[6] Bell, "A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love Between the Sexes,"
_American Journal Psychology_, July, 1902.
[7] Professor Starbuck (_Psychology of Religion_, Chapter XXX) refers to
unpublished investigations showing that recognition of the rights of
others also exhibits a sudden increment at the age of puberty.
[8] Perez, _L'Enfant de Trois à Sept Ans_, 1886, pp. 267-277.
[9] It must be remembered that the Medicean Venus is merely a
comparatively recent and familiar embodiment of a natural attitude which
is very ancient, and had impressed sculptors at a far earlier period.
Reinach, indeed, believes ("La Sculpture en Europe," _L'Anthropologie_,
No. 5, 1895) that the hand was first brought to the breast to press out
the milk, and expresses the idea of exuberance, and that the attitude of
the Venus of Medici as a symbol of modesty came later; he remarks that, as
regards both hands, this attitude may be found in a figurine of Cyprus,
2,000 years before Christ. This is, no doubt, correct, and I may add that
Babylonian figurines of Ishtar, the goddess of fertility, represent her as
clasping her hands to her breasts or her womb.
[10] When there is no sexual fear the impulse of modesty may be entirely
inhibited. French ladies under the old Régime (as A. Franklin points out
in his _Vie Privée d'Autrefois_) sometimes showed no modesty towards their
valets, not admitting the possibility of any sexual advance, and a lady
would, for example, stand up in her bath while a valet added hot water by
pouring it between her separated feet.
[11] I do not hereby mean to deny a certain degree of normal periodicity
even to the human male; but such periodicity scarcely involves any element
of sexual fear or attitude of sexual defence, in man because it is too
slight to involve complete latency of the sexual functions, in other
species because latency of sexual function in the male is always
accompanied by corresponding latency in the female.
[12] H. Northcote, _Christianity and the Sex Problem_, p. 8. Crawley had
previously argued (_The Mystic Rose_, pp. 134, 180) that this same
necessity for solitude during the performance of nutritive, sexual, and
excretory functions, is a factor in investing such functions with a
potential sacredness, so that the concealment of them became a religious
duty.
[13] _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1878, p. 26.
[14] _Essais_, livre ii, Ch. XV.
[15] _Monsieur Nicolas_, vol. i, p. 89.
[16] Lane, _Arabian Society_, p. 228. The Arab insistence on the value of
virginal modesty is well brought out in one of the most charming stories
of the _Arabian Nights_, "The History of the Mirror of Virginity."
[17] This has especially been emphasized by Crawley, _The Mystic Rose_,
pp. 181, 324 et seq., 353.
[18] _Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, Bd. II, Heft 8, p. 358.
[19] This, however, is not always or altogether true of experienced women.
Thus, the Russian correspondent already referred to, who as a youth was
accustomed, partly out of shyness, to feign complete ignorance of sexual
matters, informs me that it repeatedly happened to him at this time that
young married women took pleasure in imposing on themselves, not without
shyness but with evident pleasure, the task of initiating him, though they
always hastened to tell him that it was for his good, to preserve him from
bad women and masturbation. Prostitutes, also, often take pleasure in
innocent men, and Hans Ostwald tells (_Sexual-Probleme_, June, 1908, p.
357) of a prostitute who fell violently in love with a youth who had never
known a woman before; she had never met an innocent man before, and it
excited her greatly. And I have been told of an Italian prostitute who
spoke of the exciting pleasure which an unspoilt youth gave her by his
freshness, _tutta questa freschezza_.
[20] _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Part III, Sect. III. Mem. IV. Subs. I.
[21] N. Venette, _La Génération de l'Homme_, Part II, Ch. X.
[22] _Monsieur Nicolas_, vol. i, p. 94.
[23] Kryptadia, vol. ii, p. 26, 31. Ib. vol. iii, p. 162.
[24] "Modesty is, at first," said Renouvier, "a fear which we have of
displeasing others, and of blushing at our own natural imperfections."
(Renouvier and Prat, _La Nouvelle Monadologie_, p. 221.)
[25] C. Richet, "Les Causes du Dégoût," _L'Homme et l'Intelligence_, 1884.
This eminent physiologist's elaborate study of disgust was not written as
a contribution to the psychology of modesty, but it forms an admirable
introduction to the investigation of the social factor of modesty.
[26] It is interesting to note that where, as among the Eskimo, urine, for
instance, is preserved as a highly-valuable commodity, the act of
urination, even at table, is not regarded as in the slightest degree
disgusting or immodest (Bourke, _Scatologic Rites_, p. 202).
[27] Hawkesworth, _An Account of the Voyages_, etc., 1775, vol. ii, p. 52.
[28] _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, vol. vi, p. 173.
[29] Stevens, "Mittheilungen aus dem Frauenleben der Orang Belendas,"
_Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, Heft 4, p. 167, 1896. Crawley, (_Mystic
Rose_, Ch. VIII, p. 439) gives numerous other instances, even in Europe,
with, however, special reference to sexual taboo. I may remark that
English people of lower class, especially women, are often modest about
eating in the presence of people of higher class. This feeling is, no
doubt, due, in part, to the consciousness of defective etiquette, but that
very consciousness is, in part, a development of the fear of causing
disgust, which is a component of modesty.
[30] Shame in regard to eating, it may be added, occasionally appears as a
neurasthenic obsession in civilization, and has been studied as a form of
psychasthenia by Janet. See e.g., (Raymond and Janet, _Les Obsessions et
la Psychasthénie_, vol. ii, p. 386) the case of a young girl of 24, who,
from the age of 12 or 13 (the epoch of puberty) had been ashamed to eat in
public, thinking it nasty and ugly to do so, and arguing that it ought
only to be done in private, like urination.
[31] "Desire and disgust are curiously blended," remarks Crawley (_The
Mystic Rose_, p. 139), "when, with one's own desire unsatisfied, one sees
the satisfaction of another; and here we may see the altruistic stage
beginning; this has two sides, the fear of causing desire in others, and
the fear of causing disgust; in each case, personal isolation is the
psychological result."
[32] Hohenemser argues that the fear of causing disgust cannot be a part
of shame. But he also argues that shame is simply psychic stasis, and it
is quite easy to see, as in the above case, that the fear of causing
disgust is simply a manifestation of psychic stasis. There is a conflict
in the woman's mind between the idea of herself which she has already
given, and the more degraded idea of herself which she fears she is likely
to give, and this conflict is settled when she is made to feel that the
first idea may still be maintained under the new circumstances.
[33] We neither of us knew that we had merely made afresh a very ancient
discovery. Casanova, more than a century ago, quoted the remark of a
friend of his, that the easiest way to overcome the modesty of a woman is
to suppose it non-existent; and he adds a saying, which he attributes to
Clement of Alexandria, that modesty, which seems so deeply rooted in
women, only resides in the linen that covers them, and vanishes when it
vanishes. The passage to which Casanova referred occurs in the
_Pædagogus_, and has already been quoted. The observation seems to have
appealed strongly to the Fathers, always glad to make a point against
women, and I have met with it in Cyprian's _De Habitu Feminarum_. It also
occurs in Jerome's treatise against Jovinian. Jerome, with more scholarly
instinct, rightly presents the remark as a quotation: "_Scribit Herodotus
quod mulier cum veste deponat et verecundiam_." In Herodotus the saying is
attributed to Gyges (Book I, Chapter VIII). We may thus trace very far
back into antiquity an observation which in English has received its
classical expression from Chaucer, who, in his "Wife of Bath's Prologue,"
has:--
"He sayde, a woman cast hir shame away,
When she cast of hir smok."
I need not point out that the analysis of modesty offered above robs this
venerable saying of any sting it may have possessed as a slur upon women.
In such a case, modesty is largely a doubt as to the spectator's attitude,
and necessarily disappears when that doubt is satisfactorily resolved. As
we have seen, the Central Australian maidens were very modest with regard
to the removal of their single garment, but when that removal was
accomplished and accepted, they were fearless.
[34] The same result occurs more markedly under the deadening influence of
insanity. Grimaldi (_Il Manicomio Moderno_, 1888) found that modesty is
lacking in 50 per cent, of the insane.
[35] For some facts bearing on this point, see Houssay, _Industries of
Animals_, Chapter VII. "The Defence and Sanitation of Dwellings;" also P.
Ballion, _De l'Instinct de Propreté chez les Animaux_.
[36] Thus, Stevens mentions (_Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, p. 182, 1897)
that the Dyaks of Malacca always wash the sexual organs, even after
urination, and are careful to use the left hand in doing so. The left hand
is also reserved for such uses among the Jekris of the Niger coast
(_Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, p. 122, 1898).
[37] Lombroso and Ferrero--who adopt the derivation of _pudor_ from
_putere_; i.e., from the repugnance caused by the decomposition of the
vaginal secretions--consider that the fear of causing disgust to men is
the sole origin of modesty among savage women, as also it remains the sole
form of modesty among some prostitutes to-day. (_La Donna Delinquente_, p.
540.) Important as this factor is in the constitution of the emotion of
modesty, I need scarcely add that I regard so exclusive a theory as
altogether untenable.
[38] _Das Weib_, Ch. VI.
[39] For references as to a similar feeling among other savages, see
Westermarck, _History of Human Marriage_, p. 152.
[40] See e.g., Bourke, _Scatologic Rites_, pp. 141, 145, etc.
[41] Crawley, op. cit., Ch. VII.
