What is Body in Mind all about? Who is D.Bell? Why does female beauty need to be focused on, admired morally and defended politically? What exactly is super beauty? If you've visited Body in Mind and have asked any of these questions, you'll find your answers here... It was the Age of the Supermodels, the late eighties and early nineties, when the world was basking in an epoch that few expected would be so short-lived. The world's most beautiful, voluptuous, pro-value women were striding down the runways of the fashion world, smiling and happy, confident and fun, showing off their magnificent, womanly bodies, inspiring millions of men with their classic femininity and millions of women with their unprecedented success. It was heaven on earth, so heavenly, in fact, that few people noticed that even at its apex it was slowly on the decline, that even as women who were so famous they went by their first names were soaring to new heights on a wave of women's rights, there was a movement afoot to bring them down, to blame them for every evil from r4pe to eating disorders, to accuse these gorgeous creatures of being a bad influence on us and to replace them with smaller, skinnier, unsmiling little girls who, the pundits claimed, better represented the female form. Few noticed, and even fewer cared, except one man, who had the foresight even back then to recognize female beauty for what it was and who had the courage to defend it from its attackers, long before anyone even thought it was a value in need of protection, long before anyone saw the connection between these attacks on beauty and the attacks on women's rights that would soon plague the globe. It was 1989, and D. Bell, artist and writer, began his campaign to defend and celebrate female beauty as no one had ever done before. He formed Body in Mind, an intellectual periodical featuring essays and artwork on the meaning of female beauty, to explore what it meant to us and to unravel the mystery of why this precious gift of nature, which has inspired us since the beginning of time, has such a hold over us. And why it is so maligned. Tired of seedy pornography, tired of hearing repeatedly that sex was all men wanted, tired of witnessing beautiful women being desired but hated at the same time, he set out to explain the power that beauty has over us, not in some mystical, magical way but in real, objective terms, studying it as any scientist would study an unknown phenomenon. The answers he discovered were as revolutionary as they were simple. And his goal was nothing less than an absolute objective definition of female beauty and its complete and absolute vindication in moral terms on an historical scale. It turns out that female beauty is simply the representation of our values. The things we find beautiful in a woman are the things we value in our lives, or the things that represent those values to us. For instance, we know there are good things in life, like health, intelligence, strength, character, femininity, success, but what D.Bell discovered was that the women who possess or appear to possess these values are more beautiful to us than those who don't. If we value health and intelligence, we find a smart, healthy-looking woman more beautiful than a sickly-looking, stupid one. Pretty simple really. "We don't want things because they are beautiful", as most people think, he says, "we find things beautiful because we want them. It's true for cars or sunsets or women. It's not always clear why we value things, but the reasons - beyond beauty - are always there if you look for them. Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, it's in the values of the beholder. It's the image of our values - our ideals made real. It's a mirror, not for our faces, but for our souls." More surprising than this simple yet revolutionary discovery was its implications. The truths it exposed had been hidden from mankind for centuries. For example, if female beauty is the representation of true values, then it must follow that it is perfectly ethical, moral, and good. D.Bell had provided the world with an objective proof that female beauty is good, and a rational rebuttal to all those who have attacked it as evil down through the ages. In addition, and for the same reasons, D.Bell's discovery proved that those women who display their beauty and the men who admire them are also moral and good for doing so - shattering the horrible traditional ideas that women who use their beauty are whores, and the men who admire them are r4pists. Finally, beauty and all its admirers had been vindicated. The fact that female beauty is the representation of our values also made it possible to finally illuminate what the source of beauty's strange and unrelenting power over us has always been. "It motivates and compells us precisely because it is a force of good," D.Bell says. "It makes us want to be and achieve good things. It inspires us towards our values, the very things it represents to us. It's like a carrot waved in front of our noses by our hopes and dreams, making us pull our lives in their direction." But perhaps the most sobering truth exposed by D.Bell's insight, is that when female beauty is attacked, as it so often is today, it's not because it's evil or immoral, as we are so often told, but because it is good. "When female beauty is attacked, it is by twisted monsters bent on destroying all human values, the things female beauty represents to all of us." Once and for all, D.Bell had proven that those who belittle or outright attack female beauty mean to destroy beauty and all human values. He allowed us to finally