It is the essence of fashion to exaggerate everything to the point of
ugliness. Instead of trying to remedy the disadvantages to their gait
resulting from anatomical peculiarities (just referred to in a quotation
from Bell), women frequently take pains to deliberately exaggerate them.
As Alexander Walker remarks: “The largeness of the pelvis and the
approximation of the knees influence the gait of woman, and render it
vacillating and unsteady. Conscious of this, women, in countries where
the nutritive system in general and the pelvis in particular are large,
affect a greater degree of this vacillating unsteadiness. An example of
this is seen in the lateral and rotatory motion which is given to the
pelvis in walking by certain classes of the women in London.”
The Egyptians and Arabians consider this ludicrous rotatory motion a
great fascination, and have a special name for it—Ghung.
But Fashion, the handmaid of ugliness, is not content with aping the bad
taste of Arabians and Egyptians. It goes several steps lower than that,
down to the Hottentots. The latest hideous craze of Fashion, against
which not one woman in a hundred had taste or courage enough to
revolt—the bustle or “dress-improver” (!)—was simply the milliner’s
substitute for an anatomical peculiarity natural to some African
savages.
“It is well known,” says Darwin, “that with many Hottentot women the
posterior part of the body projects in a wonderful manner; they are
steatopygous; and Sir Andrew Smith is certain that this peculiarity is
greatly admired by the men. He once saw a woman who was considered a
beauty, and she was so immensely developed behind, that when seated on
level ground she could not rise, and had to push herself along until she
came to a slope. Some of the women in various negro tribes have the same
peculiarity; and, according to Burton, the Somal men ‘are said to choose
their wives by ranging them in a line, and by picking her out who
projects farthest _a tergo_. Nothing can be more hateful to a negro than
the opposite form.’”
Evidently “civilised” and savage women do not differ as regards Fashion,
the handmaid of ugliness. But the men do. While the male Hottentots
admire the natural steatopyga of their women, civilised men, without
exception, detest the artificial imitation of it, which makes a woman
look and walk like a deformed dromedary.