the women of these races which is very much exaggerated by
intentional manipulation due to the admiration it arouses. The
missionary Merensky reported the prevalence of the practice of
artificial elongation among the Basuto and other peoples, and the
anatomical evidence is in favor of its partly artificial
character. (The Hottentot apron is fully discussed by Ploss and
Bartels, _Das Weib_, bd. I, sec. vi.)
In the Jaboo country on the Bight of Benin in West Africa,
Daniell stated, it was considered ornamental to elongate the
labia and the clitoris artificially; small weights were appended
to the clitoris and gradually increased. (W.F. Daniell,
_Topography of Gulf of Guinea_, 1849, pp. 24, 53.)
Among the Bawenda of the northern Transvaal, the missionary
Wessmann states, it is customary for young girls from the age of
8 to spend a certain amount of time every day in pulling the
_labia majora_ in order to elongate them; in selecting a wife the
young men attach much importance to this elongation, and the girl
whose labia stand out most is most attractive. (_Zeitschrift für
Ethnologie_, 1894, ht. 4, p. 363.)
It may be added that in various parts of the world mutilations of
the sexual organs of men and women, or operations upon them, are
practiced, for reasons which are imperfectly known, since it
usually happens that the people who practice them are unable to
give the reason for this practice, or they assign a reason which
is manifestly not that which originally prompted the practice.
Thus, the excision of the clitoris, practiced in many parts of
East Africa and frequently supposed to be for the sake of dulling
sexual feeling (J.S. King _Journal of the Anthropological
Society_, Bombay, 1890, p. 2), seems very doubtfully accounted
for thus, for the women have it done of their own accord; "all
Sobo women [Niger coast] have their clitoris cut off; unless they
have this done they are looked down upon, as slave women who do
not get cut; as soon, therefore, as a Sobo woman has collected
enough money, she goes to an operating woman and pays her to do
the cutting." (_Journal of the Anthropological Institute_,
August-November, 1898, p. 117.) The Comte de Cardi investigated
this matter in the Niger Delta: "I have questioned both native
men and women," he states, "to try and get the natives' reason
for this rite, but the almost universal answer to my queries was,
'it is our country's fashion.'" One old man told him it was
practiced because favorable to continence, and several old women
said that once the women of the land used to suffer from a
peculiar kind of madness which this rite reduced. (_Journal of
the Anthropological Institute_, August-November, 1899, p. 59.) In
the same way the subincision of the urethra (mika operation of
Australia) is frequently supposed to be for the purpose of
preventing conception (See, e.g., the description of the
operation by J.G. Garson, _Medical Press_, February 21, 1894),
but this is very doubtful, and E.C. Stirling found that
subincised natives often had large families. (_Intercolonial
Quarterly Journal of Medicine and Surgery_, 1894.)
A passage in the _Mainz Chronicle_ for 1367 (as quoted by
Schultz, _Das Höfische Leben_, p. 297) shows that at that time
the tunics of the men were so made that it was always possible
for the sexual organs to be seen in walking or sitting.
This insistence on the naked sexual organs as objects of attraction is,
however, comparatively rare, and confined to peoples in a low state of
culture. Very much more widespread is the attempt to beautify and call
attention to the sexual organs by tattooing,[135] by adornment and by
striking peculiarities of clothing. The tendency for beauty of clothing to
be accepted as a substitute for beauty of body appears early in the
history of mankind, and, as we know, tends to be absolutely accepted in
civilization.[136] "We exclaim," as Goethe remarks, "'What a beautiful
little foot!' when we have merely seen a pretty shoe; we admire the lovely
waist when nothing has met out eyes but an elegant girdle." Our realities
and our traditional ideals are hopelessly at variance; the Greeks
represented their statues without pubic hair because in real life they had
adopted the oriental custom of removing the hairs; we compel our sculptors
and painters to make similar representations, though they no longer
correspond either to realities or to our own ideas of what is beautiful
and fitting in real life. Our artists are themselves equally ignorant and
confused, and, as Stratz has repeatedly shown, they constantly reproduce
in all innocence the deformations and pathological characters of defective
models. If we were honest, we should say--like the little boy before a
picture of the Judgment of Paris, in answer to his mother's question as to
which of the three goddesses he thought most beautiful--"I can't tell,
because they haven't their clothes on."
