A bit of the taste

Alexander McCall Smith, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies









"(...) What attracted men? Good looks? Certainly if a girl was pretty then she tended to get the attention of men; that was beyond any doubt at all. But it was not just prettiness that mattered, because there were many girls who did not look anything special but who seemed to find no difficulty in making men notice them. These girls dressed in a very careful way; they knew which colours appealed to men (red, and other bright colours; men were like cattle in  that respect) and they knew how to walk and sit down in a way which would make men sit up and take notice. The walk was important: it should not be a simple walk, with one leg going forward, to be followed by the other; no, the legs had to bend and twist a bit, almost as if one was thinking of walking in a circle. And then there was the delicate issue of what to do with one's bottom while one was walking. Some people thought that one could just leave one's bottom to follow one when one was walking. Not so. A mere glance at any glamorous girl would show that the bottom had to be more involved."