[42] S, Reinach, _Cultes, Mythes et Religions_, p. 172.
[43] Tertullian, _De Virginibus Velandis_, cap. 17. Hottentot women, also
(Fritsch, _Eingeborene Südafrika's_, p. 311), cover their head with a
cloth, and will not be persuaded to remove it.
[44] Wellhausen, _Reste Arabischen Heidentums_, p. 196. The same custom is
found among Tuareg men though it is not imperative for the women
(Duveyrier, _Les Touaregs du Nord_, p. 291).
[45] Quoted in _Zentralblatt für Anthropologie_, 1906, Heft I, p. 21.
[46] Or rather, perhaps, because the sight of their nakedness might lead
the angels into sin. See W.G. Sumner, _Folkways_, p. 431.
[47] In Moruland, Emin Bey remarked that women are mostly naked, but some
wear a girdle, with a few leaves hanging behind. The women of some negro
tribes, who thus cover themselves behind, if deprived of this sole
covering, immediately throw themselves on the ground on their backs, in
order to hide their nakedness.
[48] E.g., Letourneau, _L'Evolution de la Morale_, p. 146.
[49] Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 683.
[50] J.R. Forster, _Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World_,
1728, p. 395.
[51] Westermarck (_History of Human Marriage_, Ch. IX) ably sets forth
this argument, with his usual wealth of illustration. Crawley (_Mystic
Rose_, p. 135) seeks to qualify this conclusion by arguing that tattooing,
etc., of the sex organs is not for ornament but for the purpose of
magically insulating the organs, and is practically a permanent amulet or
charm.
[52] _Iliad_, II, 262. Waitz gives instances (_Anthropology_, p. 301)
showing that nakedness is sometimes a mark of submission.
[53] The Celtic races, in their days of developed barbarism, seem to have
been relatively free from the idea of proprietorship in women, and it was
probably among the Irish (as we learn from the seventeenth century
_Itinerary_ of Fynes Moryson) that the habit of nakedness was longest
preserved among the upper social class women of Western Europe.
[54] A.B. Ellis, _Tshi-Speaking Peoples_, p. 280.
[55] Burnet, _Life and Death of Rochester_, p. 110.
[56] _L'Année Sociologique_, seventh year, 1904, p. 439.
[57] Tallemont des Réaux, who began to write his _Historiettes_ in 1657,
says of the Marquise de Rambouillet: "Elle est un peu trop délicate ... on
n'oscrait prononcer le mot de _cul_. Cela va dans l'excès." Half a century
later, in England, Mandeville, in the Remarks appended to his _Fable of
the Bees_, refers to the almost prudish modesty inculcated on children
from their earliest years.
[58] In one of its civilized developments, this ritualized modesty becomes
prudery, which is defined by Forel (_Die Sexuelle Frage_, Fifth ed., p.
125) as "codified sexual morality." Prudery is fossilized modesty, and no
longer reacts vitally. True modesty, in an intelligent civilized person,
is instinctively affected by motives and circumstances, responding
sensitively to its relationships.
[59] _Memoires de Madame d'Epinay_, Part I, Ch. V. Thirty years earlier,
Mandeville had written, in England, that "the modesty of women is the
result of custom and education."
[60] Goncourt, _Histoire de la Société Française pendant le Directoire_,
p. 422. Clothes became so gauze-like, and receded to such an extent from
the limbs, that for a time the chemise was discarded as an awkward and
antiquated garment.
[61] _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1901, Heft 2, p. 179.
[62] In the rural districts of Hanover, Pastor Grashoff states, "even when
natural necessities are performed with the greatest possible freedom,
there is no offence to modesty, in rural opinion." But he makes a
statement which is both contradictory and false, when he adds that
"modesty is, to the country man in general, a foreign idea."
(_Geschlechtlich-Sittliche Verhältnisse im Deutsche Reiche_, vol. ii, p.
45.)
[63] It is frequently stated that prostitutes are devoid of modesty, but
this is incorrect; they possess a partial and diminished modesty which,
for a considerable period still remains genuine (see e.g., Reuss, _La
Prostitution_, p. 58). Lombroso and Ferrero (_La Donna_, p. 540) refer to
the objection of prostitutes to be examined during the monthly periods as
often greater than that of respectable women. Again, Callari states
("Prostituzione in Sicilia," _Archivio di Psichiatria_, 1903, p. 205),
that Sicilian prostitutes can only with difficulty be persuaded to expose
themselves naked in the practice of their profession. Aretino long since
remarked (in _La Pippa_) that no women so detest gratuitous _décolletage_
as prostitutes. When prostitutes do not possess modesty, they frequently
simulate it, and Ferriani remarks (in his _Delinquenti Minorenni_) that of
ninety-seven minors (mostly females) accused of offences against public
decency, seventy-five simulated a modesty which, in his opinion, they were
entirely without.
III.
The Blush the Sanction of Modesty--The Phenomena of Blushing--Influences
Which Modify the Aptitude to Blush--Darkness, Concealment of the Face,
Etc.
It is impossible to contemplate this series of phenomena, so radically
persistent whatever its changes of form, and so constant throughout every
stage of civilization, without feeling that, although modesty cannot
properly be called an instinct, there must be some physiological basis to
support it. Undoubtedly such a basis is formed by that vasomotor mechanism
of which the most obvious outward sign is, in human beings, the blush. All
the allied emotional forms of fear--shame, bashfulness, timidity--are to
some extent upheld by this mechanism, but such is especially the case with
the emotion we are now concerned with.[64] The blush is the sanction of
modesty.
The blush is, indeed, only a part, almost, perhaps, an accidental
part, of the organic turmoil with which it is associated.
Partridge, who has studied the phenomena of blushing in one
hundred and twenty cases (_Pedagogical Seminary_, April, 1897),
finds that the following are the general symptoms: tremors near
the waist, weakness in the limbs, pressure, trembling, warmth,
weight or beating in the chest, warm wave from feet upward,
quivering of heart, stoppage and then rapid beating of heart,
coldness all over followed by heat, dizziness, tingling of toes
and fingers, numbness, something rising in throat, smarting of
eyes, singing in ears, prickling sensations of face, and pressure
inside head. Partridge considers that the disturbance is
primarily central, a change in the cerebral circulation, and that
the actual redness of the surface comes late in the nerve storm,
and is really but a small part of it.
There has been some discussion as to why, and indeed how far,
blushing is confined to the face. Henle (_Ueber das Erröthen_)
thought that we blush in the face because all nervous phenomena
produced by mental states appear first in the face, owing to the
anatomical arrangement of the nerves of the body. Darwin
(_Expression of the Emotions_) argued that attention to a part
tends to produce capillary activity in the part, and that the
face has been the chief object of attention. It has also been
argued, on the other hand, that the blush is the vestigial
remains of a general erethism of sex, in which shame originated;
that the blush was thus once more widely diffused, and is so
still among the women of some lower races, its limitation to the
face being due to sexual selection and the enhanced beauty thus
achieved. Féré once had occasion to examine, when completely
nude, a boy of thirteen whose sexual organs were deformed; when
accused of masturbation he became covered by a blush which spread
uniformly over his face, neck, body and limbs, before and behind,
except only the hands and feet. Féré asks whether such a
universal blush is more common than we imagine, or whether the
state of nudity favors its manifestation. (_Comptes Rendus,
Société de Biologie_, April 1, 1905.) It may be added that
Partridge mentions one case in which the hands blushed.
The sexual relationships of blushing are unquestionable. It occurs chiefly
in women; it attains its chief intensity at puberty and during
adolescence; its most common occasion is some more or less sexual
suggestion; among one hundred and sixty-two occasions of blushing
enumerated by Partridge, by far the most frequent cause was teasing,
usually about the other sex. "An erection," it has been said, "is a
blushing of the penis." Stanley Hall seems to suggest that the sexual
blush is a vicarious genital flushing of blood, diverted from the genital
sphere by an inhibition of fear, just as, in girls, giggling is also very
frequently a vicarious outlet of shame; the sexual blush would thus be the
outcome of an ancestral sex-fear; it is as an irradiation of sexual
erethism that the blush may contain an element of pleasure.[65]
Bloch remarks that the blush is sexual, because reddening of the
face, as well as of the genitals, is an accompaniment of sexual
emotion (_Beiträge zur Ætiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis_, Teil
II, p. 39). "Do you not think," a correspondent writes, "that
the sexual blush, at least, really represents a vaso-relaxor
effect quite the same as erection? The embarrassment which arises
is due to a perception of this fact under circumstances which are
felt to be unsuited for such a condition. There may arise the
fear of awakening disgust by the exhibition of a state which is
out of place. I have noticed that such a blush is produced when a
sufficiently young and susceptible woman is pumped full of
compliments. This blush seems accompanied by pleasure which does
not always change to fear or disgust, but is felt to be
attractive. When discomfort arises, most women say that they feel
this because 'it looks as if they had no control over
themselves.' When they feel that there is no need for control,
they no longer feel fear, and the relaxor effect has a wider
field of operation, producing a general rosiness, erection of
spinal sexual organs, etc. Such a blush would thus be a partial
sexual equivalent, and allow of the inhibition of other sexual
effects, through the warning it gives, and the fear aroused, as
well as being in itself a slight outlet of relaxor energy. When
the relationships of the persons concerned allow freedom to the
special sexual stimuli, as in marriage, blushing does not occur
so often, and when it does it has not so often the consequent of
fear."
