The tendency of the human race is constantly toward exaggeration; and this is observed by anthropologists, among both savage and civilized peoples, in the prominence which is given to those parts of the body that are especially preferred. Thus the Chinese women bind their feet; the savage pierces the ears and nose, and wears the hair in a grotesque manner, besides otherwise compelling attention to the anatomical peculiarities by tattooing, ornaments, etc.; the harlot dyes her hair and applies pigment round her eyes to accentuate their brilliancy; and in innumerable ways human beings strive to make themselves sexually attractive.
The wearing of labrets and lip rings; the piercing of the ears and nose for the reception of ornaments; the customs of tattooing and painting; the predilection for rings and anklets and bangles and bracelets and necklaces and girdles; the blackening and filing of the teeth; the pride in the adornment of the hair; the enthusiasm for beads, and all the multitudinous customs of ornamentation, are universally said by travellers, and by those who are versed in the science of man, to be designed for the attraction of the opposite sex the reasons given being summed up, as Westermarck so well puts it, by the expressions, "to be agreeable to the women", or "to make herself a delicious morsel for the arms of an ardent lover". Among the women of civilized countries there is also this most marked tendency to make prominent those parts which are considered the attributes of feminine beauty; and nowhere, not even at the seashore, is this so well exemplified as in the ballroom.
The ancient Greeks and Romans costumed themselves with graceful and loosely flowing tunics, which served to drape them becomingly without unduly marking the dissimilarity between the sexes, and without making the sexual characteristics of anatomy too prominent. But, while modern men do not dress immodestly or sensuously, the same cannot be said of the toilettes of many women, since their costumes are often not so much adapted for utility as for accentuating too agreeably the sexual points of their beauty and displaying their figures. In fact, the "girl of the period" is characterized too largely by her clothes, and she suggests too much the mysteries of the toilette, paying too little attention to her physical charms and too much to her finery in short, she overdresses.
It is easily to be seen that fashionable women emphasize those parts of the anatomy which constitute their secondary sexual characteristics, thus bringing out an exaggerated type of the feminine figure, e.g., the breasts, bosom, waist and hips. Nature has already given a well formed woman a prominent bust, a graceful waist, and broad hips, and it is beyond dispute that she is stamped by Providence as being more distinctly sexual in her conformation, and that she is obviously fashioned for the duties of maternity. But fashion has ordained, chiefly out of deference to the unrecognized desires of men, that all these prominent sexual characters shall be enormously accentuated by corsets, bustles, padded breasts, and by other devices which display the exaggerated curves.
Thus the corset is employed to constrict the waist, the effect of which is to emphasize the hips and breasts; sleeves are sometimes enormous, sometimes scanty; skirts
are sometimes too ample, sometimes too tight; and all these various fashions have in view the self-same design of impressing on the notice the sexual attraction of the wearer. A gloriously formed woman will by nature have these parts of her figure ample and prominent, but there is no sensuality about Nature's handiwork, and to the anatomist these distortions which are decreed by fashion appear as the greatest possible violations of beauty and of propriety. All these indelicate exposures and oddities of apparel necessarily localize the attention of the beholder on the emphasized part, and the costuming of fashionable women has to a pernicious degree become too expressive of theii sex, and too highly inflaming to men.
In the ballroom the attire of some of the women, at least, is often sensuous to the extreme limit of propriety; and it is futile to deny that many men become sexually excited by a close contact with beautiful women who display bare arms and even the dimples between the breasts, and who at the same time attract by the well known erotic stimuli of perfumes, touch, and other attractive equipments, which, if they do not plainly show, at least suggest.
The logic of the changes of fashion is not difficult for physiologists to understand, for the unceasing variations of the caprices of dress follow the well known physiological law that the nervous system fails to react to a stimulus "in proportion to the duration of the action of the stimulus" (Ohaddock). Thus we cease to be excited or attracted by phenomena with which we are constantly associated, while new stimuli compel attention.