This section is from the book "Human Sexuality", by J. Richardson Parke. Also available from Amazon: Human Sexuality.
A woman's face is shorter than a man's, her mouth smaller, her nose less prominent, her neck longer and thinner, her hips wider, her waist narrower, her fingers more slender and pointed, and both hands and feet smaller and daintier. The middle line of her body is lower than man's; so that in walking her steps are shorter, and consequently lighter and more seemingly graceful; since the absence of that up-and-down movement of the head, resulting from the longer stride of the man, gives to her progress the easy, gliding movement so characteristic of the sex.
A long face, a broad mouth, and large hands and feet, are more accent ua ted in a woman than in a man; through a greater divergence from the standard; and the use of the corset to narrow the uai.-t. and the low-cut dress to lengthen the neck, are instinctive efforts on her part to approximate the standard. Both of the latter, however, are frequently carried to such an excess as to defeat their very object. If there is an ideal of beauty, common to the entire race, it is, as I have intimated, purely one of abstraction; and incapable of realization, so far as our present knowledge extends. Omne simile est dissimile; apparent similarities in taste are always accompanied by specific differences in type. The white man will see in the colored woman certain features of feminine beauty, though the woman herself is not beautiful; and most colored women would prefer white husbands, on purely aesthetic grounds, if the sexuality of the black man were not preferable to them. People are prone to associate the idea of beauty with those features and characteristics which distinguish them as a people, and if nature have bestowed upon them a narrow forehead, a brown skin, high cheek bones and a flat nose, they are always disposed to regard as defects any deviations from that specific type. Thus the white lady employs the corset or the bust-pad, or the artificial hips, to preserve her type of beauty; while the brownish, or red-skinned lady covers her body with annatto or chica-dye to preserve her tvDe of comnlexion.'
 
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