[66] Men are also very sensitive to any such inquisitiveness on the part
of the opposite sex. To this cause, perhaps, and possibly, also, to the
fear of causing disgust, may be ascribed the objection of men to undress
before women artists and women doctors. I am told there is often
difficulty in getting men to pose nude to women artists.
Sir Jonathan
Hutchinson was compelled, some years ago, to exclude lady members of the
medical profession from the instructive demonstrations at his museum, "on
account of the unwillingness of male patients to undress before them." A
similar unwillingness is not found among women patients, but it must be
remembered that, while women are accustomed to men as doctors, men (in
England) are not yet accustomed to women as doctors.
[67] "I am acquainted with the case of a shy man,"
writes Dr. Harry
Campbell, in his interesting study of "Morbid Shyness"
(_British Medical
Journal_, September 26, 1896), "who will make himself quite at home in the
house of a blind person, and help himself to wine with the utmost
confidence, whereas if a member of the family, who can see, comes into the
room, all his old shyness returns, and he wishes himself far away."
[68] Stanley Hall ("Showing Off and Bashfulness,"
_Pedagogical Seminary_,
June, 1903), quotes Dr. Anagnos, of the Perkins Institute for the Blind,
to this effect.
[69] Thus, Sonnini, in the eighteenth century, noted that the country
women in Egypt only wore a single garment, open from the armpits to the
knees on each side, so that it revealed the body at every movement; "but
this troubles the women little, provided the face is not exposed."
(_Voyage dans la Haute et Basse Egypte_, 1779, vol. i, p, 289.) When
Casanova was at Constantinople, the Comte de Bonneval, a convert to Islam,
assured him that he was mistaken in trying to see a woman's face when he
might easily obtain greater favors from her. "The most reserved of Turkish
women," the Comte assured him, "only carries her modesty in her face, and
as soon as her veil is on she is sure that she will never blush at
anything." (_Mémoires_, vol. i, p. 429.)
[70] It is worth noting that this impulse is rooted in the natural
instinctive acts and ideas of childhood. Stanley Hall, dealing with the
"Early Sense of Self," in the report already mentioned, refers to the eyes
as perhaps even more than the hands, feet, and mouth,
"the centres of that
kind of self-consciousness which is always mindful of how the self appears
to others," and proceeds to mention "the very common impression of young
children that if the eyes are covered or closed they cannot be seen. Some
think the entire body thus vanishes from sight of others; some, that the
head also ceases to be visible; and a still higher form of this curious
psychosis is that, when they are closed, the soul cannot be seen."
(_American Journal of Psychology_, vol. ix, No. 3, 1898.) The instinctive
and unreasoned character of this act is further shown by its occurrence in
idiots. Näcke mentions that he once had occasion to examine the abdomen of
an idiot, who, thereupon, attempted to draw down his shirt with the left
hand, while with the right he covered his eyes.
[71] Cf. Stanley Hall and T. Smith, "Showing Off and Bashfulness,"
_American Journal of Psychology_, June, 1903.
IV.
Summary of the Factors of Modesty--The Future of Modesty--Modesty an
Essential Element of Love.
We have seen that the factors of modesty are numerous.
To attempt to
explain modesty by dismissing it as merely an example of psychic
paralysis, of _Stauung_, is to elude the problem by the statement of what
is little more than a truism. Modesty is a complexus of emotions with
their concomitant ideas which we must unravel to comprehend.
We have found among the factors of modesty: (1) the primitive animal
gesture of sexual refusal on the part of the female when she is not at
that moment of her generative life at which she desires the male's
advances; (2) the fear of arousing disgust, a fear primarily due to the
close proximity of the sexual centre to the points of exit of those
excretions which are useless and unpleasant, even in many cases to
animals; (3) the fear of the magic influence of sexual phenomena, and the
ceremonial and ritual practices primarily based on this fear, and
ultimately passing into simple rules of decorum which are signs and
guardians of modesty; (4) the development of ornament and clothing,
concomitantly fostering alike the modesty which represses male sexual
desire and the coquetry which seeks to allure it; (5) the conception of
women as property, imparting a new and powerful sanction to an emotion
already based on more natural and primitive facts.
It must always be remembered that these factors do not usually occur
separately. Very often they are all of them implied in a single impulse of
modesty. We unravel the cord in order to investigate its construction, but
in real life the strands are more or less indistinguishably twisted
together.
It may still be asked finally whether, on the whole, modesty really
becomes a more prominent emotion as civilization advances. I do not think
this position can be maintained. It is a great mistake, as we have seen,
to suppose that in becoming extended modesty also becomes intensified. On
the contrary, this very extension is a sign of weakness.
