{The Dive}[6th February 1976]

[Redbook2:80-82][19760206:1235a]{The Dive}[6th February 1976]

19760206.1235

[continued]

I have been pre-occupied these last few days by the photograph accompanying an advertisement by the Electricity Council on page 7 of The Times of the 4^th of February, 1976.

It shows a young girl in a black bikini underwater, coming out of a deep dive: while her legs are still angled back and up, her shoulders are level, pointing forwards (across the picture): in which direction her face looks straight ahead.

I have been trying to analyse her powerful attraction. Cynics [...] might say that this is easily explained: a young girl [...] 'floating' in an elastic position within a scanty bikini (there is something odd about that not-very-pretty bikini: if such a thing were not so very unlikely, one might wonder if it had not been 'painted' on, and the photograph touched up accordingly. But wishful thinking should not be carried too far). However, close analysis of the photograph (which means close study of the girl) shows this to be a misleading suggestion: for she is not, in body, in classic terms, particularly sexy. Her feet and ankles are indelicate, her knees knobbly, her thighs thick, her bottom big, her waist not slender, her breasts small, her shoulders muscled, and her face uninviting. Uninviting? I mean that she does not consciously invite: and perhaps that is the clue to her attraction – which [...] is not sexual, although like many such it contains sexual and other elements. She is indifferent to you, to me: her whole body, and her face foremost, are concentrated in the dive, and in what follows from the dive. It is this total absorption which gives her her beauty: for she is beautiful, as shown; which all goes to prove the old point that it is not so much what a body is that makes it beautiful (although that may help), but what it does – what she (or he) does within it, and with it.

[continues]

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