There can be no doubt that the blush is sexually attractive. The
blush is the expression of an impulse to concealment and flight,
which tends automatically to arouse in the beholder the
corresponding impulse of pursuit, so that the central situation
of courtship is at once presented. Women are more or less
conscious of this, as well as men, and this recognition is an
added source of embarrassment when it cannot become a source of
pleasure. The ancient use of rouge testifies to the beauty of the
blush, and Darwin stated that, in Turkish slave-markets, the
girls who readily blushed fetched the highest prices. To evoke a
blush, even by producing embarrassment, is very commonly a cause
of masculine gratification.
Savages, both men and women, blush even beneath a dusky skin (for
the phenomenon of blushing among different races, see Waitz,
_Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, Bd. I, pp. 149-150), and it is
possible that natural selection, as well as sexual selection, has
been favorable to the development of the blush. It is scarcely an
accident that, as has been often observed, criminals, or the
antisocial element of the community--whether by the habits of
their lives or by congenital abnormality--blush less easily than
normal persons. Kroner (_Das körperliche Gefühl_, 1887, p. 130)
remarks: "The origin of a specific connection between shame and
blushing is the work of a _social selection_. It is certainly an
immediate advantage for a man not to blush; indirectly, however,
it is a disadvantage, because in other ways he will be known as
shameless, and on that account, as a rule, he will be shut out
from propagation. This social selection will be specially
exercised on the female sex, and on this account, women blush to
a greater extent, and more readily, than men."
The importance of the blush, and the emotional confusion behind it, as the
sanction of modesty is shown by the significant fact that, by lulling
emotional confusion, it is possible to inhibit the sense of modesty. In
other words, we are here in the presence of a fear--to a large extent a
sex-fear--impelling to concealment, and dreading self-attention; this fear
naturally disappears, even though its ostensible cause remains, when it
becomes apparent that there is no reason for fear.
That is the reason why nakedness in itself has nothing to do with modesty
or immodesty; it is the conditions under which the nakedness occurs which
determine whether or not modesty will be roused. If none of the factors of
modesty are violated, if no embarrassing self-attention is excited, if
there is a consciousness of perfect propriety alike in the subject and in
the spectator, nakedness is entirely compatible with the most scrupulous
modesty. A. Duval, a pupil of Ingres, tells that a female model was once
quietly posing, completely nude, at the École des Beaux Arts. Suddenly she
screamed and ran to cover herself with her garments. She had seen a
workman on the roof gazing inquisitively at her through a skylight.[66]
And Paola Lombroso describes how a lady, a diplomatist's wife, who went to
a gathering where she found herself the only woman in evening dress, felt,
to her own surprise, such sudden shame that she could not keep back her
tears.
It thus comes about that the emotion of modesty necessarily depends on
the feelings of the people around. The absence of the emotion by no means
signifies immodesty, provided that the reactions of modesty are at once
set in motion under the stress of a spectator's eye that is seen to be
lustful, inquisitive, or reproachful. This is proved to be the case among
primitive peoples everywhere. The Japanese woman, naked as in daily life
she sometimes is, remains unconcerned because she excites no disagreeable
attention, but the inquisitive and unmannerly European's eye at once
causes her to feel confusion. Stratz, a physician, and one, moreover, who
had long lived among the Javanese who frequently go naked, found that
naked Japanese women felt no embarrassment in his presence.
It is doubtless as a cloak to the blush that we must explain the curious
influence of darkness in restraining the manifestations of modesty, as
many lovers have discovered, and as we may notice in our cities after
dark. This influence of darkness in inhibiting modesty is a very ancient
observation. Burton, in the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, quotes from Dandinus
the saying "_Nox facit impudentes_," directly associating this with
blushing, and Bargagli, the Siennese novelist, wrote in the sixteenth
century that, "it is commonly said of women, that they will do in the dark
what they would not do in the light." It is true that the immodesty of a
large city at night is to some extent explained by the irruption of
prostitutes at that time; prostitutes, being habitually nearer to the
threshold of immodesty, are more markedly affected by this influence. But
it is an influence to which the most modest women are, at all events in
some degree, susceptible. It has, indeed, been said that a woman is always
more her real self in the dark than in the glare of daylight; this is part
of what Chamberlain calls her night-inspiration.
"Traces of the night-inspiration, of the influence of the
primitive fire-group, abound in woman. Indeed, it may be said
(the life of Southern Europe and of American society of to-day
illustrates this point abundantly) that she is, in a sense, a
night-being, for the activity, physical and moral, of modern
women (revealed e.g. in the dance and the nocturnal
intellectualities of society) in this direction is remarkable.
Perhaps we may style a good deal of her ordinary day-labor as
rest, or the commonplaces and banalities of her existence, her
evening and night life being the true side of her activities"
(A.F. Chamberlain, "Work and Rest," _Popular Science Monthly_,
March, 1902). Giessler, who has studied the general influence of
darkness on human psychic life, reaches conclusions which
harmonize with these (C.M. Giessler, "Der Einfluss der Dunkelheit
auf das Seelenleben des Menschen," _Vierteljahrsschrift für
wissenschaftliche Philosophie_, 1904, pp. 255-279). I have not
been able to see Giessler's paper, but, according to a summary of
it, he comes to the result that in the dark the soul's activities
are nearer to its motor pole than to its sensitive pole, and that
there is a tendency for phenomena belonging to the early period
of development to be prominent, motor memory functioning more
than representative memory, attention more than apperception,
imagination more than logical thinking, egoistic more than
altruistic morals.
It is curious to note that short-sightedness, naturally, though
illogically, tends to exert the same influence as darkness in this
respect; I am assured by short-sighted persons of both sexes that they are
much more liable to the emotions of shyness and modesty with their glasses
than without them; such persons with difficulty realize that they are not
so dim to others as others are to them. To be in the company of a blind
person seems also to be a protection against shyness.[67] It is
interesting to learn that congenitally blind children are as sensitive to
appearances as normal children, and blush as readily.[68] This would seem
to be due to the fact that the habitually blind have permanently adjusted
their mental focus to that of normal persons, and react in the same manner
as normal persons; blindness is not for them, as it is for the
short-sighted without their glasses, a temporary and relative, almost
unconscious refuge from clear vision.
It is, of course, not as the mere cloak of a possible blush that darkness
gives courage; it is because it lulls detailed self-realization, such
conscious self-realization being always a source of fears, and the blush
their definite symbol and visible climax. It is to the blush that we must
attribute a curious complementary relationship between the face and the
sacro-pubic region as centres of anatomical modesty. The women of some
African tribes who go naked, Emin Bey remarked, cover the face with the
hand under the influence of modesty. Martial long since observed (Lib.
iii, LXVIII) that when an innocent girl looks at the penis she gazes
through her fingers. Where, as among many Mohammedan peoples, the face is
the chief focus of modesty, the exposure of the rest of the body,
including sometimes even the sacro-pubic region, and certainly the legs
and thighs, often becomes a matter of indifference.[69]
This concealment of the face is more than a convention; it has a
psychological basis. We may observe among ourselves the well-marked
feminine tendency to hide the face in order to cloak a possible blush, and
to hide the eyes as a method of lulling self-consciousness, a method
fabulously attributed to the ostrich with the same end of concealment.[70]
A woman who is shy with her lover will sometimes experience little or no
difficulty in showing any part of her person provided she may cover her
face. When, in gynecological practice, examination of the sexual organs is
necessary, women frequently find evident satisfaction in concealing the
face with the hands, although not the slightest attention is being
directed toward the face, and when an unsophisticated woman is betrayed
into a confession which affects her modesty she is apt to turn her back to
her interlocutor. "When the face of woman is covered," it has been said,
"her heart is bared," and the Catholic Church has recognized this
psychological truth by arranging that in the confessional the penitent's
face shall not be visible. The gay and innocent freedom of southern women
during Carnival is due not entirely to the permitted license of the season
or the concealment of identity, but to the mask that hides the face. In
England, during Queen Elizabeth's reign and at the Restoration, it was
possible for respectable women to be present at the theatre, even during
the performance of the most free-spoken plays, because they wore masks.
The fan has often subserved a similar end.[71]
All such facts serve to show that, though the forms of modesty may change,
it is yet a very radical constituent of human nature in all stages of
civilization, and that it is, to a large extent, maintained by the
mechanism of blushing.
FOOTNOTES:
[64] Melinaud ("Pourquoi Rougit-on?" _Revue des Deux Mondes_, 1 Octobre,
1893) points out that blushing is always associated with fear, and
indicates, in the various conditions under which it may arise,--modesty,
timidity, confusion,--that we have something to conceal which we fear may
be discovered. "All the evidence," Partridge states, "seems to point to
the conclusion that the mental state underlying blushing belongs to the
fear family. The presence of the feeling of dread, the palpitation of the
heart, the impulse to escape, to hide, the shock, all confirms this view."
[65] G. Stanley Hall, "A Study of Fears," _American Journal Psychology_,
1897.
[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 investigations of Goodman, Stephenson, Van Ott, Reinl,
Jacobi, and others, it has been generally recognized that
menstruation is a continuous process, the flow being merely the
climax of a menstrual cycle, a physiological wave which is in
constant flux or reflux. This cycle manifests itself in all a
woman's activities, in metabolism, respiration, temperature,
etc., as well as on the nervous and psychic side. The healthier
the woman is, the less conscious is the cyclic return of her
life, but the cycle may be traced (as Hegar has found) even
before puberty takes place, while Salerni has found that even in
amenorrhoea the menstrual cycle still manifests itself in the
temperature and respiration. (_Rivista Sperimentale di
Freniatria_, XXX, fasc. 2-3.)
