Читать книгу The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilization - Iwan 1872-1922 Bloch - Страница 34

“I find it,” he writes, “impossible to believe that the sense of shame, which is entirely wanting among these naked Indians, can in other men be a primary sense. I am compelled to believe that this sense first made its appearance after certain parts of the body had been covered by clothing, and that the nakedness of women was first concealed from the gaze of others when, perhaps, in very slightly complicated economic and social conditions, the value of marriageable girls had increased, in consequence of more active intercourse, as is now the case among the principal families in Schingu. I am also of opinion that we make the explanation more difficult than it really is when we theoretically believe ourselves to possess a greater sense of shame than we practically have.”[74]

Thus we find that among the Bakäiri, who go completely naked, our (sexual) sense of shame is almost completely undeveloped; more especially, a sense of shame due to disclosure of parts does not exist, whilst the purely animal, physiological sense of shame is clearly manifested by these people.[75]

Where nudity is customary, the erotic sense of shame is very slightly developed. Civilized man also accustoms himself with incredible quickness to nudity, as if it were an entirely natural condition.

“The feeling of being in the presence of nudity is no longer noticed after a quarter of an hour, and when those who witness it are intentionally reminded of it, and are asked whether naked men and women, fathers, mothers, and children, who are standing about or walking unconcernedly, should be condemned or regarded with compassion on account of their shamelessness, the observer only feels inclined to laugh, as at something quite absurd, or to protest at a preposterous suggestion.... With what rapidity in unfamiliar regions it is possible to become accustomed to a purely nude environment is most clearly shown by the fact that I myself, in the night from the 15th to the 16th September, and again on the following night, dreamed of my German home, and there in my dream I saw all my acquaintances as completely nude as the Bakäiri with whom I was sojourning. I myself felt astonished at this, but my neighbour at table at a dinner-party at which in my dream I was a guest, a lady of quality, at once bade me compose myself, and said, ‘Now we all go like this.’”[76]

The Bakäiri, who go completely naked, have no “private parts.” They jest about these parts verbally and pictorially with complete indifference. It would be ridiculous for this reason to regard them as “indecent.” The onset of puberty is celebrated in the case of both sexes by noisy popular festivals, in which the “private parts” receive a demonstrative and joyful attention. A man who wishes to inform a stranger that he is the father of one of those present, a woman who wishes to declare herself to be the mother of a child, grasps the genital organs with an earnest and unconcerned demeanour, intending by this gesture to indicate that they themselves are the procreators. The cloth covering the penis of the male, and the three cornered apron of the female, are not for purposes of concealment, but are simply intended to protect the mucous membranes—as a bandage or an apron in the women, and in the men as an apparatus for the mechanical treatment of phimosis.

It is only in jest that such things can be regarded as “articles of clothing,” the principal object of which is to subserve the sense of shame. Sexual excitement is not concealed by this simple covering. The red threads of the Trumai, the vari-coloured cloths of the Bororo, are adornments, by which attention is attracted to this region rather than repelled.[77] The completely naked Suyá women wash their genital organs in the river in the presence of Europeans.[78]

Thus among these Caribs of Central Brazil, who are still living in the stone age, we observe in all their simplicity the results of complete nudity, and we are able to determine that this nudity entirely prevents the origination of an erotic sense of shame in our meaning of the term. The physiological factors of the sense of shame are not, taken alone, sufficiently strong to lead to the appearance of this sense in its full strength as a special psychical phenomenon. It is first in association with clothing that these physiological factors have any great significance in the production of the sense of shame.