see that they are the evil, not beauty. But D.Bell did not stop with the first ever objective definition of the age old mystery of female beauty, nor with the discovery of its intrinsic and fundamental moral goodness, kept hidden since the beginning of time. These were merely flashpoints of a lifelong passion to defend and glorify female beauty for the man who loved it. In the early 90's D. Bell focused his attention in three areas, in crafting and perfecting the essays and articles that would explain his discoveries about female beauty and their meaning in our lives, in drawing and painting images of value-driven or idealized women, and in creating photographs of the most objectively beautiful women he could find. Not content to merely take snapshots of naked girls, D. Bell laboured over each session, posing his statuesque and beautiful models in heroic, confident and playful poses, using the exquisite deserts of Utah and California and the pristine beaches of Baja as his backdrops. His focus on idealized beauty quickly became his trademark style - sexy but not sexual, feminine but not girlish, his photos remain some of the most elegant, tasteful and beautiful images of female beauty ever taken, simply because he was the first to purposely embue them with objective moral values. By 1997, the internet had proven to be an excellent forum for D. Bell's original views on beauty and beauty-focussed photography, so Body in Mind the website went online on October 1, 1997. Body in Mind was the first website to see the need and the market for wholesome nude images of women, and the first to see the possibility of daily beauty 'bites', daily news items and pontifications about female beauty, eventually publishing in total over 400 illustrated essays and ideas culled from eight years of research, writing, drawings, photography, and observation. D.Bell was blogging before blogging existed, he was writing about his discoveries and theories of female beauty before beauty was considered a valid scientific subject, and he was publishing nude photos that concentrated on the beauty of women when the rest of the world was going internet porn crazy. "Female beauty is the only thing I can think of that is news worthy every single day." - D.Bell The commentary, analysis, and imagery of female beauty continues to this day on Body in Mind, commentary on the blog page, analysis on the ideas page, and photography on the photos page. Over the years, Body in Mind caught the attention of respected authors and artists, who began to feature their own essays and images on his site and who praised D. Bell for his unique respect for female beauty and is insights into it. It has grown steadily, featuring short fiction, interviews, political commentary, aesthetic analyses, and, as always, images of pure, inspiring beauty. An avid readership delighted in finding a place where they were praised as moral for admiring the beauty of women, where they could indulge their intellect and their taste in beauty, and where they felt, for the first time, like one of the 'good guys', a nickname that D. Bell soon adopted for beauty supporters. Body in Mind also drew the praise of women who agreed with his slogan "Hatred of beauty is hatred of women" joined his campaign to end that hatred, and who thanked him for allowing them to enjoy their own beauty and sexuality for the first time. Among them me, his wife Leanne, who met D.Bell through the pages of Body in Mind, and fell in love with his ideas as much as with him. Body in Mind has convinced many that the world's fascination with beauty was not a shallow fad but the beginnings of a moral movement, a movement that has only ever needed ideological direction to fully blossom. Interest in both the site and its subject continues to grow around the world, as evidenced by the proliferation of like-minded sites that have surfaced on the web in recent years. Today Body in Mind remains the quiet, original and only true thinking man's beauty site, the only site to feature morality and philosophy mixed with breathtaking beauty in an intelligent, moral and purposeful way. We believe this special mix of intelligence, morality and physical beauty creates something separate and new, a superior kind of beauty, which we call superbeauty because of its special power to motivate and reward moral behaviour in us, and because of the superlative values it embodies and projects so well. Never one to allow such a discovery about beauty go to waste, in July of 2003, tired of seeing women around the world abused and butchered due to mankind's long-standing failure to understand the true nature and power of female beauty, and wanting to put his discoveries about superbeauty to work in their defence, D.Bell and Body in Mind created SuperBeauty.Org, the world's first beauty activism organization dedicated to educating people about the moral nature of female beauty and to freeing those women around the world who have had their rights and lives taken away by people and governments operating under the misapprehension that female beauty and sexuality are evil and punishable. D.Bell's ideas remain the only direct rebuttal to these injustices, and SuperBeauty.Org is still the only place anyone can go to fight for the beauty they love. The Age of the Supermodel may be gone, but hopefully the Age of Superbeauty has begun, in the work of D.Bell, in Body in Mind, in SuperBeauty.Org, and in you, gentle reader, and with it, a new moral respect for female beauty as well as political freedom for the women who possess it and so generously share it with the world. Leanne Bell

October 1, 2003