For a summary of the phenomena of the menstrual cycle, see
Havelock Ellis, _Man and Woman_, fourth ed., revised and
enlarged, Ch. XI; "The Functional Periodicity of Women." Cf.
Keller, _Archives Générales de Médecine_, May, 1897; Hegar,
_Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie_, 1901, Heft 2 and 3;
Helen MacMurchy, _Lancet_, Oct. 5. 1901; A.E. Giles,
_Transactions Obstetrical Society London_, vol. xxxix, p. 115,
etc.
_Mittelschmerz_ is a condition of pain occurring about the middle
of the intermenstrual period, either alone or accompanied by a
slight sanguineous discharge, or, more frequently, a
non-sanguineous discharge. (In a case described by Van Voornveld,
the manifestation was confined to a regularly occurring rise of
temperature.) The phenomenon varies, but seems usually to occur
about the fourteenth day, and to last two or three days. Laycock,
in 1840 (_Nervous Diseases of Women_, p. 46), gave instances of
women with an intermenstrual period. Depaul and Guéniot
(_Dictionnaire Encyclopédique des Sciences Médicales_, Art.,
"Menstruation," p. 694) speak of intermenstrual symptoms, and
even actual flow, as occurring in women who are in a perfect
state of health, and constituting genuine "_règles
surnuméraries_." The condition is, however, said to have been
first fully described by Valleix; then, in 18725 by Sir William
Priestley; and subsequently by Fehling, Fasbender, Sorel,
Halliday Croom, Findley, Addinsell, and others. (See, for
instance, "Mittelschmerz," by J. Halliday Croom, _Transactions of
Edinburgh Obstetrical Society_, vol. xxi, 1896. Also, Krieger,
_Menstruation_, pp. 68-69.) Fliess (_Die Beziehungen zwischen
Nase und weiblichen Geschlechts-Organen_, p. 118) goes so far as
to assert that an intermenstrual period of menstrual
symptoms--which he terms _Nebenmenstruation_--is "a phenomenon
well known to most healthy women." Observations are at present
too few to allow any definite conclusions, and in some of the
cases so far recorded a pathological condition of the sexual
organs has been found to exist. Rosner, of Cracow, however, found
that only in one case out of twelve was there any disease present
(_La Gynécologie_, June, 1905), and Storer, who has met with
twenty cases, insists on the remarkable and definite regularity
of the manifestations, wholly unlike those of neuralgia (_Boston
Medical and Surgical Journal_, April 19, 1900). There is no
agreement as to the cause of _Mittelschmerz_. Addinsell
attributed it to disease of the Fallopian tubes. This, however,
is denied by such competent authorities as Cullingworth and Bland
Sutton. Others, like Priestley, and subsequently Marsh (_American
Journal of Obstetrics_, July, 1897), have sought to find the
explanation in the occurrence of ovulation. This theory is,
however, unsupported by facts, and eventually rests on the
exploded belief that ovulation is the cause of menstruation.
Rosner, following Richelet, vaguely attributes it to the diffused
hyperæmia which is generally present. Van de Velde also
attributes it to an abnormal fall of vascular tone, causing
passive congestion of the pelvic viscera. Others again, like
Armand Routh and MacLean, in the course of an interesting
discussion on _Mittelschmerz_ at the Obstetric Society of London,
on the second day of March, 1898, believe that we may trace here
a double menstruation, and would explain the phenomenon by
assuming that in certain cases there is an intermenstrual as well
as a menstrual cycle. The question is not yet ripe for
settlement, though it is fully evident that, looking broadly at
the phenomena of rut and menstruation, the main basis of their
increasing frequency as we rise toward civilized man is increase
of nutrition, heat and sunlight being factors of nutrition. When
dealing with civilized man, however, we are probably concerned
not merely with general nutrition, but with the nervous direction
of that nutrition.
At this stage it is natural to inquire what the corresponding phenomena
are among animals. Unfortunately, imperfect as is our comprehension of the
human phenomena, our knowledge of the corresponding phenomena among
animals is much more fragmentary and incomplete. Among most animals
menstruation does not exist, being replaced by what is known as heat, or
oestrus, which usually occurs once or twice a year, in spring and in
autumn, sometimes affecting the male as well as the female.[87] There is,
however, a great deal of progression in the upward march of the phenomena,
as we approach our own and allied zoölogical series. Heat in domesticated
cows usually occurs every three weeks. The female hippopotamus in the
Zoölogical Gardens has been observed to exhibit monthly sexual excitement,
with swelling and secretion from the vulva. Progression is not only toward
greater frequency with higher evolution or with increased domestication,
but there is also a change in the character of the flow. As Wiltshire,[88]
in his remarkable lectures on the "Comparative Physiology of
Menstruation," asserted as a law, the more highly evolved the animal, the
more sanguineous the catamenial flow.
It is not until we reach the monkeys that this character of the flow
becomes well marked. Monthly sanguineous discharges have been observed
among many monkeys. In the seventeenth century various observers in many
parts of the world--Bohnius, Peyer, Helbigius, Van der Wiel, and
others--noted menstruation in monkeys.[89] Buffon observed it among
various monkeys as well as in the orang-utan. J.G. St. Hilaire and Cuvier,
many years ago, declared that menstruation exists among a variety of
monkeys and lower apes. Rengger described a vaginal discharge in a species
of cebus in Paraguay, while Raciborski observed in the Jardin des Plantes
that the menstrual hæmorrhage in guenons was so abundant that the floor of
the cage was covered by it to a considerable extent; the same variety of
monkey was observed at Surinam, by Hill, a surgeon in the Dutch army, who
noted an abundant sanguineous flow occurring at every new moon, and
lasting about three days, the animal at this time also showing signs of
sexual excitement.[90]
The macaque and the baboon appear to be the non-human animals, in which
menstruation has been most carefully observed. In the former, besides the
flow, Bland Sutton remarks that "all the naked or pale-colored parts of
the body, such as the face, neck, and ischial regions, assume a lively
pink color; in some cases, it is a vivid red."[91] The flow is slight, but
the coloring lasts several days, and in warm weather the labia are much
swollen.
Heape[92] has most fully and carefully described menstruation in monkeys.
He found at Calcutta that the _Macacus cynomolgus_ menstruated regularly
on the 20th of December, 20th of January, and about the 20th of February.
The _Cynocephalus porcaria_ and the _Semnopithecus entellus_ both
menstruated each month for about four days. In the _Macaci rhesus_ and
_cynomolgus_ at menstruation "the nipples and vulva become swollen and
deeply congested, and the skin of the buttocks swollen, tense, and of a
brilliant-red or even purple color. The abdominal wall also, for a short
space upward, and the inside of the thighs, sometimes as far down as the
heel, and the under surface of the tail for half its length or more, are
all colored a vivid red, while the skin of the face, especially about the
eyes, is flushed or blotched with red." In late gestation the coloring is
still more vivid. Something similar is to be seen in the males also.
Distant, who kept a female baboon for some time, has recorded the dates of
menstruation during a year. He found that nine periods occurred during the
year. The average length between the periods was nearly six weeks, but
they occurred more frequently in the late autumn and the winter than in
the summer.[93]
It is an interesting fact, Heape noted, that, notwithstanding
menstruation, the seasonal influence, or rut, still persisted in the
monkeys he investigated.
In the anthropoid apes, Hartmann remarks that several observers have
recorded periodic menstruation in the chimpanzee, with flushing and
enlargement of the external parts, and protrusion of the external lips,
which are not usually visible, while there is often excessive enlargement
and reddening of these parts and of the posterior callosities during
sexual excitement. Very little, however, appears to be definitely known
regarding any form of menstruation in the higher apes. M. Deniker, who has
made a special study of the anthropoid apes, informs me that he has so far
been unable to make definite observations regarding the existence of
menstruation. Moll remarks that he received information regarding such a
phenomenon in the orang-utan. A pair of orang-utans was kept in the Berlin
Zoölogical Gardens some years ago, and the female was stated to have at
intervals a menstrual flow resembling that of women, and during this
period to refrain from sexual congress, which was otherwise usually
exercised at regular intervals, at least every two or three days; Moll
adds, however, that, while his informant is a reliable man, the length of
time that has elapsed may have led him to make mistakes in details. Keith,
in a paper read before the Zoölogical Society of London, has described
menstruation in a chimpanzee; it occurred every twenty-third or
twenty-fourth day, and lasted for three days; the discharge was profuse,
and first appeared in about the ninth or tenth year.[94]
What is menstruation? It is easy to describe it, by its obvious symptoms,
as a monthly discharge of blood from the uterus, but nearly as much as
that was known in the infancy of the world. When we seek to probe more
intimately into the nature of menstruation we are still baffled, not
merely as regards its cause, but even as regards its precise mechanism.
"The primary cause of menstruation remains unexplained"; "the cause of
menstruation remains as obscure as ever"; so conclude two of the most
thorough and cautious investigators into this subject.[95] It is, however,
widely accepted that the main cause of menstruation is a rhythmic
contraction of the uterus,--the result of a disappointed preparation for
impregnation,--a kind of miniature childbirth. This seems to be the most
reasonable view of menstruation; i.e., as an abortion of a decidua.