C. H. Stratz, in a historical and anthropological study regarding women’s clothing (Stuttgart, 1900), has compared the data of the more recent ethnological investigations with the facts already known in the history of civilization and art, and has noticed a remarkable agreement between the two. According to him, “the first original purpose of clothing was, not the covering, but simply and solely the adornment of the naked body.”[79] The naked man feels little or no shame; the clothed man is the first to feel shame—he feels it when the customary ornament is lacking. This is true alike for primitive and for civilized man. For Stratz very rightly points out that any manifestation of nudity which is prescribed by fashion—that is to say, by the then dominant code of beautification—is never felt as nudity. On the contrary, a lady in a high-necked dress amongst the décolletée ladies of a ballroom, “would feel deeply ashamed because her breast was not bare.”

The history of clothing and of fashion, which is so closely associated therewith, affords us the most important elements for the understanding of the sense of shame of modern man, and for the judgment of its importance and of its natural limitations. Moreover, clothing has most intimate relations to love as a psychical phenomenon. “How great an influence,” says Emanuel Herrmann, “love exercises, in all its stages, upon clothing, and how clearly, on the other hand, love is expressed by clothing!”[80] Clothing more especially satisfies the general human need, proved by Hoche and myself to exist, for variety in sexual relationships, which continually demands new allurements and new stimuli.

The preliminary stage of clothing, a kind of symbolic clothing for primitive man, is the staining, painting, and tattooing, of the skin, regarding which recent ethnological researches, especially those of Westermarck,[81] Joest,[82] and Marquardt,[83] have afforded us noteworthy conclusions.

It is a fact of great interest that the tendency to painting and adorning the body existed already in prehistoric times, thus affording a notable illustration of the truth of Herbert Spencer’s opinion that the vanity of uncivilized man was much greater than that of civilized man. In palæolithic dwellings coloured earths have actually been discovered, and coloured pastes made by mixing iron rust with reindeer fat, which unquestionably were employed for the colouring of the human body. Moreover, as Ludwig Stein remarks, the history of cosmetics, which Lord Bacon, in his “Cosmetica,” dated from the days of Biblical antiquity, can be traced back with certainty to the man of the ice age, upon whose individual and moral qualities this fact throws a significant light. According to Klaatsch, palæolithic man was not contented simply with painting his skin; he also tattooed himself by means of fine flint knives.[84]

Painting and tattooing of the body must, then, be regarded as a primitive stage of clothing. Ploss-Bartels remarks: “I find it impossible to doubt that the original meaning of tattooing is to be found in the endeavour to cover nakedness”; and Joest, the most learned student of tattooing, is of the same opinion. He writes: “The less a man clothes himself, the more he tattoos his skin; and the more he clothes himself, the less he tattoos.”[85]

We must also regard the coloration of the skin produced by tattooing as a means of allurement; tattooing was, in fact, principally carried out for the purpose of sexual allurement and stimulation. The tattooed man is the more beautiful, the more worthy object of desire. Even in cases in which painting and tattooing were originally undertaken for other purposes—for instance, with some therapeutic aim, or perhaps to serve as means of social or political differentiation—still, these signs and visible changes in the skin of the body speedily exerted a powerful influence upon the other sex, and by sexual selection were converted into sexual lures.[86]

This sexual character of tattooing is indicated also by the fact that amongst numerous savage people of the South Seas, in the Caroline Islands, in New Guinea, and in the Pelew Islands, the girls, in order to attract the men, were accustomed to tattoo exclusively the genital region, and especially the mons Veneris; thus, by tattooing, they made this region markedly apparent. It is characteristic that Miklucho-Maclay at the first glance received the impression that the girl tattooed in this manner wore on the mons Veneris a three-cornered piece of blue cloth, so closely can tattooing simulate clothing.

The sexual nature of tattooing is also shown by its association with phallic festivals. In Tahiti there is a very characteristic legend regarding the sexual origin of tattooing.[87] Among many primitive peoples the first appearance of menstruation gives the signal for tattooing, and for priapistic festivals.