Among savages,
modesty is far more radical and invincible than among the civilized. Of
the Araucanian women of Chile, Treutler has remarked that they are
distinctly more modest than the Christian white population, and such
observations might be indefinitely extended. It is, as we have already
noted, in a new and crude civilization, eager to mark its separation from
a barbarism it has yet scarcely escaped, that we find an extravagant and
fantastic anxiety to extend the limits of modesty in life, and art, and
literature. In older and more mature civilizations--in classical
antiquity, in old Japan, in France--modesty, while still a very real
influence, becomes a much less predominant and all-pervading influence. In
life it becomes subservient to human use, in art to beauty, in literature
to expression.
Among ourselves we may note that modesty is a much more invincible motive
among the lower social classes than among the more cultivated classes.
This is so even when we should expect the influence of occupation to
induce familiarity. Thus I have been told of a ballet-girl who thinks it
immodest to bathe in the fashion customary at the seaside, and cannot make
up her mind to do so, but she appears on the stage every night in tights
as a matter of course; while Fanny Kemble, in her _Reminiscences_, tells
of an actress, accustomed to appear in tights, who died a martyr to
modesty rather than allow a surgeon to see her inflamed knee. Modesty is,
indeed, a part of self-respect, but in the fully-developed human being
self-respect itself holds in check any excessive modesty.[72]
We must remember, moreover, that there are more definite grounds for the
subordination of modesty with the development of civilization. We have
seen that the factors of modesty are many, and that most of them are based
on emotions which make little urgent appeal save to races in a savage or
barbarous condition. Thus, disgust, as Richet has truly pointed out,
necessarily decreases as knowledge increases.[73] As we analyze and
understand our experiences better, so they cause us less disgust. A rotten
egg is disgusting, but the chemist feels no disgust toward sulphuretted
hydrogen; while a solution of propylamin does not produce the disgusting
impression of that human physical uncleanliness of which it is an odorous
constituent. As disgust becomes analyzed, and as self-respect tends to
increased physical purity, so the factor of disgust in modesty is
minimized. The factor of ceremonial uncleanness, again, which plays so
urgent a part in modesty at certain stages of culture, is to-day without
influence except in so far as it survives in etiquette.
In the same way
the social-economic factor of modesty, based on the conception of women as
property, belongs to a stage of human development which is wholly alien to
an advanced civilization. Even the most fundamental impulse of all, the
gesture of sexual refusal, is normally only imperative among animals and
savages. Thus civilization tends to subordinate, if not to minimize,
modesty, to render it a grace of life rather than a fundamental social law
of life. But an essential grace of life it still remains, and whatever
delicate variations it may assume we can scarcely conceive of its
disappearance.
In the art of love, however, it is more than a grace; it must always be
fundamental. Modesty is not indeed the last word of love, but it is the
necessary foundation for all love's most exquisite audacities, the
foundation which alone gives worth and sweetness to what Sénancour calls
its "delicious impudence."[74] Without modesty we could not have, nor
rightly value at its true worth, that bold and pure candor which is at
once the final revelation of love and the seal of its sincerity.
Even Hohenemser--who argues that for the perfect man there could
be no shame, because shame rests on an inner conflict in one's
own personality, and "the perfect man knows no inner conflict"--believes that, since humanity is imperfect, modesty
possesses a high and, indeed, symptomatic value, for
"its
presence shows that according to the measure of a man's ideal
personality, his valuations are established."
Dugas goes further, and asserts that the ideals of modesty
develop with human development, and forever take on new and finer
forms. "There is," he declares, "a very close relationship
between naturalness, or sincerity, and modesty, for in love,
naturalness is the ideal attained, and modesty is only the fear
of coming short of that ideal. Naturalness is the sign and the
test of perfect love. It is the sign of it, for, when love can
show itself natural and true, one may conclude that it is
purified of its unavowable imperfections or defects, of its alloy
of wretched and petty passions, its grossness, its chimerical
notions, that it has become strong and healthy and vigorous. It
is the ordeal of it, for to show itself natural, to be always
true, without shrinking, it must have all the lovable qualities,
and have them without seeking, as a second nature.
What we call
'natural,' is indeed really acquired; it is the gift of a
physical and moral evolution which it is precisely the object of
modesty to keep. Modesty is the feeling of the true, that is to
say, of the healthy, in love; it long exists as a vision, not yet
attained; vague, yet sufficiently clear for all that deviates
from it to be repelled as offensive and painful. At first, a
remote and seemingly inaccessible ideal, as it comes nearer it
grows human and individual, and emerges from the region of dream,
ceasing not to be loved as ideal, even when it is possessed as
real.
"At first sight, it seems paradoxical to define modesty as an
aspiration towards truth in love; it seems, on the contrary, to
be an altogether factitious feeling. But to simplify the problem,
we have to suppose modesty reduced to its normal functions,
disengaged from its superstitions, its variegated customs and
prejudices, the true modesty of simple and healthy natures, as
far removed from prudery as from immodesty. And what we term the
natural, or the true in love, is the singular mingling of two
forms of imaginations, wrongly supposed to be incompatible: ideal
aspiration and the sense for the realities of life.