Burdach (according to Beard) was the first who described menstruation as
an abortive parturition. "The hypothesis," Marshall and Jolly conclude,
"that the entire pro-oestrous process is of the nature of a preparation
for the lodgment of the ovum is in accordance with the facts."[96]
Fortunately, since we are here primarily concerned with its psychological
aspects, the precise biological cause and physiological nature of
menstruation do not greatly concern us.
There is, however, one point which of late years has been definitely
determined, and which should not be passed without mention: the relation
of menstruation to ovulation. It was once supposed that the maturation of
an ovule in the ovaries was the necessary accompaniment, and even cause,
of menstruation. We now know that ovulation proceeds throughout the whole
of life, even before birth, and during gestation,[97] and that removal of
the ovaries by no means necessarily involves a cessation of menstruation.
It has been shown that regular and even excessive menstruation may take
place in the congenital absence of a trace of ovaries or Fallopian
tubes.[98] On the other hand, a rudimentary state of the uterus, and a
complete absence of menstruation, may exist with well-developed ovaries
and normal ovulation.[99] We must regard the uterus as to some extent an
independent organ, and menstruation as a process which arose, no doubt,
with the object, teleologically speaking, of cooperating more effectively
with ovulation, but has become largely independent.[100]
It is sometimes stated that menstruation may be entirely absent
in perfect health. Few cases of this condition have, however,
been recorded with the detail necessary to prove the assertion.
One such case was investigated by Dr. H.W. Mitchell, and
described in a paper read to the New York County Medical Society,
February 22, 1892 (to be found in _Medical Reprints_, June,
1892). The subject was a young, unmarried woman, 24 years of age.
She was born in Ireland, and, until her emigration, lived quietly
at home with her parents. Being then twenty years of age, she
left home and came to New York. Up to that time no signs of
menstruation had appeared, and she had never heard that such a
function existed. Soon after her arrival in New York, she
obtained a situation as a waiting-maid, and it was noticed, after
a time, that she was not unwell at each month. Friends filled her
ears with wild stories about the dreadful effects likely to
follow the absence of menstruation. This worried her greatly, and
as a consequence she became pale and anæmic, with loss of flesh,
appetite, and sleep, and a long train of imaginary nervous
symptoms. She presented herself for treatment, and insisted upon
a uterine examination. This revealed no pathological condition
of her uterus. She was assured that she would not die, or become
insane, nor a chronic invalid. In consequence she soon forgot
that she differed in any way from other girls. A course of
chalybeate tonics, generous diet, and proper care of her general
health, soon restored her to her normal condition. After close
observation for several years, she submitted to a thorough
examination, although entirely free from any abnormal symptoms.
The examination revealed the following physical condition:
Weight, 105 pounds (her weight before leaving Ireland was 130);
girth of chest, twenty-nine and a half inches; girth of abdomen,
twenty-five inches; girth of pelvis, thirty-four and a half
inches; girth of thigh, upper third, twenty inches; heart
healthy, sounds and rhythm perfectly normal; pulse, 76; lungs
healthy; respiratory murmur clear and distinct over every part;
respiration, easy and twenty per minute; the mammæ are well
developed, firm, and round; nipples, small, no areola; her skin
is soft, smooth, and healthy; figure erect, plump, and
symmetrical; her bowels are regular; kidneys, healthy. She has a
good appetite, sleeps well, and in no particular shows any sign
of ill health. The uterine examination reveals a short vagina,
and a small, round cervix uteri, rather less in size than the
average, and projecting very slightly into the vaginal canal.
Depth of uterus from os to fundus, two and a quarter inches, is
very nearly normal. No external sign of abnormal ovaries. She is
a well-developed, healthy young woman, performing all her
physiological functions naturally and regularly, except the
single function of menstruation. No vicarious menstruation takes
the place of the natural function, though she has been watched
very closely during the past two years, nor the least periodical
excitement. It is added that, though the clitoris is normal, the
mons veneris is almost destitute of hair, and the labia rather
undeveloped, while, "as far as is known," sexual instincts and
desire are entirely absent. These latter facts, I may add, would
seem to suggest that, in spite of the health of the subject,
there is yet some concealed lack of development of the sexual
system, of congenital character. In a case recorded by Plant
(_Centralblatt für Gynäkologie_, No. 9, 1896, summarized in the
_British Medical Journal_, April 4, 1896), in which the internal
sexual organs were almost wholly undeveloped, and menstruation
absent, the labia were similarly undeveloped, and the pubic hair
scanty, while the axillary hair was wholly absent, though that of
the head was long and strong.
We may now regard as purely academic the discussion formerly carried on as
to whether menstruation is to be regarded as analogous to heat in female
animals. For many centuries at least the resemblance has been sufficiently
obvious. Raciborski and Pouchet, who first established the regular
periodicity of ovulation in mammals, identified heat and
menstruation.[101] During the past century there was, notwithstanding, an
occasional tendency to deny any real connection. No satisfactory grounds
for this denial have, however, been brought forward. Lawson Tait, indeed,
and more recently Beard, have stated that menstruation cannot be the
period of heat, because women have a disinclination to the approach of the
male at that time.[102] But, as we shall see later, this statement is
unfounded. An argument which might, indeed, be brought forward is the very
remarkable fact that, while in animals the period of heat is the only
period for sexual intercourse, among all human races, from the very
lowest, the period of menstruation is the one period during which sexual
intercourse is strictly prohibited, sometimes under severe penalties, even
life itself. This, however, is a social, not a physiological, fact.
Ploss and Bartels call attention to the curious contrast, in this
respect, between heat and menstruation. The same authors also
mention that in the Middle Ages, however, preachers found it
necessary to warn their hearers against the sin of intercourse
during the menstrual period. It may be added that Aquinas and
many other early theologians held, not only that such intercourse
was a deadly sin, but that it engendered leprous and monstrous
children. Some later theologians, however, like Sanchez, argued
that the Mosaic enactments (such as Leviticus, Ch. XX, v. 18) no
longer hold good. Modern theologians--in part influenced by the
tolerant traditions of Liguori, and, in part, like Debreyne
(_Moechialogie_, pp. 275 et seq.) informed by medical science--no
longer prohibit intercourse during menstruation, or regard it as
only a venial sin.
We have here a remarkable, but not an isolated, example of the tendency of
the human mind in its development to rebel against the claims of primitive
nature. The whole of religion is a similar remolding of nature, a
repression of natural impulses, an effort to turn them into new channels.
Prohibition of intercourse during menstruation is a fundamental element of
savage ritual, an element which is universal merely because the conditions
which caused it are universal, and because--as is now beginning to be
generally recognized--the causes of human psychic evolution are everywhere
the same. A strictly analogous phenomenon, in the sexual sphere itself, is
the opposed attitude in barbarism and civilization toward the sexual
organs. Under barbaric conditions and among savages, when no
magico-religious ideas intervene, the sexual organs are beautiful and
pleasurable objects. Under modern conditions this is not so. This
difference of attitude is reflected in sculpture. In savage and barbaric
carvings of human beings, the sexual organs of both sexes are often
enormously exaggerated. This is true of the archaic European figures on
which Salomon Reinach has thrown so much light, but in modern sculpture,
from the time when it reached its perfection in Greece onward, the sexual
regions in both men and women are systematically minimized.[103]
With advancing culture--as again we shall see later--there is a conflict
of claims, and certain considerations are regarded as "higher" and more
potent than merely "natural" claims. Nakedness is more natural than
clothing, and on many grounds more desirable under the average
circumstances of life, yet, everywhere, under the stress of what are
regarded as higher considerations, there is a tendency for all races to
add more and more to the burden of clothes. In the same way it happens
that the tendency of the female to sexual intercourse during
menstruation[104] has everywhere been overlaid by the ideas of a culture
which has insisted on regarding menstruation as a supernatural phenomenon
which, for the protection of everybody, must be strictly tabooed.[105]
This tendency is reinforced, and in high civilization replaced, by the
claims of an æsthetic regard for concealment and reserve during this
period. Such facts are significant for the early history of culture, but
they must not blind us to the real analogy between heat and menstruation,
an analogy or even identity which may be said to be accepted now by most
careful investigators.[106]
If it is, perhaps, somewhat excessive to declare, with Johnstone, that
"woman is the only animal in which rut is omnipresent," we must admit that
the two groups of phenomena merge into or replace each other, that their
object is identical, that they involve similar psychic conditions. Here,
also, we see a striking example of the way in which women preserve a
primitive phenomenon which earlier in the zoölogical series was common to
both sexes, but which man has now lost. Heat and menstruation, with
whatever difference of detail, are practically the same phenomenon. We
cannot understand menstruation unless we bear this in mind.
On the psychic side the chief normal and primitive characteristic of the
menstrual state is the more predominant presence of the sexual impulse.
There are other mental and emotional signs of irritability and instability
which tend to slightly impair complete mental integrity, and to render, in
some unbalanced individuals explosions of anger or depression, in rarer
cases crime, more common;[107] but the heightening of the sexual impulse,
languor, shyness, and caprice are the more human manifestations of an
emotional state which in some of the lower female animals during heat may
produce a state of fury.
