Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1: The Evolution of Modesty; The Phenomena of Sexual Periodicity; Auto-ErotismEllis, Havelock
Science
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1: The Evolution of Modesty; The Phenomena of Sexual Periodicity; Auto-Erotism
Ellis, Havelock
Sex; Sex (Psychology)
This economic factor necessarily involved the introduction of a new moral
element into modesty. If a woman's chastity is the property of another
person, it is essential that she shall be modest in order that men may not
be tempted to incur the penalties involved by the infringement of property
rights. Thus modesty is strictly inculcated on women in order that men may
be safeguarded from temptation. The fact was overlooked that modesty is
itself a temptation. Immodesty being, on this ground, disapproved by men,
a new motive for modesty is furnished to women. In the book which the
Knight of the Tower, Landry, wrote in the fourteenth century, for the
instruction of his daughters, this factor of modesty is naïvely revealed.
He tells his daughters of the trouble that David got into through the
thoughtlessness of Bathsheba, and warns them that "every woman ought
religiously to conceal herself when dressing and washing, and neither out
of vanity nor yet to attract attention show either her hair, or her neck,
or her breast, or any part which ought to be covered." Hinton went so far
as to regard what he termed "body modesty," as entirely a custom imposed
upon women by men with the object of preserving their own virtue. While
this motive is far from being the sole source of modesty, it must
certainly be borne in mind as an inevitable outcome of the economic factor
of modesty.
In Europe it seems probable that the generally accepted conceptions of
mediæval chivalry were not without influence in constituting the forms in
which modesty shows itself among us. In the early middle ages there seems
to have been a much greater degree of physical familiarity between the
sexes than is commonly found among barbarians elsewhere. There was
certainly considerable promiscuity in bathing and indifference to
nakedness. It seems probable, as Durkheim points out,[56] that this state
of things was modified in part by the growing force of the dictates of
Christian morality, which regarded all intimate approaches between the
sexes as sinful, and in part by the influence of chivalry with its
æsthetic and moral ideals of women, as the representative of all the
delicacies and elegancies of civilization. This ideal was regarded as
incompatible with the familiarities of the existing social relationships
between the sexes, and thus a separation, which at first existed only in
art and literature, began by a curious reaction to exert an influence on
real life.
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