The concealment actually attained was not, however, it would appear,
originally sought. Various authors have brought together evidence to show
that the main primitive purpose of adornment and clothing among savages is
not to conceal the body, but to draw attention to it and to render it more
attractive. Westermarck, especially, brings forward numerous examples of
savage adornments which serve to attract attention to the sexual regions
of man and woman.[137] He further argues that the primitive object of
various savage peoples in practicing circumcision, as other similar
mutilations, is really to secure sexual attractiveness, whatever religious
significance they may sometimes have developed subsequently. A more recent
view represents the magical influence of both adornment and mutilation as
primary, as a method of guarding and insulating dangerous bodily
functions. Frazer, in _The Golden Bough_, is the most able and brilliant
champion of this view, which undoubtedly embodies a large element of
truth, although it must not be accepted to the absolute exclusion of the
influence of sexual attractiveness. The two are largely woven in
together.[138]
There is, indeed, a general tendency for the sexual functions to take on a
religious character and for the sexual organs to become sacred at a very
early period in culture. Generation, the reproductive force in man,
animals, and plants, was realized by primitive man to be a fact of the
first magnitude, and he symbolized it in the sexual organs of man and
woman, which thus attained to a solemnity which was entirely independent
of purposes of sexual allurement. Phallus worship may almost be said to be
a universal phenomenon; it is found even among races of high culture,
among the Romans of the Empire and the Japanese to-day; it has, indeed,
been thought by some that one of the origins of the cross is to be found
in the phallus.
"Hardly any other object," remarks Dr. Richard Andree, "has been
with such great unanimity represented by nearly all peoples as
the phallus, the symbol of procreative force in the religions of
the East and an object of veneration at public festivals. In the
Moabitic Baal Peor, in the cult of Dionysos, everywhere, indeed,
except in Persia, we meet with Priapic representations and the
veneration accorded to the generative organ. It is needless to
refer to the great significance of the _Linga puja_, the
procreative organ of the god Siva, in India, a god to whom more
temples were erected than to any other Indian deity. Our museums
amply show how common phallic representations are in Africa, East
Asia, the Pacific, frequently in connection with religious
worship." (R. Andree, "Amerikansche Phallus-Darstellungen,"
_Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1895, ht. 6, p. 678.)
Women have no external generative organ like the phallus to play
a large part in life as a sacred symbol. There is, however, some
reason to believe that the triangle is to some extent such a
symbol. Lejeune ("La Representation Sexuelle en Religion, Art, et
Pédagogie," _Bulletin de la Société d'Anthropologie_, Paris,
October 3, 1901) brings forward reasons in favor of the view that
the triangular hair-covered region of the mons veneris has had
considerable significance in this respect, and he presents
various primitive figures in illustration.
Apart from the religions and magical properties so widely accorded to the
primary sexual characters, there are other reasons why they should not
often have gained or long retained any great importance as objects of
sexual allurement. They are unnecessary and inconvenient for this purpose.
The erect attitude of man gives them here, indeed, an advantage possessed
by very few animals, among whom it happens with extreme rarity that the
primary sexual characters are rendered attractive to the eye of the
opposite sex, though they often are to the sense of smell. The sexual
regions constitute a peculiarly vulnerable spot, and remain so even in
man, and the need for their protection which thus exists conflicts with
the prominent display required for a sexual allurement. This end is far
more effectively attained, with greater advantage and less disadvantage,
by concentrating the chief ensigns of sexual attractiveness on the upper
and more conspicuous parts of the body. This method is well-nigh universal
among animals as well as in man.
