Does this not seem strange, anomalous? Could man be more beautiful than woman?
And who among people believes this? Even woman herself — though she may be captivated in man by a manliness that carries many of the meanings of beauty — cannot possibly believe that man is more beautiful than she is.... And even man himself, however great his vanity, cannot believe it..
But Dr. Amir Boktor holds an opinion on this matter that may greatly anger woman, for it strips from her that immortal attribute, the attribute of beauty; and he builds his view on the standards of beauty as the Greeks understood them.
Worshippers of Beauty.
The Greeks, says Dr. Boktor, when they wished to represent beauty, preferred man over woman, because they found in his
figure and his appearance that harmony and balance which answers to the standards of beauty — so much so that Plato, in all that he wrote about beauty in Socrates' splendid dialogue with his pupils, referred only to beauty in man...
And Dr. Boktor says that Schopenhauer was frank in his judgment of woman when he said:
"Man is far more beautiful than woman..."
Dr. Boktor ends his article by saying:
"Man is more beautiful than woman in his figure and the straightness of his frame, in the strength of expression in his features and the proportion of his limbs. He is more beautiful than she is in the lightness of his movement, his energy, his vitality, his speed, the grace of his gait, and the breadth of his strides... Most of the qualities that distinguish man answer the standards of beauty more than they do in woman."
This is some of what Dr. Boktor says, in his article on the beauty of man, in last June's Hilal...
But we are confident that Dr. Boktor did not believe himself, and that no one will believe him — not even man himself, for man always insists on placing woman in the highest rank of beauty...