ridled feminine instincts, she is a mistress of the feminine
arts of adornment, she can speak to him concerning the mysteries of
womanhood and the luxuries of sex with an immediate freedom and knowledge
the innocent maiden cloistered in her home would be incapable of. She
appeals to him by no means only because she can gratify the lower desires
of sex, but also because she is, in her way, an artist, an expert in the
art of feminine exploitation, a leader of feminine fashions. For she is
this, and there are, as Simmel has stated in his _Philosophie der Mode_,
good psychological reasons why she always should be this. Her uncertain
social position makes all that is conventional and established hateful to
her, while her temperament makes perpetual novelty delightful. In new
fashions she finds "an aesthetic form of that instinct of destruction which
seems peculiar to all pariah existences, in so far as they are not
completely enslaved in spirit."

"However surprising it may seem to some," a modern writer
remarks, "prostitutes must be put on the same level as artists.
Both use their gifts and talents for the joy and pleasure of
others, and, as a rule, for payment. What is the essential
difference between a singer who gives pleasure to hearers by her
throat and a prostitute who gives pleasure to those who seek her
by another part of her body? All art works on the senses." He
refers to the significant fact that actors, and especially
actresses, were formerly regarded much as prostitutes are now (R.
Hellmann, _Ueber Geschlechtsfreiheit_, pp. 245-252).

Bernaldo de Quiros and Llanas Aguilaniedo (_La Mala Vida en
Madrid_, p. 242) trace the same influence still lower in the
social scale. They are describing the more squalid kind of _cafe
chantant_, in which, in Spain and elsewhere, the most vicious and
degenerate feminine creatures become waitresses (and occasionally
singers and dancers), playing the part of amiable and
distinguished _hetairae_ to the public of carmen and shop-boys who
frequent these resorts. "Dressed with what seems to the youth
irreproachable taste, with hair elaborately prepared, and clean
face adorned with flowers or trinkets, affable and at times
haughty, superior in charm and in finery to the other women he is
able to know, the waitresses become the most elevated example of
the _femme galante_ whom he is able to conte