Modern Association With Physical Beauty and Youth
An extremely attractive, youthful male is often called an Adonis, often with a connotation of deserved vanity: "the office Adonis." The legendary attractiveness of the figure is referenced in Sarrasine by Honoré de Balzac, which describes an unrequited love of the main character, Sarrasine for the image in a painting of an Adonis and a castrato. The allusion to extreme physical attractiveness is apparent in the psychoanalytical Adonis Complex which refers to a body image obsession with improving one's physique and youthful appearance.
Bodybuilders use the expression "Adonis belt" to refer to the two shallow grooves of the surface anatomy of the human abdomen running from the iliac crest (hip bone) to the pubis. Also, the Golden Ratio of a tape measure of shoulder-to-waist ratio is called the Adonis Index.
Read more about this topic: Adonis
Famous quotes containing the words modern, association, physical, beauty and/or youth:
“I have developed a visionary modern lyric, and, for it, an idiom in which I can write lyrically, colloquially, and dramatically. My subject is city life—with its sofas, hotel corridors, cinemas, underworlds, cardboard suitcases, self-willed buses, banknotes, soapy bathrooms, newspaper-filled parks; and its anguish, its enraged excitement, its great lonely joys.”
—Rosemary Tonks (b. 1932)
“With all their faults, trade-unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in man, than any other association of men.”
—Clarence Darrow (1857–1938)
“We best avoid wars by taking even physical action to stop small ones.”
—Anthony, Sir Eden (1897–1977)
“When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)