There is another reason why the sexual organs should be discarded as
objects of sexual allurement, a reason which always proves finally
decisive as a people advances in culture. They are not æsthetically
beautiful. It is fundamentally necessary that the intromittent organ of
the male and the receptive canal of the female should retain their
primitive characteristics; they cannot, therefore, be greatly modified by
sexual or natural selection, and the exceedingly primitive character they
are thus compelled to retain, however sexually desirable and attractive
they may become to the opposite sex under the influence of emotion, can
rarely be regarded as beautiful from the point of view of æsthetic
contemplation. Under the influence of art there is a tendency for the
sexual organs to be diminished in size, and in no civilized country has
the artist ever chosen to give an erect organ to his representations of
ideal masculine beauty. It is mainly because the unæsthetic character of a
woman's sexual region is almost imperceptible in any ordinary and normal
position of the nude body that the feminine form is a more æsthetically
beautiful object of contemplation than the masculine. Apart from this
character we are probably bound, from a strictly æsthetic point of view,
to regard the male form as more æsthetically beautiful.[139] The female
form, moreover, usually overpasses very swiftly the period of the climax
of its beauty, often only retaining it during a few weeks.
The following communication from a correspondent well brings out
the divergences of feeling in this matter:
"You write that the sex organs, in an excited condition, cannot
be called æsthetic. But I believe that they are a source, not
only of curiosity and wonder to many persons, but also objects of
admiration. I happen to know of one man, extremely intellectual
and refined, who delights in lying between his mistress's thighs
and gazing long at the dilated vagina. Also another man, married,
and not intellectual, who always tenderly gazes at his wife's
organs, in a strong light, before intercourse, and kisses her
there and upon the abdomen. The wife, though amative, confessed
to another woman that she could not understand the attraction. On
the other hand, two married men have told me that the sight of
their wives' genital parts would disgust them, and that they have
never seen them.
"If the sexual parts cannot be called æsthetic, they have still a
strong charm for many passionate lovers, of both sexes, though
not often, I believe, among the unimaginative and the uneducated,
who are apt to ridicule the organs or to be repelled by them.
Many women confess that they are revolted by the sight of even a
husband's complete nudity, though they have no indifference for
sexual embraces. I think that the stupid bungle of Nature in
making the generative organs serve as means of relieving the
bladder has much to do with this revulsion. But some women of
erotic temperament find pleasure in looking at the penis of a
husband or lover, in handling it, and kissing it. Prostitutes do
this in the way of business; some chaste, passionate wives act
thus voluntarily. This is scarcely morbid, as the mammalia of
most species smell and lick each others' genitals. Probably
primitive man did the same."
Brantôme (_Vie des Dames Galantes_, Discours II) has some remarks
to much the same effect concerning the difference between men,
some of whom take no pleasure in seeing the private parts of
their wives or mistresses, while others admire them and delight
to kiss them.
I must add that, however natural or legitimate the attraction of
the sexual parts may be to either sex, the question of their
purely æsthetic beauty remains unaffected.
Remy de Gourmont, in a discussion of the æsthetic element in
sexual beauty, considers that the invisibility of the sexual
organs is the decisive fact in rendering women more beautiful
than men. "Sex, which is sometimes an advantage, is always a
burden and always a flaw; it exists for the race and not for the
individual. In the human male, and precisely because of his erect
attitude, sex is the predominantly striking and visible fact, the
point of attack in a struggle at close quarters, the point aimed
at from a distance, an obstacle for the eye, whether regarded as
a rugosity on the surface or as breaking the middle of a line.
The harmony of the feminine body is thus geometrically much more
perfect, especially when we consider the male and the female at
the moment of desire when they present the most intense and
natural expression of life. Then the woman, whose movements are
all interior, or only visible by the undulation of her curves,
preserves her full æsthetic value, while the man, as it were, all
at once receding toward the primitive state of animality, seems
to throw off all beauty and become reduced to the simple and
naked condition of a genital organism." (Remy de Gourmont,
_Physique de l'Amour_, p. 69.) Remy de Gourmont proceeds,
however, to point out that man has his revenge after a woman has
become pregnant, and that, moreover, the proportions of the
masculine body are more beautiful than those of the feminine
body.
