is in danger--so with sex, no sooner does one or
the other sex propose to discard its arbitrary conventional
characteristics, or to supplement them by others borrowed from its
fellow-sex, than an outcry immediately is raised that sex itself is in
danger.

Sex--the most potent force in the universe--in danger because women
wear knickerbockers instead of petticoats, or military men take to
corsets and cosmetics!

That parallel with religion may be pursued profitably one step further.
In religion, the conventional test of your faith is not how you live,
not in your kindness of heart or purity of mind, but how you believe--in
the Trinity, in the Atonement; and do you turn to the East during the
recital of the Apostles' Creed? These and such, as every one knows, are
the vital matters of religion. And it is even so with sex. You are not
asked for the realities of manliness or womanliness, but for the
shadows, the arbitrary externalities, the fashions of which change from
generation to generation.

To be truly womanly you must never wear your hair short; to be truly
manly you must never wear it long. To be truly womanly you must dress as
daintily as possible, however uncomfortably; to be truly manly you must
wear the most hideous gear ever invented by the servility of tailors--a
strange succession of cylinders from head to heel; cylinder on head,
cylinder round your body, cylinders on arms and cylinders on legs. To be
truly womanly you must be shrinking and clinging in manner and trivial
in conversation; you must have no ideas, and rejoice that you wish for
none; you must thank Heaven that you have never ridden a bicycle or
smoked a cigarette; and you must be prepared to do a thousand other
absurd and ridiculous things. To be truly manly you must be and do the
opposite of all these things, with this exception--that with you the
possession of ideas is optional. The finest specimens of British manhood
are without ideas; but that, I say, is, generally speaking, a matter for
yourself. It is indeed the only matter in which you have any choice.
More important matters, such as the cut of your clothes and hair, the
shape of your face, the length of your moustache and the pattern of your
cane--all these are very properly regulated for you by laws of fashion,
which you could never dream of breaking. You may break every moral law
there is--or rather, was--and still remain a man. You may be a bully, a
cad, a coward and a fool, in the p