  Several feminist scholars, most especially Ruth Hubbard (1990), have clearly pointed out the close parallels of Darwin's account of eager males competing with one another for access to reticent and choosy females with Victorian gender values (see also, Fausto-Sterling 1985/1992). It is also noted that the activity of choice Darwin ascribed to females is caused by a female preoccupation with beauty and as such often has negative consequences for both male survival and the species itself. Nonetheless, feminists have revealed that Darwin was exceptional for theorizing that female choice had any evolutionary consequences at all. For example, as Helena Cronin (1991) points out, Darwin's contemporaries, especially Alfred Russell Wallace, (1) were skeptical that females had an aesthetic sense, (2) believed that if they did have one, it was unlikely to be stable enough to result in evolutionary change, (3) believed that female choice, if it did exist, would be swamped out by natural selection, and finally (4) believed that the excessive male displays were likely the result of the excess vigor possessed by male animals and not female choice. Darwin's theories of sexual selection and especially of female choice languished for nearly a century.