The primary sexual characters of man and woman have thus never at any time
played a very large part in sexual allurement. With the growth of culture,
indeed, the very methods which had been adopted to call attention to the
sexual organs were by a further development retained for the purpose of
concealing them. From the first the secondary sexual characters have been
a far more widespread method of sexual allurement than the primary sexual
characters, and in the most civilized countries to-day they still
constitute the most attractive of such methods to the majority of the
population.
The main secondary sexual characters in woman and the type which
they present in beautiful and well-developed persons are
summarized as follows by Stratz, who in his book on the beauty of
the body in woman sets forth the reasons for the characteristics
here given:--
Delicate bony structure.
Rounded forms and breasts.
Broad pelvis.
Long and abundant hair.
Low and narrow boundary of pubic hair.
Sparse hair in armpit.
No hair on body.
Delicate skin.
Rounded skull.
Small face.
Large orbits.
High and slender eyebrows.
Low and small lower jaw.
Soft transition from cheek to neck.
Rounded neck.
Slender wrist.
Small hand, with long index finger.
Rounded shoulders.
Straight, small clavicle.
Small and long thorax.
Slender waist.
Hollow sacrum.
Prominent and domed nates.
Sacral dimples.
Rounded and thick thighs.
Low and obtuse pubic arch.
Soft contour of knee.
Rounded calves.
Slender ankle.
Small toes.
Long second and short fifth toe.
Broad middle incisor teeth.
(Stratz, _Die Schönheit des Weiblichen Körpers_, fourteenth
edition, 1903, p. 200. This statement agrees at most points with
my own exposition of the secondary sexual characters: _Man and
Woman_, fourth edition, revised and enlarged, 1904.)
Thus we find, among most of the peoples of Europe, Asia, and Africa, the
chief continents of the world, that the large hips and buttocks of women
are commonly regarded as an important feature of beauty. This secondary
sexual character represents the most decided structural deviation of the
feminine type from the masculine, a deviation demanded by the reproductive
function of women, and in the admiration it arouses sexual selection is
thus working in a line with natural selection. It cannot be said that,
except in a very moderate degree, it has always been regarded as at the
same time in a line with claims of purely æsthetic beauty. The European
artist frequently seeks to attenuate rather than accentuate the
protuberant lines of the feminine hips, and it is noteworthy that the
Japanese also regard small hips as beautiful. Nearly everywhere else
large hips and buttocks are regarded as a mark of beauty, and the average
man is of this opinion even in the most æsthetic countries. The contrast
of this exuberance with the more closely knit male form, the force of
association, and the unquestionable fact that such development is the
condition needed for healthy motherhood, have served as a basis for an
ideal of sexual attractiveness which appeals to nearly all people more
strongly than a more narrowly æsthetic ideal, which must inevitably be
somewhat hermaphroditic in character.