Thus defined,
modesty not only repudiates that cold and dissolving criticism
which deprives love of all poetry, and prepares the way for a
brutal realism; it also excludes that light and detached
imagination which floats above love, the mere idealism of heroic
sentiments, which cherishes poetic illusions, and passes, without
seeing it, the love that is real and alive. True modesty implies
a love not addressed to the heroes of vain romances, but to
living people, with their feet on the earth. But on the other
hand, modesty is the respect of love; if it is not shocked by
its physical necessities, if it accepts physiological and
psychological conditions, it also maintains the ideal of those
moral proprieties outside of which, for all of us, love cannot be
enjoyed. When love is really felt, and not vainly imagined,
modesty is the requirement of an ideal of dignity, conceived as
the very condition of that love. Separate modesty from love, that
is, from love which is not floating in the air, but crystallized
around a real person, and its psychological reality, its poignant
and tragic character, disappears." (Dugas, "La Pudeur," _Revue
Philosophique_, Nov., 1903.) So conceived, modesty becomes a
virtue, almost identical with the Roman _modestia_.
FOOTNOTES:
[72] Freud remarks that one may often hear, concerning elderly ladies,
that in their youth in the country, they suffered, almost to collapse,
from hæmorrhages from the genital passage, because they were too modest to
seek medical advice and examination; he adds that it is extremely rare to
find such an attitude among our young women to-day. (S.
Freud, _Zur
Neurosenlehre_, 1906, p. 182.) It would be easy to find evidence of the
disappearance of misplaced signs of modesty formerly prevalent, although
this mark of increasing civilization has not always penetrated to our laws
and regulations.
[73] "Disgust," he remarks, "is a sort of synthesis which attaches to the
total form of objects, and which must diminish and disappear as scientific
analysis separates into parts what, as a whole, is so repugnant."
[74] Sénancour, _De l'Amour_, 1834, vol. i, p. 316. He remarks that a
useless and false reserve is due to stupidity rather than to modesty.
THE PHENOMENA OF SEXUAL PERIODICITY.
I.
The Various Physiological and Psychological Rhythms--
Menstruation--The
Alleged Influence of the Moon--Frequent Suppression of Menstruation among
Primitive Races--Mittelschmerz--Possible Tendency to a Future
Intermenstrual Cycle--Menstruation among Animals--
Menstruating Monkeys and
Apes--What is Menstruation--Its Primary Cause Still Obscure--The Relation
of Menstruation to Ovulation--The Occasional Absence of Menstruation in
Health--The Relation of Menstruation to "Heat"--The Prohibition of
Intercourse during Menstruation--The Predominance of Sexual Excitement at
and around the Menstrual Period--Its Absence during the Period Frequently
Apparent only.
Throughout the vegetable and animal worlds the sexual functions are
periodic. From the usually annual period of flowering in plants, with its
play of sperm-cell and germ-cell and consequent seed-production, through
the varying sexual energies of animals, up to the monthly effervescence of
the generative organism in woman, seeking not without the shedding of
blood for the gratification of its reproductive function, from first to
last we find unfailing evidence of the periodicity of sex. At first the
sun, and then, as some have thought, the moon, have marked throughout a
rhythmic impress on the phenomena of sex. To understand these phenomena we
have not only to recognize the bare existence of that periodic fact, but
to realize its implications.
Rhythm, it is scarcely necessary to remark, is far from characterizing
sexual activity alone. It is the character of all biological activity,
alike on the physical and the psychic sides. All the organs of the body
appear to be in a perpetual process of rhythmic contraction and expansion.
The heart is rhythmic, so is the respiration. The spleen is rhythmic, so
also the bladder. The uterus constantly undergoes regular rhythmic
contractions at brief intervals. The vascular system, down to the smallest
capillaries, is acted on by three series of vibrations, and every
separate fragment of muscular tissue possesses rhythmic contractility.
Growth itself is rhythmic, and, as Malling-Hansen and subsequent observers
have found, follows a regular annual course as well as a larger cycle. On
the psychic sides attention is rhythmic. We are always irresistibly
compelled to impart a rhythm to every succession of sounds, however
uniform and monotonous. A familiar example of this is the rhythm we can
seldom refrain from hearing in the puffing of an engine.
