Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of SexThomas, William Isaac
Science
Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex
Thomas, William Isaac
Sex; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
umbrella, with drums, sankos, horns, and various musical
instruments, cased in gold, about the thickness of cartridge
paper; large circles of gold hung by scarlet cloth from the
swords of state;... hatchets of the same were intermixed with
them; the breasts of the Ochras and various attendants were
adorned with large stars, stools, crescents, and gossamer
wings of solid gold.[165]
It is not surprising that the characteristically sexual method of
display and emotional appeal should be associated with the earlier
efforts at adjustment, both in the individual and in the state. This
method is based on the instincts, and just as inhibition and brain
legislation follow the instincts in point of development, a rational
mode of control, individual and public, is developed later than the
emotional form, or, at any rate, is not at first independent of it.
The origin of mental impressionability seems to lie then, not in one,
but in the two general regions of activity--that connected with the
struggle for food and that connected with reproduction. The strain
on the attention in the food and conflict side of life involves
the development of mental impressionability, particularly of an
impressionability on the side of cognition. But in addition we have
the impressionability growing out of sexual life which has been in
question above, and which is more closely related to appreciation than
to cognition. And of these two aspects of impressionability--the one
growing out of conflict and the one growing out of reproduction--the
latter has more social possibilities than the former, because it
implies a sympathetic rather than an antagonistic organic attitude. It
is certainly in virtue of susceptibility to the opinion of others that
society works--through public opinion, fashion, tradition, reproof,
encouragement, precept, and doctrine--to bring the individual
under control and make him a member of society; and it is doubtful
whether this could have been accomplished if a peculiar attitude
of responsiveness to opinion had not arisen in sexual relations,
reinforcing the more general and cognitive impressionability.
Without this capacity to be influenced the individual would be in the
condition of the hardened criminal, and society would be impossible.
This sex-susceptibility, which was originally developed as an
accessory of reproduction and had no social meaning whatever, has
thus, in the struggle of society to obtain a hold on the individual,
become a social factor of great importance, and together with another
product of sexual life--the love of offspring--it is, I suspect, the
most immediate source of our sympathetic attitudes in general, and an
important force in the development of the ideal, moral, and aesthetic
sides of life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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