Broad hips, which involve a large pelvis, are necessarily a characteristic
of the highest human races, because the races with the largest heads must
be endowed also with the largest pelvis to enable their large heads to
enter the world. The white race, according to Bacarisse, has the broadest
sacrum, the yellow race coming next, the black race last. The white race
is also stated to show the greatest curvature of the sacrum, the yellow
race next, while the black race has the flattest sacrum.[140] The black
race thus possesses the least developed pelvis, the narrowest, and the
flattest. It is certainly not an accidental coincidence that it is
precisely among people of black race that we find a simulation of the
large pelvis of the higher races admired and cultivated in the form of
steatopygia. This is an enormously exaggerated development of the
subcutaneous layer of fat which normally covers the buttocks and upper
parts of the thighs in woman, and in this extreme form constitutes a kind
of natural fatty tumor. Steatopygia cannot be said to exist, according to
Deniker, unless the projection of the buttocks exceeds 4 per cent of the
individual's height; it frequently equals 10 per cent. True steatopygia
only exists among Bushman and Hottentot women, and among the peoples who
are by blood connected with them. An unusual development of the buttocks
is, however, found among the Woloffs and many other African peoples.[141]
There can be no doubt that among the black peoples of Africa generally,
whether true steatopygia exists among them or not, extreme gluteal
development is regarded as a very important, if not the most important,
mark of beauty, and Burton stated that a Somali man was supposed to choose
his wife by ranging women in a row and selecting her who projected
farthest _a tergo_.[142] In Europe, it must be added, clothing enables
this feature of beauty to be simulated. Even by some African peoples the
posterior development has been made to appear still larger by the use of
cushions, and in England in the sixteenth century we find the same
practice well recognized, and the Elizabethan dramatists refer to the
"bum-roll," which in more recent times has become the bustle, devices
which bear witness to what Watts, the painter, called "the persistent
tendency to suggest that the most beautiful half of humanity is furnished
with tails."[143] In reality, as we see, it is simply a tendency, not to
simulate an animal character, but to emphasize the most human and the most
feminine of the secondary sexual characters, and therefore, from the
sexual point of view, a beautiful feature.[144]
Sometimes admiration for this characteristic is associated with admiration
for marked obesity generally, and it may be noted that a somewhat greater
degree of fatness may also be regarded as a feminine secondary sexual
character. This admiration is specially marked among several of the black
peoples of Africa, and here to become a beauty a woman must, by drinking
enormous quantities of milk, seek to become very fat. Sonnini noted that
to some extent the same thing might be found among the Mohammedan women of
Egypt. After bright eyes and a soft, polished, hairless skin, an Egyptian
woman, he stated, most desired to obtain _embonpoint_; men admired fat
women and women sought to become fat. "The idea of a very fat woman,"
Sonnini adds, "is nearly always accompanied in Europe by that of softness
of flesh, effacement of form, and defect of elasticity in the outlines. It
would be a mistake thus to represent the women of Turkey in general, where
all seek to become fat. It is certain that the women of the East, more
favored by Nature, preserve longer than others the firmness of the flesh,
and this precious property, joined to the freshness and whiteness of their
skin, renders them very agreeable. It must be added that in no part of the
world is cleanliness carried so far as by the women of the East."[145]
The special characteristics of the feminine hips and buttocks become
conspicuous in walking and may be further emphasized by the special method
of walking or carriage. The women of some southern countries are famous
for the beauty of their way of walk; "the goddess is revealed by her
walk," as Virgil said. In Spain, especially, among European countries, the
walk very notably gives expression to the hips and buttocks. The spine is
in Spain very curved, producing what is termed _ensellure_, or
saddle-back--a characteristic which gives great flexibility to the back
and prominence to the gluteal regions, sometimes slightly simulating
steatopygia. The vibratory movement naturally produced by walking and
sometimes artificially heightened thus becomes a trait of sexual beauty.
Outside of Europe such vibration of the flanks and buttocks is more
frankly displayed and cultivated as a sexual allurement. The Papuans are
said to admire this vibratory movement of the buttocks in their women.
Young girls are practiced in it by their mothers for hours at a time as
soon as they have reached the age of 7 or 8, and the Papuan maiden walks
thus whenever she is in the presence of men, subsiding into a simpler gait
when no men are present. In some parts of tropical Africa the women walk
in this fashion. It is also known to the Egyptians, and by the Arabs is
called _ghung_.[146] As Mantegazza remarks, the essentially feminine
character of this gait makes it a method of sexual allurement. It should
be observed that it rests on feminine anatomical characteristics, and that
the natural walk of a femininely developed woman is inevitably different
from that of a man.
In an elaborate discussion of beauty of movement Stratz
summarizes the special characters of the gait in woman as
follows: "A woman's walk is chiefly distinguished from a man's by
shorter steps, the more marked forward movement of the hips, the
greater length of the phase of rest in relation to the phase of
motion, and by the fact that the compensatory movements of the
upper parts of the body are less powerfully supported by the
action of the arms and more by the revolution of the flanks. A
man's walk has a more pushing and active character, a woman's a
more rolling and passive character; while a man seems to seek to
catch his fleeing equilibrium, a woman seems to seek to preserve
the equilibrium she has reached.... A woman's walk is beautiful
when it shows the definitely feminine and rolling character, with
the greatest predominance of the moment of extension over that of
flexion." (Stratz, _Die Schönheit des Weiblichen Körpers_,
fourteenth edition, p. 275.)
