Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 December 1889 — FREAKS OF FASCINATION. [ARTICLE]

FREAKS OF FASCINATION.

Handsome Women Are Not Always the Most Attractive. Dame Nature plays strange freaks with men’s minds. If one of the many enterprising newspapers of the day was to inaugurate a competition in which every man had to give an accurate description of the kind of women most prone to fascinate him, many readers would, says a writer in the Brooklyn Eagle, be astonished. The effect would be greatly enhanced if each competitor had to write a short! description of himself as well. More j than ever, then, would people wonder how.it comes about that some great strapping Hercules falls in love with a fragile, etheral maiden, or that puny weakling courts the buxom, strapping lassie. Cupid was ever represented as a blindfolded boy, and the erratic aim of some of his arrows has surely Betokened this. Who has not seen the man who dotes on his wife, while she to other men appears hopelessly ugly, or incomparably stupid? How often, too, one may see a beautiful, intellectual woman who is totally absorbed in her insignificant husband! In such cases there is a hidden, deep rooted affinity which the happy couple themselves could not define, and which the skeptical eye of the cynic will never fathom. Noah Webster’s definition of the word fascination is, “The exercise of a powerful or irresistible influence on the affections and passions,” and he gives as secondary explanatipns, “Unseen, inexplicable influence, witchs craft, enchantment.” In the words “inexplicable influence” the learned doctor seems to have summed up neatly the whole question. Who can explain what is frequently the case, that of two men of as nearly as possible the same cast of mind, the one will find a woman irresistibly fascinating, while on the other she may not exert the slightest attractive influence? Such a problem is as hard to solve as why the guileless rabbit, instead of putting his best leg forward and making a bolt, circles round the snake which he knows only too well intends to make a meal of him. The wise heathen, Aristotle, said: “No man loves but that he is first delighted with comeliness and beauty, and beauty is for the most part the bait which lures a victim into the meshes of the snare, but not always. Dr. Webster,, too. seems to imply by his definition that in the power of fascination, whether excercised by man or woman, there lurks a. certain sexual affinity.