 The careful purging of sensual pleasure from aesthetic enjoyment mingles with the paradoxical employment of female bodies as examples of aesthetic objects. Among the things that are naturally agreeable to human nature, Hume lists music, good cheer, and “the fair sex.” And Kant states, “The man develops his own taste while the woman makes herself an object of everybody’s taste.” (Kant 1798 [1978: 222]) Edmund Burke frankly eroticizes beauty when he speculates that the grace and delicacy of line that mark beautiful objects are reminiscent of the curves of the female body (Burke 1757/1968). If women are the objects of aesthetic pleasure, then the actual desire of the perceiver must be distanced and overcome in order for enjoyment to be purely aesthetic. This outcome is one implication of the notion of disinterested pleasure. This requirement, it would seem, assumes a standard point of view that is masculine and heterosexual. But of course women are also subjects who exercise taste. This implies that women are unstably both aesthetic subject and object at the same time. As a rule, the connoisseur, the so-called man of taste, was indeed male, and female bodies—in reality or represented in art—figured among the objects of aesthetic pleasure. However, women were also participants in the development of aesthetic ideals, and Terry Robinson argues that they actively shaped the concept of the beautiful female body (T. Robinson 2018).