An occasional development of the idea of sexual beauty as associated with
developed hips is found in the tendency to regard the pregnant woman as
the most beautiful type. Stratz observes that a woman artist once remarked
to him that since motherhood is the final aim of woman, and a woman
reaches her full flowering period in pregnancy, she ought to be most
beautiful when pregnant. This is so, Stratz replied, if the period of her
full physical bloom chances to correspond with the early months of
pregnancy, for with the onset of pregnancy metabolism is heightened, the
tissues become active, the tone of the skin softer and brighter, the
breasts firmer, so that the charm of fullest bloom is increased until the
moment when the expansion of the womb begins to destroy the harmony of the
form. At one period of European culture, however,--at a moment and among a
people not very sensitive to the most exquisite æsthetic sensations,--the
ideal of beauty has even involved the character of advanced pregnancy. In
northern Europe during the centuries immediately preceding the Renaissance
the ideal of beauty, as we may see by the pictures of the time, was a
pregnant woman, with protuberant abdomen and body more or less extended
backward. This is notably apparent in the work of the Van Eycks: in the
Eve in the Brussels Gallery; in the wife of Arnolfini in the highly
finished portrait group in the National Gallery; even the virgins in the
great masterpiece of the Van Eycks in the Cathedral at Ghent assume the
type of the pregnant woman.
"Through all the middle ages down to Dürer and Cranach," quite
truly remarks Laura Marholm (as quoted by I. Bloch, _Beiträge zur
Ætiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis_, Teil I, p. 154), "we find a
very peculiar type which has falsely been regarded as one of
merely ascetic character. It represents quiet, peaceful, and
cheerful faces, full of innocence; tall, slender, young figures;
the shoulders still scanty; the breasts small, with slender legs
beneath their garments; and round the upper part of the body
clothing that is tight almost to the point of constriction. The
waist comes just under the bosom, and from this point the broad
skirts in folds give to the most feminine part of the feminine
body full and absolutely unhampered power of movement and
expansion. The womanly belly even in saints and virgins is very
pronounced in the carriage of the body and clearly protuberant
beneath the clothing. It is the maternal function, in sacred and
profane figures alike, which marks the whole type--indeed, the
whole conception--of woman." For a brief period this fashion
reappeared in the eighteenth century, and women wore pads and
other devices to increase the size of the abdomen.
With the Renaissance this ideal of beauty disappeared from art. But in
real life we still seem to trace its survival in the fashion for that
class of garments which involved an immense amount of expansion below the
waist and secured such expansion by the use of whalebone hoops and similar
devices. The Elizabethan farthingale was such a garment. This was
originally a Spanish invention, as indicated by the name (from
_verdugardo_, provided with hoops), and reached England through France. We
find the fashion at its most extreme point in the fashionable dress of
Spain in the seventeenth century, such as it has been immortalized by
Velasquez. In England hoops died out during the reign of George III but
were revived for a time, half a century later, in the Victorian
crinoline.[147]
Only second to the pelvis and its integuments as a secondary sexual
character in woman we must place the breasts.[148] Among barbarous and
civilized peoples the beauty of the breast is usually highly esteemed.
Among Europeans, indeed, the importance of this region is so highly
esteemed that the general rule against the exposure of the body is in its
favor abrogated, and the breasts are the only portion of the body, in the
narrow sense, which a European lady in full dress is allowed more or less
to uncover. Moreover, at various periods and notably in the eighteenth
century, women naturally deficient in this respect have sometimes worn
artificial busts made of wax. Savages, also, sometimes show admiration for
this part of the body, and in the Papuan folk-tales, for instance, the
sole distinguishing mark of a beautiful woman is breasts that stand
up.[149] On the other hand, various savage peoples even appear to regard
the development of the breasts as ugly and adopt devices for flattening
this part of the body.[150] The feeling that prompts this practice is not
unknown in modern Europe, for the Bulgarians are said to regard developed
breasts as ugly; in mediæval Europe, indeed, the general ideal of feminine
slenderness was opposed to developed breasts, and the garments tended to
compress them. But in a very high degree of civilization this feeling is
unknown, as, indeed, it is unknown to most barbarians, and the beauty of a
woman's breasts, and of any natural or artificial object which suggests
the gracious curves of the bosom, is a universal source of pleasure.
