We must not,
of course, suppose that these considerations are always or often present
to the consciousness of the maiden who "blushingly turns from Adonis to
Hercules," but the emotional attitude is rooted in more or less unerring
instincts. In this way it happens that even in the field of visual
attraction sexual selection influences women on the underlying basis of
the more primitive sense of touch, the fundamentally sexual sense.

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