In matters of carriage, habit, and especially clothing the love of sexual disparity is instinctive, everywhere well marked, and often carried to very great lengths.  To some extent such differences are due to the opposing demands of more fundamental differences in custom and occupation.  But this cause by no means adequately accounts for them, since it may sometimes happen that what in one land is the practice of the men is in another the practice of the women, and yet the practices of the two sexes are still opposed[194].  Men instinctively desire to avoid doing things in women’s ways, and women instinctively avoid doing things in men’s ways, yet both sexes admire in the other sex those things which in themselves they avoid.  In the matter of clothing this charm of disparity reaches its highest point, and it has constantly happened that men have even called in the aid of religion to enforce a distinction which seemed to them so urgent[195].  One of the greatest of sex allurements would be lost and the extreme importance of clothes would disappear at once if the two sexes were to dress alike; such identity of dress has, however, never come about among any people.

FOOTNOTES: 

[171] L. da Vinci, Frammenti, selected by Solmi, pp. 177-180.

[172] Westermarck, who accepts the “charm of disparity,” gives references, History of Human Marriage, p. 354.

[173] Descent of Man.  Part II, Chapter XVIII.

[174] Bloch (Beitraege zur AEtiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis, Teil II, pp. 260 et seq.) refers to the tendency to admixture of races and to the sexual attraction occasionally exerted by the negress and sometimes the negro on white persons as evidence in favor of such charm of disparity.  In part, however, we are here concerned with vague statements concerning imperfectly known facts, in part with merely individual variations, and with that love of the exotic under the stimulation of civilized conditions to which reference has already been made (p. 184).

[175] In this connection the exceptional case of Tennyson is of interest.  He was born and bred in the very fairest part of England (Lincolnshire), but he himself and the stock from which he sprang were dark to a very remarkable degree.  In his work, although it reveals traces of the conventional admiration for the fair, there is a marked and unusual admiration for distinctly dark women, the women resembling the stock to which he himself belonged.  See Havelock Ellis, “The Color Sense in Literature,” Contemporary Review, May, 1896.

[176] It is noteworthy that in the Round-About, already referred to, although no man expresses a desire to meet a short woman, when he refers to announcements by women as being such as would be likely to suit him, the persons thus pointed out are in a notable proportion short.

[177] It has been discussed by F.J.  Debret, La Selection Naturelle dans l’espece humaine (These de Paris), 1901.  Debret regards it as due to natural selection.