The casual vision of a girl's breasts may, in the chastest youth,
evoke a strange perturbation. (Cf., e.g., a passage in an early
chapter of Marcelle Tinayre's _La Maison du Péché_.) We need not
regard this feeling as of purely sexual origin; and in addition
even to the æsthetic element it is probably founded to some
extent on a reminiscence of the earliest associations of life.
This element of early association was very well set forth long
ago by Erasmus Darwin:--
"When the babe, soon after it is born into this cold world, is
applied to its mother's bosom, its sense of perceiving warmth is
first agreeably affected; next its sense of smell is delighted
with the odor of her milk; then its taste is gratified by the
flavor of it; afterward the appetites of hunger and of thirst
afford pleasure by the possession of their object, and by the
subsequent digestion of the aliment; and, last, the sense of
touch is delighted by the softness and smoothness of the milky
fountain, the source of such variety of happiness.
"All these various kinds of pleasure at length become associated
with the form of the mother's breast, which the infant embraces
with its hands, presses with its lips, and watches with its eyes;
and thus acquires more accurate ideas of the form of its mother's
bosom than of the odor, flavor, and warmth which it perceives by
its other senses. And hence at our maturer years, when any object
of vision is presented to us which by its wavy or spiral lines
bears any similitude to the form of the female bosom, whether it
be found in a landscape with soft gradations of raising and
descending surface, or in the forms of some antique vases, or in
other works of the pencil or the chisel, we feel a general glow
of delight which seems to influence all our senses; and if the
object be not too large we experience an attraction to embrace it
with our lips as we did in our early infancy the bosom of our
mothers." (E. Darwin, _Zoönomia_, 1800, vol. i, p. 174.)
The general admiration accorded to developed breasts and a developed
pelvis is evidenced by a practice which, as embodied in the corset, is all
but universal in many European countries, as well as the extra-European
countries inhabited by the white race, and in one form or another is by no
means unknown to peoples of other than the white race.
The tightening of the waist girth was little known to the Greeks of the
best period, but it was practiced by the Greeks of the decadence and by
them transmitted to the Romans; there are many references in Latin
literature to this practice, and the ancient physician wrote against it in
the same sense as modern doctors. So far as Christian Europe is concerned
it would appear that the corset arose to gratify an ideal of asceticism
rather than of sexual allurement. The bodice in early mediæval days bound
and compressed the breasts and thus tended to efface the specifically
feminine character of a woman's body. Gradually, however, the bodice was
displaced downward, and its effect, ultimately, was to render the breasts
more prominent instead of effacing them. Not only does the corset render
the breasts more prominent; it has the further effect of displacing the
breathing activity of the lungs in an upward direction, the advantage from
the point of sexual allurement thus gained being that additional attention
is drawn to the bosom from the respiratory movement thus imparted to it.
So marked and so constant is this artificial respiratory effect, under the
influence of the waist compression habitual among civilized women, that
until recent years it was commonly supposed that there is a real and
fundamental difference in breathing between men and women, that women's
breathing is thoracic and men's abdominal. It is now known that under
natural and healthy conditions there is no such difference, but that men
and women breathe in a precisely identical manner. The corset may thus be
regarded as the chief instrument of sexual allurement which the armory of
costume supplies to a woman, for it furnishes her with a method of
heightening at once her two chief sexual secondary characters, the bosom
above, the hips and buttocks below. We cannot be surprised that all the
scientific evidence in the world of the evil of the corset is powerless
not merely to cause its abolition, but even to secure the general adoption
of its comparatively harmless modifications.