The actual period of the menstrual flow, at all events the first two or
three days, does not, among European women, usually appear to show any
heightening of sexual emotion.[108] This heightening occurs usually a few
days before, and especially during, the latter part of the flow, and
immediately after it ceases.[109] I have, however, convinced myself by
inquiry that this absence of sexual feeling during the height of the flow
is, in large part, apparent only. No doubt, the onset of the flow, often
producing a general depression of vitality, may tend directly to depress
the emotions, which are heightened by the general emotional state and
local congestion of the days immediately preceding; but among some women,
at all events, who are normal and in good health, I find that the period
of menstruation itself is covered by the period of the climax of sexual
feeling. Thus, a married lady writes: "My feelings are always very strong,
not only just before and after, but during the period; very unfortunately,
as, of course, they cannot then be gratified"; while a refined girl of 19,
living a chaste life, without either coitus or masturbation, which she has
never practiced, habitually feels very strong sexual excitement about the
time of menstruation, and more especially during the period; this desire
torments her life, prevents her from sleeping at these times, and she
looks upon it as a kind of illness.[110] I could quote many other similar
and equally emphatic statements, and the fact that so cardinal a
relationship of the sexual life of women should be ignored or denied by
most writers on this matter, is a curious proof of the prevailing
ignorance.[111]
This ignorance has been fostered by the fact that women, often disguise
even to themselves the real state of their feelings. One lady remarks that
while she would be very ready for coitus during menstruation, the thought
that it is impossible during that time makes her put the idea of it out of
her mind. I have reason to think that this statement may be taken to
represent the real feelings of very many women. The aversion to coitus is
real, but it is often due, not to failure of sexual desire, but to the
inhibitory action of powerful extraneous causes. The absence of active
sexual desire in women during the height of the flow may thus be regarded
as, in part, a physiological fact, following from the correspondence of
the actual menstrual flow to the period of _pro-oestrum_, and in part, a
psychological fact due to the æsthetic repugnance to union when in such a
condition, and to the unquestioned acceptance of the general belief that
at such a period intercourse is out of the question. Some of the strongest
factors of modesty, especially the fear of causing disgust and the sense
of the demands of ceremonial ritual, would thus help to hold in check the
sexual emotions during this period, and when, under the influence of
insanity, these motives are in abeyance, the coincidence of sexual desire
with the menstrual flow often becomes more obvious.[112]
It must be added that, especially among the lower social classes, the
primitive belief of the savage that coitus during menstruation is bad for
the man still persists. Ploss and Bartels mention that among the peasants
in some parts of Germany, where it is believed that impregnation is
impossible during menstruation, coitus at that time would be frequent were
it not thought dangerous for the man.[113] It has also been a common
belief both in ancient and modern times that coitus during menstruation
engenders monsters.[114]
Notwithstanding all the obstacles that are thus placed in the way of
coitus during menstruation, there is nevertheless good reason to believe
that the first coitus very frequently takes place at this point of least
psychic resistance. When still a student I was struck by the occurrence of
cases in which seduction took place during the menstrual flow, though at
that time they seemed to me inexplicable, except as evidencing brutality
on the part of the seducer. Négrier,[115] in the lying-in wards of the
Hôtel-Dieu at Angers, constantly found that the women from the country who
came there pregnant as the result of a single coitus had been impregnated
at or near the menstrual epoch, more especially when the period coincided
with a feast-day, as St. John's Day or Christmas.
Whatever doubt may exist as to the most frequent state of the sexual
emotions during the period of menstruation, there can be no doubt whatever
that immediately before and immediately after, very commonly at both
times,--this varying slightly in different women,--there is usually a
marked heightening of actual desire. It is at this period (and sometimes
during the menstrual flow) that masturbation may take place in women who
at other times have no strong auto-erotic impulse. The only women who do
not show this heightening of sexual emotion seem to be those in whom
sexual feelings have not yet been definitely called into consciousness, or
the small minority, usually suffering from some disorder of sexual or
general health, in whom there is a high degree of sexual anæsthesia.[116]
The majority of authorities admit a heightening of sexual emotion
before or after the menstrual crisis. See e.g., Krafft-Ebing, who
places it at the post-menstrual period (_Psychopathia Sexualis_,
Eng. translation of tenth edition, p. 27). Adler states that
sexual feeling is increased before, during and after menstruation
(_Die Mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung des Weibes_, 1904, p.
88). Kossmann (Senator and Kaminer, _Health and Disease in
Relation to Marriage_, I, 249), advises intercourse just after
menstruation, or even during the latter days of the flow, as the
period when it is most needed. Guyot says that the eight days
after menstruation are the period of sexual desire in women
(_Bréviaire de l'Amour Expérimentale_, p. 144). Harry Campbell
investigated the periodicity of sexual desire in healthy women of
the working classes, in a series of cases, by inquiries made of
their husbands who were patients at a London hospital. People of
this class are not always skilful in observation, and the method
adopted would permit many facts to pass unrecorded; it is,
therefore, noteworthy that only in one-third of the cases had no
connection between menstruation and sexual feeling been observed;
in the other two-thirds, sexual feeling was increased, either
before, after, or during the flow, or at all of these times; the
proportion of cases in which sexual feeling was increased before
the flow, to those in which it was increased after, was as three
to two. (H. Campbell, _Nervous Organization of Men and Women_, p.
203.)
Even this elementary fact of the sexual life has, however, been
denied, and, strange to say, by two women doctors. Dr. Mary
Putnam Jacobi, of New York, who furnished valuable contributions
to the physiology of menstruation, wrote some years ago, in a
paper on "The Theory of Menstruation," in reference to the
question of the connection between oestrus and menstruation:
"Neither can any such rhythmical alternation of sexual instinct
be demonstrated in women as would lead to the inference that the
menstrual crisis was an expression of this," i.e., of oestrus.
Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, again, in her book on _The Human Element
in Sex_, asserts that the menstrual flow itself affords complete
relief for the sexual feelings in women (like sexual emissions
during sleep in men), and thus practically denies the prevalence
of sexual desire in the immediately post-menstrual period, when,
on such a theory, sexual feeling should be at its minimum. It is
fair to add that Dr. Blackwell's opinion is merely the survival
of a view which was widely held a century ago, when various
writers (Bordeu, Roussel, Duffieux, J. Arnould, etc.), as Icard
has pointed out, regarded menstruation as a device of Providence
for safeguarding the virginity of women.
FOOTNOTES:
[75] Thaddeus L. Bolton, "Rhythm," _American Journal of Psychology_,
January, 1894.
[76] It is scarcely necessary to warn the reader that this statement does
not prejudge the question of the inheritance of acquired characters,
although it fits in with Semon's Mnemic theory. We can, however, very well
suppose that the organism became adjusted to the rhythms of its
environment by a series of congenital variations. Or it might be held, on
the basis of Weismann's doctrine, that the germ-plasm has been directly
modified by the environment.
[77] Thus, the Papuans, in some districts, believe that the first
menstruation is due to an actual connection, during sleep, with the moon
in the shape of a man, the girl dreaming that a real man is embracing her.
(_Reports Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits_, vol. v, p. 206.)
[78] Darwin, _Descent of Man_, p. 164.
[79] While in the majority of women the menstrual cycle is regular for the
individual, and corresponds to the lunar month of 28 days, it must be
added that in a considerable minority it is rather longer, or, more
usually, shorter than this, and in many individuals is not constant.
Osterloh found a regular type of menstruation in 68 per cent, healthy
women, four weeks being the most usual length of the cycle; in 21 per
cent, the cycle was always irregular. See Näcke, "Die Menstruation und ihr
Einfluss bei chronischen Psychosen," _Archiv für Psychiatrie_, 1896, Bd,
28, Heft 1.
[80] Among the Duala and allied negro peoples of Bantu stock dances of
markedly erotic character take place at full moon. Gason describes the
dances and sexual festivals of the South Australian blacks, generally
followed by promiscuous intercourse, as taking place at full moon.
(_Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, November, 1894, p. 174.) In
all parts of the world, indeed, including Christendom, festivals are
frequently regulated by the phases of the moon.
[81] It has often been held that the course of insanity is influenced by
the moon. Of comparatively recent years, this thesis has been maintained
by Koster (_Ueber die Gesetze des periodischen Irreseins und verwandter
Nervenzustände_, Bonn, 1882), who argues in detail that periodic insanity
tends to fall into periods of seven days or multiples of seven.
[82] Ed. Hahn, _Demeter und Baubo_, p. 23.
[83] E. Seler, _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1907, Heft I, p. 39. And as
regards the primitive importance of the moon, see also Frazer, _Adonis,
Attis, Osiris_, Ch. VIII.
[84] Jastrow, _Religion of Babylonia_, 1898, pp. 68, 75-79, 461.
[85] Even in England, Barnes has known women of feeble sexual constitution
who menstruated only in summer (R. Barnes, _Diseases of Women_, 1878, p.
192).
[86] A.B. Holder, "Gynecic Notes among American Indians," _American
Journal of Obstetrics_, No. 6, 1892.
[87] In the male, the phenomenon is termed rut, and is most familiar in
the stag. I quote from Marshall and Jolly some remarks on the infrequency
of rut: "'The male wild Cat,' Mr. Cocks informs us, (like the stag), 'has
a rutting season, calls loudly, almost day and night, making far more
noise than the female.' This information is of interest, inasmuch as the
males of most carnivores, although they undoubtedly show signs of
increased sexual activity at some times more than at others, are not known
to have anything of the nature of a regularly recurrent rutting season.
