As a man having the pleasure of looking at a beautiful woman, I can tell you that it is key to the highest arousal. Not only is she beautiful but her being with you says that you are beautiful, in some way, too. When someone talks about how people are bad at sex, for a man, it is about how she looks, certainly other qualities, like intelligence and voice, and regality, and if she is into you. If she is, then you feel hot, proud, and sexy, you are ultimately satisfied. Looks are important when it comes to sex. But, I also haven’t been able to maintain long-term relationships with them, because they knew they could have anyone they wanted. My mother was a beauty queen and runway model. I saw her lonely life, and eventual penniless life. She met my dad, a sweet, chubby man she would encourage to finish medical school, but they divorced when I was too young to remember. She said he tricked her into having sex. She gave up her career as a commercial artist to raise my sister and me, then he died. All her boyfriends and husbands thereafter were tricksters and/or drunks. I saw how lonely she was, but beauty as in anything beautiful causes the observer to go into themselves in a cathartic cocoon of contemplation of self, which heightens a person’s euphoria. No, beauty is key. It is the ultimate turn on. A beautiful woman cannot necessarily see herself from outside. She can register an affect, but I don’t think a beautiful woman can ever understand her affect, her arousing capacity just by being beautiful, so I beg to differ, just as I have no idea how people feel when they are with me. So, I guess at least for me beauty is key to arousal and maintenance of arousal, which may also be connected to my mother’s beauty, since I have found those beautiful women, I have loved to have reminded me of things about her, mainly that they came into a room and shut it down. Being with such a woman is the secret sauce and it makes everything else taste good. I miss all the beautiful women I have had the privilege to love. I just wish I were still with one of them, and there is one I pine for in particular. And as far as it appears, it looks like I will go to my death alone.