A series of
experiments, by Bolton, on thirty subjects showed that the clicks of an
electric telephone connected in an induction-apparatus nearly always fell
into rhythmic groups, usually of two or four, rarely of three or five, the
rhythmic perception being accompanied by a strong impulse to make
corresponding muscular movements.[75]
It is, however, with the influence--to some extent real, to some extent,
perhaps, only apparent--of cosmic rhythm that we are here concerned. The
general tendency, physical and psychic, of nervous action to fall into
rhythm is merely interesting from the present point of view as showing a
biological predisposition to accept any periodicity that is habitually
imposed upon the organism.[76] Menstruation has always been associated
with the lunar revolutions.[77] Darwin, without specifically mentioning
menstruation, has suggested that the explanation of the allied cycle of
gestation in mammals, as well as incubation in birds, may be found in the
condition under which ascidians live at high and low water in consequence
of the phenomena of tidal change.[78] It must, however, be remembered that
the ascidian origin of the vertebrates has since been contested from many
sides, and, even if we admit that at all events some such allied
conditions in the early history of vertebrates and their ancestors tended
to impress a lunar cycle on the race, it must still be remembered that the
monthly periodicity of menstruation only becomes well marked in the human
species.[79] Bearing in mind the influence exerted on both the habits and
the emotions even of animals by the brightness of moonlight nights, it is
perhaps not extravagant to suppose that, on organisms already ancestrally
predisposed to the influence of rhythm in general and of cosmic rhythm in
particular, the periodically recurring full moon, not merely by its
stimulation of the nervous system, but possibly by the special
opportunities which it gave for the exercise of the sexual functions,
served to implant a lunar rhythm on menstruation. How important such a
factor may be we have evidence in the fact that the daily life of even the
most civilized peoples is still regulated by a weekly cycle which is
apparently a segment of the cosmic lunar cycle.
Mantegazza has suggested that the sexual period became established with
relation to the lunar period because moonlight nights were favorable to
courting,[80] and Nelson remarks that in his experience young and robust
persons are subject to recurrent periods of wakefulness at night which
they attribute to the action of the full moon. One may perhaps refer also
to the tendency of bright moonlight to stir the emotions of the young,
especially at puberty, a tendency which in neurotic persons may become
almost morbid.[81]
It is interesting to point out that, the farther back we are able to trace
the beginnings of culture, the more important we find the part played by
the moon. Next to the alteration of day and night, the moon's changes are
the most conspicuous and startling phenomena of Nature; they first suggest
a basis for reckoning time; they are of the greatest use in primitive
agriculture; and everywhere the moon is held to have vast influence on the
whole of organic life. Hahn has suggested that the reason why mythological
systems do not usually present the moon in the supreme position which we
should expect, is that its immense importance is so ancient a fact that it
tends, with mythological development, to become overlaid by other
elements.[82] According to Seler, Quetzalcouatl and Tezeatlipoca, the two
most considerable figures in the Mexican pantheon, are to be regarded
mainly as complementary forms of the moon divinity, and the moon was the
chief Mexican measurer of time.[83] Even in Babylonia, where the sun was
most specially revered, at the earliest period the moon ranked higher,
being gradually superseded by the worship of the sun.[84] Although such
considerations as these will by no means take us as far back as the
earliest appearance of menstruation, they may serve to indicate that the
phases of the moon probably played a large part in the earliest evolution
of man. With that statement we must at present rest content.
It is possible that the monthly character of menstruation, while
representing a general tendency of the human race, always and everywhere
prevalent, may be modified in the future. It is a noteworthy fact that
among many primitive races menstruation only occurs at long intervals.
Thus among Eskimo women menstruation follows the peculiar cosmic
conditions to which the people are subjected; Cook, the ethnologist of the
Peary North Greenland expedition, found that menstruation only began after
the age of nineteen, and that it was usually suppressed during the winter
months, when there is no sun, only about one in ten women continuing to
menstruate during this period.[85] It was stated by Velpeau that Lapland
and Greenland women usually only menstruate every three months, or even
only two or three times during the year. On the Faroe Islands it is said
that menstruation is frequently absent. Among the Samoyeds, Mantegazza
mentions that menstruation is so slight that some travelers have denied
its existence. Azara noted among the Guaranis of Paraguay that
menstruation was not only slight in amount, but the periods were separated
by long intervals. Among the Indians in North America, again, menstruation
appears to be scanty. Thus, Holder, speaking of his experience with the
Crow Indians of Montana, says: "I am quite sure that full-blood Indians in
this latitude do not menstruate so freely as white women, not usually
exceeding three days."[86] Among the naked women of Tierra del Fuego, it
is said that there is often no physical sign of the menses for six months
at a time. These observations are noteworthy, though they clearly
indicate, on the whole, that primitiveness in race is a very powerless
factor without a cold climate. On the other hand, again, there is some
reason to suppose that in Europe there is a latent tendency in some women
for the menstrual cycle to split up further into two cycles, by the
appearance of a latent minor climax in the middle of the monthly interval.
I allude to the phenomenon usually called _Mittelschmerz_, middle period,
or intermenstrual pain.
Since the investigat