Nothing of the kind is known in the Dog, nor, so far as we are aware, in
the males of the domestic Cat, or the Ferret, all of which seem to be
capable of copulation at any time of the year. On the other hand, the
males of Seals appear to have a rutting season at the same time as the
sexual season of the female." (Marshall and Jolly, "Contributions to the
Physiology of Mammalian Reproduction," _Philosophical Transactions_, 1905,
B. 198.)
[88] A. Wiltshire, _British Medical Journal_, March, 1883. The best
account of heat known to me is contained in Ellenberger's _Vergleichende
Physiologie der Haussaügethiere_, 1892, Band 4, Theil 2, pp. 276-284.
[89] Schurig (_Parthenologia_, 1729, p. 125), gives numerous references
and quotations.
[90] Quoted by Icard, _La Femme_, etc., p. 63.
[91] Bland Sutton, _Surgical Diseases of the Ovaries_, and _British
Gynecological Journal_, vol. ii.
[92] W. Heape, "The Menstruation of _Semnopithecus Entellus_,"
_Philosophical Transactions_, 1894; "Menstruation and Ovulation of
_Macacus Rhesus_," _Philosophical Transactions_, 1897.
[93] W.L. Distant, "Notes on the Chacma Baboon," _Zoölogist_, January,
1897, p, 29.
[94] _Nature_, March 23, 1899.
[95] W. Heape, "The Menstruation of _Semnopithecus Entellus_,"
_Philosophical Transactions_, 1894, p. 483; Bland Sutton, _Surgical
Diseases of the Ovaries_, 1896.
[96] T. Bryce and J. Teacher (_Contributions to the Study of the Early
Development of the Human Ovum_, 1908), putting the matter somewhat
differently, regard menstruation as a cyclical process, providing for the
maintenance of the endometrium in a suitable condition of immaturity for
the production of the decidua of pregnancy, which they believe may take
place at any time of the month, though most favorably shortly before or
after a menstrual period which has been accompanied by ovulation.
[97] Robinson, _American Gynecological and Obstetrical Journal_, August,
1905.
[98] Bossi, _Annali di Ostetrica e Ginecologia_, September, 1896;
summarized in the _British Medical Journal_, October 31, 1896. As regards
the more normal influence of the ovaries over the uterus, see e.g.
Carmichael and F.H.A. Marshall, "Correlation of the Ovarian and Uterine
Functions," _Proceedings Royal Society_, vol. 79, Series B, 1907.
[99] Beuttner, _Centralblatt für Gynäkologie_, No. 49, 1893; summarized in
_British Medical Journal_, December, 1893. Many cases show that pregnancy
may occur in the absence of menstruation. See, e.g., _Nouvelles Archives
d'Obstétrique et de Gynécologie_, 25 Janvier, 1894, supplement, p. 9.
[100] It is still possible, and even probable, that the primordial cause
of both phenomena is the same. Heape (_Transactions Obstetrical Society of
London_, 1898, vol. xl, p. 161) argues that both menstruation and
ovulation are closely connected with and influenced by congestion, and
that in the primitive condition they are largely due to the same cause.
This primary cause he is inclined to regard as a ferment, due to a change
in the constitution of the blood brought about by climatic influences and
food, which he proposes to call gonadin. (W. Heape, _Proceedings of Royal
Society_, 1905, vol. B. 76, p. 266.) Marshall, who has found that in the
ferret and other animals, ovulation may be dependent upon copulation, also
considers that ovulation and menstruation, though connected and able to
react on each other, may both be dependent upon a common cause; he finds
that in bitches and rats heat can be produced by injection of extract from
ovaries in the oestrous state (F.H.A. Marshall, _Philosophical
Transactions_, 1903, vol. B. 196; also Marshall and Jolly, id., 1905, B.
198). Cf. C.J. Bond, "An Inquiry Into Some Points in Uterine and Ovarian
Physiology and Pathology in Rabbits," _British Medical Journal_, July 21,
1906.
[101] Pouchet, _Théorie de l'Ovulation Spontanée_, 1847. As Blair Bell and
Pontland Hick remark ("Menstruation," _British Medical Journal_, March 6,
1909), the repeated oestrus of unimpregnated animals (once a fortnight in
rabbits) is surely comparable to menstruation.
[102] Tait, _Provincial Medical Journal_, May, 1891; J. Beard, _The Span
of Gestation_, 1897, p. 69. Lawson Tait is reduced to the assertion that
ovulation and menstruation are identical.
[103] As Moll points out, even the secondary sexual characters have
undergone a somewhat similar change. The beard was once an important
sexual attraction, but men can now afford to dispense with it without fear
of loss in attractiveness. (_Libido Sexualis_, Band I, p. 387.) These
points are discussed at greater length in the fourth volume of these
_Studies_, "Sexual Selection in Man."
[104] It is not absolutely established that in menstruating animals the
period of menstruation is always a period of sexual congress; probably
not, the influence of menstruation being diminished by the more
fundamental influence of breeding seasons, which affect the male also;
monkeys have a breeding season, though they menstruate regularly all the
year round.
[105] See Appendix A.
[106] Bland Sutton, loc. cit., p. 896.
[107] See H. Ellis, _Man and Woman_, Chapter XI.
[108] This is by no means true of European women only. Thus, we read in an
Arabic book, _The Perfumed Garden_, that women have an aversion to coitus
during menstruation. On the other hand, the old Hindoo physician, Susruta,
appears to have stated that a tendency to run after men is one of the
signs of menstruation.
[109] The actual period of the menstrual flow corresponds, in Heape's
terminology, to the congestive stage, or _pro-oestrum_, in female animals;
the _oestrus_, or period of sexual desire, immediately follows the
_pro-oestrum_, and is the direct result of it. See Heape, "The 'Sexual
Season' of Mammals," _Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science_, 1900,
vol. xliv, Part I.
[110] It may be noted that (as Barnes, Oliver, and others have pointed
out) there is heightened blood-pressure during menstruation. Haig remarks
that he has found a tendency for high pressure to be accompanied by
increased sexual appetite (_Uric Acid_, 6th edition, p. 155).
[111] Sir W.F. Wade, however, remarked, some years ago, in his Ingleby
Lectures (_Lancet_, June 5, 1886): "It is far from exceptional to find
that there is an extreme enhancement of concupiscence in the immediate
precatamenial period," and adds, "I am satisfied that evidence is
obtainable that in some instances, ardor is at its maximum during the
actual period, and suspect that cases occur in which it is almost, if not
entirely, limited to that time." Long ago, however, the genius of Haller
had noted the same fact. More recently, Icard (_La Femme_, Chapter VI and
elsewhere, e.g., p. 125) has brought forward much evidence in confirmation
of this view. It may be added that there is considerable significance in
the fact that the erotic hallucinations, which are not infrequently
experienced by women under the influence of nitrous oxide gas, are more
likely to appear at the monthly period than at any other time. (D.W.
Buxton, _Anesthetics_, 1892, p. 61.)
[112] Gehrung considers that in healthy young girls amorous sensations are
normal during menstruation, and in some women persist, during this period,
throughout life. More usually, however, as menstrual period after
menstrual period recurs, without the natural interruption of pregnancy,
the feeling abates, and gives place to sensations of discomfort or pain.
He ascribes this to the vital tissues being sapped of more blood than can
be replaced in the intervals. "The vital powers, being thus kept in
abeyance, the amative sensations are either not developed, or destroyed.
This, superadded by the usual moral and religious teachings, is amply
sufficient, by degrees, to extinguish or prevent such feelings with the
great majority. The sequestration as 'unclean,' of women during their
catamenial period, as practiced in olden times, had the same tendency."
(E.C. Gehrung, "The Status of Menstruation," _Transactions American
Gynecology Society_, 1901, p. 48.)
[113] It is possible there may be an element of truth in this belief.
Diday, of Lyons, found that chronic urethorrhoea is an occasional result
of intercourse during menstruation. Raciborski (_Traité de la
Menstruation_, 1868, p. 12), who also paid attention to this point, while
confirming Diday, came to the conclusion that some special conditions must
be present on one or both sides.
[114] See, e.g., Ballantyne, "Teratogenesis," _Transactions of the
Edinburgh Obstetrical Society_, 1896, vol. xxi, pp. 324-25.
[115] As quoted by Icard, _La Femme_, etc., p. 194. I have not been able
to see Négrier's work.
[116] I deal with the question of sexual anæsthesia in women in the third
volume of these _Studies_: "The Sexual Impulse in Women."
II.
The Question of a Monthly Sexual Cycle in Men--The Earliest Suggestions of
a General Physiological Cycle in Men--Periodicity in Disease--Insanity,
Heart Disease, etc.--The Alleged Twenty-three Days' Cycle--The
Physiological Periodicity of Seminal Emissions during Sleep--Original
Observations--Fortnightly and Weekly Rhythms.
For some centuries, at least, inquisitive observers here and there have
thought they found reason to believe that men, as well as women, present
various signs of a menstrual physiological cycle. It would be possible to
collect a number of opinions in favor of such a monthly physiological
periodicity in men. Precise evidence, however, is, for the most part,
lacking. Men have expended infinite ingenuity in establishing the remote
rhythms of the solar system and the periodicity of comets. They have
disdained to trouble about the simpler task of proving or disproving the
cycles of their own organisms.[117] It is over half a century since
Laycock wrote that "the _scientific_ observation and treatment of disease
are impossible without a knowledge of the mysterious revolutions
continually taking place in the system"; yet the task of summarizing the
whole of our knowledge regarding these "mysterious revolutions" is even
to-day no heavy one. As to the existence of a monthly cycle in the sexual
instincts of men, with a single exception, I am not aware that any attempt
has been made to bring forward definite evidence.[118] A certain interest
and novelty attaches, therefore, to the evidence I am able to produce,
although that evidence will not suffice to settle the question finally.
