Cole Porter’s jazz-age musical Fifty Million Frenchmen features a song addressed to a woman with mysterious allure:
Your fetching physique is hardly unique,
You’re mentally not so hot.
You’ll never win laurels because of your morals,
But I’ll tell you what you’ve got ...
You’ve got that thing.
The ‘certain thing’ that according to Porter ‘makes birds forget to sing’ is broadly the subject of The Secret Power of Beauty. Of course, beauty is not just sexual, and indeed the definition could be expanded to include all things under the sun. To quote another popular song from a different era, everything is beautiful in its own way.
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