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:
“The medieval university looked backwards; it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge.... The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (18251895)
“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 (18571938)
“The State never intentionally confronts a mans sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“The beauty of independence, departure, actions that rely on themselves.”
—Walt Whitman (18191892)
“If youth is a fault, it is one that one gets rid of soon enough.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (17491832)