"
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.
Pages:
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372
373
374
375
376
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387