Several books have been written on the history of the corset.
Léoty (_Le Corset à travers les Ages_, 1893) accepts Bouvier's
division of the phases through which the corset has passed: (1)
the bands, or fasciæ, of Greek and Roman ladies; (2) period of
transition during greater part of middle ages, classic traditions
still subsisting; (3) end of middle ages and beginning of
Renaissance, when tight bodices were worn; (4) the period of
whalebone bodices, from middle of sixteenth to end of eighteenth
centuries; (5) the period of the modern corset. We hear of
embroidered girdles in Homer. Even in Rome, however, the fasciæ
were not in general use, and were chiefly employed either to
support the breasts or to compress their excessive development,
and then called _mamillare_. The _zona_ was a girdle, worn
usually round the hips, especially by young girls. The modern
corset is a combination of the _fascia_ and the _zona_. It was at
the end of the fourteenth century that Isabeau of Bavaria
introduced the custom of showing the breasts uncovered, and the
word "corset" was then used for the first time.
Stratz, in his _Frauenkleidung_ (pp. 366 et seq.), and in his
_Schönheit des Weiblichen Körpers_, Chapters VIII, X, and XVI,
also deals with the corset, and illustrates the results of
compression on the body. For a summary of the evidence concerning
the difference of respiration in man and woman, its causes and
results, see Havelock Ellis, _Man and Woman_, fourth edition,
1904, pp. 228-244. With reference to the probable influence of
the corset and unsuitable clothing generally during early life in
impeding the development of the mammary glands, causing inability
to suckle properly, and thus increasing infant mortality, see
especially a paper by Professor Bollinger (_Correspondenz-blatt
Deutsch. Gesell. Anthropologie_, October, 1899).
The compression caused by the corset, it must be added, is not
usually realized or known by those who wear it. Thus, Rushton
Parker and Hugh Smith found, in two independent series of
measurements, that the waist measurement was, on the average, two
inches less over the corset than round the naked waist; "the
great majority seemed quite unaware of the fact." In one case the
difference was as much as five inches. (_British Medical
Journal_, September 15 and 22, 1900.)
The breasts and the developed hips are characteristics of women and are
indications of functional effectiveness as well as sexual allurement.
Another prominent sexual character which belongs to man, and is not
obviously an index of function, is furnished by the hair on the face. The
beard may be regarded as purely a sexual adornment, and thus comparable to
the somewhat similar growth on the heads of many male animals. From this
point of view its history is interesting, for it illustrates the tendency
with increase of civilization not merely to dispense with sexual
allurement in the primary sexual organs, but even to disregard those
growths which would appear to have been developed solely to act as sexual
allurements. The cultivation of the beard belongs peculiarly to barbarous
races. Among these races it is frequently regarded as the most sacred and
beautiful part of the person, as an object to swear by, an object to which
the slightest insult must be treated as deadly. Holding such a position,
it must doubtless act as a sexual allurement. "Allah has specially created
an angel in Heaven," it is said in the _Arabian Nights_, "who has no other
occupation than to sing the praises of the Creator for giving a beard to
men and long hair to women." The sexual character of the beard and the
other hirsute appendage is significantly indicated by the fact that the
ascetic spirit in Christianity has always sought to minimize or to hide
the hair. Altogether apart, however, from this religious influence,
civilization tends to be opposed to the growth of hair on the masculine
face and especially to the beard. It is part of the well-marked tendency
with civilization to the abolition of sexual differences. We find this
general tendency among the Greeks and Romans, and, on the whole, with
certain variations and fluctuations of fashion, in modern Europe also.
Schopenhauer frequently referred to this disappearance of the beard as a
mark of civilization, "a barometer of culture."[151] The absence of facial
hair heightens æsthetic beauty of form, and is not felt to remove any
substantial sexual attraction.
That even the Egyptians regarded the beard as a mark of beauty
and an object of veneration is shown by the fact that the priests
wore it long and cut it off in grief (Herodotus, _Euterpe_,