The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilization: Translated from the Sixth German EditionBloch, Iwan
Philosophy
The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilization: Translated from the Sixth German Edition
Bloch, Iwan
Sex; Sexual ethics
The physical difference between man and woman is also beyond question
the principal cause of the difference between masculine and feminine
clothing. According to Waldeyer (Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth
Congress of Anthropologists at Kassel, 1895, published in the _Journal
of the German Society of Anthropologists_, No. 9, p. 76), it is
especially the difference in the length and position of the thigh-bones
that is responsible for the differentiation between masculine and
feminine clothing. In woman, the upper ends of the femora are, in
consequence of the greater width of the pelvis, more widely separated
than in the male; and since in both sexes these bones are closely
approximated at the knees, in women their position appears more oblique.
This, in combination with the comparative shortness of women’s thighs,
has a manifest influence upon the gait, especially in running, in which
man distinctly excels woman. In this purely anatomical difference is to
be found the reason why the masculine mode of dress, which makes the
lower extremities very manifest, is not adapted for woman, especially
when in the upright posture. This is an important cause for the
differentiation between masculine and feminine clothing.
A further fundamental difference between the clothing of man and that of
woman is the much greater simplicity and monotony, on the whole, of
masculine clothing. This has, with good reason, been associated with the
greater intellectual differentiation of man, who, therefore, stands less
in need of any peculiar accentuation of the individual personality by
means of clothing. Woman, who earlier was =only= a sexual being,
utilized clothing in manifold ways as a means of sexual allurement, as
the chief means of compensation for the life of activity denied her by
Nature and custom, whereas to man, on the whole, the employment of
sexual stimulation by means of clothing was superfluous.
Georg Simmel writes from another point of view. He is of opinion that
woman, in comparison with man, is, on the whole, the more constant
being, but that precisely this constancy, which expresses the equability
and unity of her nature on the emotional side, demands, on the
principle of compensation of vital tendencies, a more active variability
in other less central provinces; whereas, on the contrary, man, in his
very nature less constant, who is not accustomed to cleave with the same
unconditional concentration of all vital interests to any once
experienced emotional relationship, precisely in consequence of this,
stands less in need of such external variability. Man, as regards
objective phenomena, is, on the whole, more indifferent than woman,
because fundamentally he is the more variable being, and therefore can
more easily dispense with such objective variability.[120]
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