To explain this apparent anomaly Westermarck assumes that the object of the concealment "is to excite through the unknown!" To such fantastic nonsense does the doctrine of sexual selection lead. In reality there is no reason for supposing that the Chinese consider crippled feet--looking like "the hoof of an animal"--beautiful any more than mutilations of other parts of the body. In all probability the origin of the custom of crippling women's feet must be traced to the jealousy of the men, who devised this procedure as an effective way of preventing their wives from leaving their homes and indulging in amorous intrigues; other practices with the same purpose being common in Oriental countries. In course of time the foot-binding became an inexorable fashion which the foolishly conservative women were more eager to continue than the men. All accounts agree that the anti-foot-binding movement finds its most violent and stubborn opponents in the women themselves. The _Missionary Review_ for July, 1899, contains an article summing up a report of the _Tien Tsu Hui,_ or "Natural Foot Society," which throws a bright light on the whole question and from which I quote as follows:
"The male members of a family may be opposed to the maiming of their female relatives by the senseless custom, but the women will support it. One Chinese even promised his daughter a dollar a day to keep her natural feet, and another, having failed with his older girls, arranged that his youngest should be under his personal supervision night and day. The one natural-footed girl was sought in marriage for the dollars that had been faithfully laid by for her. But at her new home she was so _ridiculed_ by the hundreds who came to see her--and her feet--that she lost her reason. The other girl also became insane as a result of the _persecutions_ which she had to endure."
Thus we see that what keeps up this hideous custom is not the women's desire to arouse the esthetic admiration and amorous passion of the _men_ by a hoof of beauty, but the fear of ridicule and persecution by the other women, slaves of fashion all. These same motives are the source of most of the ugly fashions prevalent even in civilized Europe and America. Théophile Gautier believed that most women had no sense of beauty, but only a sense of fashion; and if explorers and missionaries had borne in mind the fundamental difference between fashion and esthetics, anthropological literature would be the poorer by hundreds of "false facts" and ludicrous inferences.[113]