems the mantra is still, “It’s more important to look good than to feel good.” Or to do good, or to think good, or to BE good.
Shimshonit 
OK, I have to ask:
“I didn’t love it the first time and was no more thrilled with it a second time.”
Then, um, why did you re-read it?
I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree – The Screwtape Letters is my all time favorite mussar book, and I’ve reread it many times.
It seems to me that to a first approximation the desirable form in women is whatever is difficult for the particular culture. Most women work outdoors in the fields? Praise the lily white complexion of those who bathe in milk. Food scarce? Hail the full figured woman. Everyone working in cubicals? Hail the tanned athletic beauty,
Michael: I was inspired to read it when my Torah teacher referred to it once in a shiur. She had said that Lewis wrote that the best way to destroy religion is to make it relevant. I was curious about what she meant. Larry can probably comment much more knowledgeably on that reference than I can.
Larry: Very interesting observation about “what is beautiful.” It reminds me of a conundrum a friend of mine had who came across a lovely young convert who, he claimed, was a dead ringer for Princess Di. He said he couldn’t bring himself to ask her out, having been programmed throughout his life that women who looked like THAT were not for him (i.e. because they were–usually–not Jewish). I have little doubt some other nice Jewish boy overcame whatever inhibitions he may have had on that score and has a handsome family to show for it.
She had said that Lewis wrote that the best way to destroy religion is to make it relevant
Lewis was referring to making religion a means rather than an end. If you are Christian because Christianity is a good vehicle for social change then you are really worshiping social change, not Christianity. (This was several decades before Liberation Theology arose, but I’m sure Lewis had examples in mind.
I suspect Lewis would look on the history of the heterdox movement’s adoption of egalitarianism, woman’s ordination, and so forth as examples of making religion relevant.
I’m much more ambivalent about this than Lewis is, probably since I tend to see Judaism as fully integrated with Olam Hazeh, while Lewis viewed Christianity as ‘in this world but not of it’.