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.