Apart from this general control exercised by the norm of
conspicuous waste over the ideal of feminine beauty, there are
one or two details which merit specific mention as showing how it
may exercise an extreme constraint in detail over men's sense of
beauty in women. It has already been noticed that at the stages
of economic evolution at which conspicuous leisure is much
regarded as a means of good repute, the ideal requires delicate
and diminutive bands and feet and a slender waist. These
features, together with the other, related faults of structure
that commonly go with them, go to show that the person so
affected is incapable of useful effort and must therefore be
supported in idleness by her owner. She is useless and expensive,
and she is consequently valuable as evidence of pecuniary
strength. It results that at this cultural stage women take
thought to alter their persons, so as to conform more nearly to
the requirements of the instructed taste of the time; and under
the guidance of the canon of pecuniary decency, the men find the
resulting artificially induced pathological features attractive.
So, for instance, the constricted waist which has had so wide and
persistent a vogue in the communities of the Western culture, and
so also the deformed foot of the Chinese.
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