Women as paraphernalia

"A woman's supposed to be beautiful for a very good reason, because she's paraphernalia, she comes under the same category as September Morn or a Turkey carpet or a pair of deer's horns. You judge a man's looks by how well he's made to stand stress and strain and don't need to take anything off anybody and can walk right up to the old world and spit in its eye. The more fit he seems to be for life and to do all that's expected of a man the better looking he is. But a woman now, her looks depend on how fit she seems to be for a man, and how different she is, from him. The way she's built, there's supposed to be a lot of unnecessary furbelows here and there, impractical, while him, the more he's built like a tool to work with and the more there's nothing unnecessary, the better it is."
     "That's right," Alitta said, feeling rather disheartened, as at a sermon, drawing a deep sigh.
     "I could tell you a few things about fashion," the dressmaker went on. "What the men like best are what there's the least sense in, dresses you can't sit down in, that won't stand a lot of action, that hobble you and truss you up and slow you down and fix it so you can't hardly breathe, till finally you're off in one corner, like a bird in a cage, not cluttering up the busy paths in life that men has got to use. That's the styles they really like! They want to be the movers and shakers. They want to do the world's business and be the Brigadier General and whoa and giddup and carve the roast on Sunday. Women are just supposed to be, like an ornament on the mantel. . . ."
     "You think men don't like dyed hair and crimped hair and paint and powder an inch thick and beads and feather boas and I don't know what all," Rose said. "The majority of 'em say they don't--but listen--all that fixing and fussing and hanging things on suits 'em right down to a T. You know why? Because the more dolled up a woman is, the more of a dumb image she is, and there's nothing a man likes better than a dumb image except a still dumber one. Images don't fly in the face of nobody for one thing, and they don't rack their brains and start getting ideas, which can scare a person out of seven years' growth."
     --From Marry Me, Carry Me