Women are very sensitive to the quality of a man’s touch, and appear to seek and enjoy contact and pressure to a greater extent than do men, although in early adolescence this impulse seems to be marked in both sexes.  “There is something strangely winning to most women,” remarks George Eliot, in The Mill on the Floss, “in that offer of the firm arm; the help is not wanted physically at that moment, but the sense of help—­the presence of strength that is outside them and yet theirs—­meets a continual want of the imagination.”

Women are often very critical concerning a man’s touch and his method of shaking hands.  Stanley Hall (Adolescence, vol. ii, p. 8) quotes a gifted lady as remarking:  “I used to say that, however much I liked a man, I could never marry him if I did not like the touch of his hand, and I feel so yet.”

Among the elements of sexual attractiveness which make a special appeal to women, extreme personal cleanliness would appear to take higher rank than it takes in the eyes of a man, some men, indeed, seeming to make surprisingly small demands of a woman in this respect.  If this is so we may connect it with the fact that beauty in a woman’s eye is to a much greater extent than in a man’s a picture of energy, in other words, a translation of pressure contracts, with which the question of physical purity is necessarily more intimately associated than it is with the picture of purely visual beauty.  It is noteworthy that Ovid (Ars Amandi, lib.  I) urges men who desire to please women to leave the arts of adornment and effeminacy to those whose loves are homosexual, and to practice a scrupulous attention to extreme neatness and cleanliness of body and garments in every detail, a sun-browned skin, and the absence of all odor.  Some two thousand years later Brummell in an age when extravagance and effeminacy often marked the fashions of men, introduced a new ideal of unobtrusive simplicity, extreme cleanliness (with avoidance of perfumes), and exquisite good taste; he abhorred all eccentricity, and may be said to have constituted a tradition which Englishmen have ever since sought, more or less successfully to follow; he was idolized by women.

It may be added that the attentiveness of women to tactile contacts is indicated by the frequency with which in them it takes on morbid forms, as the delire du contact, the horror of contamination, the exaggerated fear of touching dirt. (See, e.g., Raymond and Janet, Les Obsessions et la Psychasthenie.)

FOOTNOTES: 

[168] William Ellis, Polynesian Researches, second edition, 1832, vol. 1, p. 215.

[169] Stendhal (De l’Amour, Chapter XVIII) has some remarks on this point, and refers to the influence over women possessed by Lekain, the famous actor, who was singularly ugly.  “It is passion,” he remarks, “which we demand; beauty only furnishes probabilities.”