The savage male of today
when attired in his paint, feathers, cats' tails and necklaces is an
immeasurably more ornamented and imposing figure than his female, even
when fully attired for a dance in beads and bangles: the Oriental
male has sometimes scarcely been able to walk under the weight of his
ornaments; and the males of Europe a couple of centuries ago, with their
powdered wigs, lace ruffles and cuffs, paste buckles, feathered cocked
hats, and patches were quite as ridiculous in their excess of adornment
as the complementary females of their own day, or the most parasitic
females of this. Both in the class and the individual, whether male or
female, an intense love of dress and meretricious external adornment is
almost invariably the concomitant and outcome of parasitism. Were the
parasite female class in our own societies today to pass away, French
fashions with their easeless and grotesque variations (shaped not for
use or beauty, but the attracting of attention) would die out. And the
extent to which any woman today, not herself belonging to the parasite
class and still labouring, attempts to follow afar off the fashions of
the parasite, may be taken generally as an almost certain indication
of the ease with which she would accept parasitism were its conditions
offered her. The tendency of the cultured and intellectually labouring
woman of today to adopt a more rational type of attire, less shaped to
attract attention to the individual than to confer comfort and abstain
from impeding activity, is often spoken of as an attempt on the part
of woman slavishly to imitate man. What is really taking place is, that
like causes are producing like effects on human creatures with common
characteristics.)

But there remain certain psychic differences in attitude, on the part of
male and female as such, which are inherent and not artificial: and,
in the psychic human world, it is exactly as we approach the sphere
of sexual and reproductive activity, with those emotions and instincts
connected directly with sex and the reproduction of the race, that a
difference does appear.

In the animal world all forms of psychic variations are found allying
themselves now with the male sex form, and then with the female. In the
insect and fish worlds, where the female forms are generally larger
and stronger than the male, the female is generally more pugnacious and
predatory than the male. Among birds-of-prey, where also the female fo