The great Italian physician, Sanctorius, who was in so many ways the
precursor of our modern methods of physiological research by the means of
instruments of precision, was the first, so far as I am aware, to suggest
a monthly cycle of the organism in men. He had carefully studied the
weight of the body with reference to the amount of excretions, and
believed that a monthly increase in weight to the amount of one or two
pounds occurred in men, followed by a critical discharge of urine, this
crisis being preceded by feelings of heaviness and lassitude.[119] Gall,
another great initiator of modern views, likewise asserted a monthly cycle
in men. He insisted that there is a monthly critical period, more marked
in nervous people than in others, and that at this time the complexion
becomes dull, the breath stronger, digestion more laborious, while there
is sometimes disturbance of the urine, together with general _malaise_, in
which the temper takes part; ideas are formed with more difficulty, and
there is a tendency to melancholy, with unusual irascibility and mental
inertia, lasting a few days. More recently Stephenson, who established the
cyclical wave-theory of menstruation, argued that it exists in men also,
and is really "a general law of vital energy."[120]
Sanctorius does not appear to have published the data on which
his belief was founded. Keill, an English, follower of
Sanctorius, in his _Medicina Statica Britannica_ (1718),
published a series of daily (morning and evening) body-weights
for the year, without referring to the question of a monthly
cycle. A period of maximum weight is shown usually, by Keill's
figures, to occur about once a month, but it is generally
irregular, and cannot usually be shown to occur at definite
intervals. Monthly discharges of blood from the sexual organs and
other parts of the body in men have been recorded in ancient and
modern times, and were treated of by the older medical writers as
an affliction peculiar to men with a feminine system. (Laycock,
_Nervous Diseases of Women_, p. 79.) A summary of such cases will
be found in Gould and Pyle (_Anomalies and Curiosities of
Medicine_, 1897, pp. 27-28). Laycock (_Lancet_, 1842-43, vols. i
and ii) brought forward cases of monthly and fortnightly cycles
in disease, and asserted "the general principle that there are
greater and less cycles of movements going on in the system,
involving each other, and closely connected with the organization
of the individual." He was inclined to accept lunar influence,
and believed that the physiological cycle is made up of definite
fractions and multiples of a period of seven days, especially a
unit of three and a half days. Albrecht, a somewhat erratic
zoölogist, put forth the view a few years ago that there are
menstrual periods in men, giving the following reasons: (1) males
are rudimentary females, (2) in all males of mammals, a
rudimentary masculine uterus (Müller's ducts) still persists, (3)
totally hypospadic male individuals menstruate; and believed that
he had shown that in man there is a rudimentary menstruation
consisting in an almost monthly periodic appearance, lasting for
three or four days, of white corpuscles in the urine (_Anomalo_,
February, 1890). Dr. Campbell Clark, some years since, made
observations on asylum attendants in regard to the temperature,
during five weeks, which tended to show that the normal male
temperature varies considerably within certain limits, and that
"so far as I have been able to observe, there is one marked and
prolonged rise every month or five weeks, averaging three days,
occasional lesser rises appearing irregularly and of shorter
duration. These observations are only made in three cases, and I
have no proof that they refer to the sexual appetite" (Campbell
Clark, "The Sexual Reproductive Functions," Psychological
Section, British Medical Association, Glasgow, 1888; also,
private letters). Hammond (_Treatise on Insanity_, p. 114) says:
"I have certainly noted in some of my friends, the tendency to
some monthly periodic abnormal manifestations. This may be in the
form of a headache, or a nasal hæmorrhage, or diarrhoea, or
abundant discharge of uric acid, or some other unusual
occurrence. I think," he adds, "this is much more common than is
ordinarily supposed, and a careful examination or inquiry will
generally, if not invariably, establish the existence of a
periodicity of the character referred to."
Dr. Harry Campbell, in his book on _Differences in the Nervous
Organization of Men and Women_, deals fully with the monthly
rhythm (pp. 270 et seq.), and devotes a short chapter to the
question, "Is the Menstrual Rhythm peculiar to the Female Sex?"
He brings forward a few pathological cases indicating such a
rhythm, but although he had written a letter to the _Lancet_,
asking medical men to supply him with evidence bearing on this
question, it can scarcely be said that he has brought forward
much evidence of a convincing kind, and such as he has brought
forward is purely pathological. He believes, however, that we may
accept a monthly cycle in men. "We may," he concludes, "regard
the human being--both male and female--as the subject of a
monthly pulsation which begins with the beginning of life, and
continues till death," menstruation being regarded as a function
accidentally ingrafted upon this primordial rhythm.
It is not unreasonable to argue that the possibility of such a
menstrual cycle is increased, if we can believe that in women,
also, the menstrual cycle persists even when its outward
manifestations no longer occur. Aëtius said that menstrual
changes take place during gestation; in more modern times, Buffon
was of the same opinion. Laycock also maintained that menstrual
changes take place during pregnancy (_Nervous Diseases of Women_,
p. 47). Fliess considers that it is certainly incorrect to assert
that the menstrual process is arrested during pregnancy, and he
refers to the frequency of monthly epistaxis and other nasal
symptoms throughout this period (W. Fliess, _Beziehungen zwischen
Nase und Geschlechts-Organen_, pp. 44 et seq.). Beard, who
attaches importance to the persistence of a cyclical period in
gestation, calls it the muffled striking of the clock. Harry
Campbell (_Causation of Disease_, p. 54) has found
post-climacteric menstrual rhythm in a fair sprinkling of cases
up to the age of sixty.
It is somewhat remarkable that, so far as I have observed, none of these
authors refer to the possibility of any heightening of the sexual appetite
at the monthly crisis which they believe to exist in men. This omission
indicates that, as is suggested by the absence of definite statements on
the matter of increase of sexual desire at menstruation, it was an ignored
or unknown fact. Of recent years, however, many writers, especially
alienists, have stated their conviction that sexual desire in men tends to
be heightened at approximately monthly intervals, though they have not
always been able to give definite evidence in support of their statements.
Clouston, for instance, has frequently asserted this monthly
periodic sexual heightening in men. In the article,
"Developmental Insanity," in Tuke's _Psychological Dictionary_,
he refers to the periodic physiological heightening of the
reproductive _nisus_; and, again, in an article on "Alternation,
Periodicity, and Relapse in Mental Diseases" (_Edinburgh Medical
Journal_, July, 1882), he records the case of "an insane
gentleman, aged 49, who, for the past twenty-six years, has been
subject to the most regularly occurring brain-exaltation every
four weeks, almost to a day. It sometimes passes off without
becoming acutely maniacal, or even showing itself in outward
acts; at other times it becomes so, and lasts for periods of from
one to four weeks. It is always preceded by an uncomfortable
feeling in the head, and pain in the back, mental hebetude, and
slight depression. The _nisus generativus_ is greatly increased,
and he says that, if in that condition, he has full and free
seminal emissions during sleep, the excitement passes off; if
not, it goes on. A full dose of bromide or iodide of potassium
often, but not always, has the effect of stopping the excitement,
and a very long walk sometimes does the same. When the
excitement gets to a height, it is always followed by about a
week of stupid depression." In the same article Clouston remarks:
"I have for a long time been impressed with the relationship of
the mental and bodily alternations and periodicities in insanity
to the great physiological alternations and periodicities, and I
have generally been led to the conclusion that they are the same
in all essential respects, and only differ in degree of intensity
or duration. By far the majority of the cases in women follow the
law of the menstrual and sexual periodicity; the majority of the
cases in men follow the law of the more irregular periodicities
of the _nisus generativus_ in that sex. Many of the cases in both
sexes follow the seasonal periodicity which perhaps in man is
merely a reversion to the seasonal generative activities of the
majority of the lower animals." He found that among 338 cases of
insanity, chiefly mania and melancholia, 46 per cent, of females
and 40 per cent, of males showed periodicity,--diurnal, monthly,
seasonal, or annual, and more marked in women than in men, and in
mania than in melancholia,--and adds: "I found that the younger
the patient, the greater is the tendency to periodic remission
and relapse. The phenomenon finds its acme in the cases of
pubescent and adolescent insanity."
Conolly Norman, in the article "Mania, Hysterical" (Tuke's
_Psychological Dictionary_), states that "the activity of the
sexual organs is probably in both sexes fundamentally periodic."
Krafft-Ebing records the case of a neurasthenic Russian, aged 24,
who experienced sexual desires of urologinic character, with fair
regularity, every four weeks (_Psychopathia Sexualis_), and Näcke
mentions the case of a man who had nocturnal emissions at
intervals of four weeks (_Archiv für Kriminal-Anthropologie_,
1908, p. 363), while Moll (_Libido Sexualis_, Bd. I, pp. 621-623)
recorded the case of a man, otherwise normal, who had attacks of
homosexual feeling every four weeks, and Rohleder (_Zeitschrift
für Sexualwissenschaft_, Nov., 1908) gives the case of an
unmarried slightly neuropathic physician who for several days
every three to five weeks has attacks of almost satyriacal sexual
excitement.