An important sexual relationship is also manifested by the colour element of tattooing. It appears that the sense of love in primitive man is closely connected with the sight of particular colours. According to Konrad Lange, the sensual voluptuous value of these colours obtained its peculiar character from the feeling of love associated with viewing them; and, speaking generally, we can prove the existence of a certain association between the love of colour and the sexual impulse. Lange records an experience of his own youth, that when, about fourteen years of age, he was glancing at a vari-coloured necktie he had feelings which were not very different in their nature from sexual desire. He rightly draws attention to the fact that in primitive man this association of ideas is especially vivid, for the reason that, as already stated, the painting of the body is usually first undertaken at the time of the commencement of puberty.[88]

It is a significant fact that among modern civilized peoples the practice of tattooing is generally confined to certain lower classes of the population, such as sailors, criminals, and prostitutes, among whom the primitive impulses remain active in a quite exceptional strength, as Lombroso has more especially shown in his “Palimsesti di Carcere,” and in his works on the criminal and the prostitute. Very frequently obscene tattooings were found in such persons.[89] Marro, Lacassagne, Batut, and Rudolf Bergh, have also studied the tattooings of prostitutes and criminals, and have observed the same objects and ornaments in both classes. Salillas in Spain, Drago in the Argentine, Ellis and Greaves in England, and Tronow in Russia, obtained similar results. In 12·5 per cent. of the inmates of reformatories in Brieg, Kurella found that the skin was tattooed. According to him, cynicism, revenge, cruelty, remorselessness, gloomy or indifferent fatalism, bestial lewdness, with a dominant tendency to unnatural vices of every kind, “constituted the principal psychical manifestations exhibited by these tattoo-pictures.”

“Pæderastic symbols among the men, and tribadistic among the female prostitutes, are of especially frequent occurrence, and among these we often find a mackerel sketched on the vulva, denoting the souteneur; still more perverse sexual representations even French authors such as Batut have not ventured to reproduce; we see things which would send the police des mœurs out of their minds. Already in quite young vagabonds, frequently sons of prostitutes, we see representations of this kind.”[90]

Not only, however, in criminals and prostitutes, but also in the non-criminal members of the lowest classes of the population, we often observe erotic tattooings of the most obscene character, which, without doubt, serve as sexual lures and stimuli. J. Robinsohn and Friedrich S. Krauss recently published an interesting account of these matters.[91]

Cases of Tattooing in Women of the Upper Classes.—It appears that the primitive tendency to tattooing as a sexual stimulus and means of allurement has recently revived in certain circles of the refined sensual world. René Schwaeblé, in his celebrated book based on his own observations and moral studies, and entitled, “Les Détraquées de Paris” (Paris, 1904), gives an account of the increasing diffusion of tattooing among both men and women of the upper classes of Parisian society, for which purpose a specialist has opened an atelier in the Rue Blanche, in Montmartre. Schwaeblé devotes a special chapter to the “tatouées” (pp. 47-57), and describes an assembly of some of these distinguished libertines in a house in the Rue de la Pompe in Passy. In one of these ladies, tattooing imitated in a most deceptive manner a pair of stockings, thus affording a characteristic instance of the above-mentioned association between tattooing and clothing. Another woman had inscriptions tattooed on the thighs and hips; in two the legs were adorned with garlands of vine-leaves, birds were billing on the abdomen, and on the back were depicted many coloured bouquets of flowers, with the inscription, “X. pinxit, after Watteau.” A marchioness had her family coat-of-arms depicted between the shoulder blades; another great lady had had tattooed on her body the maddest and most obscene drawings of a satanistic character! Two unmistakably homosexual women had a common tattooing—that is to say, one was complementary to the other; only when they were side by side had the picture a meaning. The most remarkable of all the tattooings, however, was that of the hostess. On her body was the picture of a complete hunt, the individual scenes of which wound round her body; it was in the most vivid colours; carriages, packs of hounds and hunters were all shown. The final goal of the hunt was a fox tattooed in the genital region.

Tattooing leads on to the consideration of many-coloured clothing, which is especially common in primitive conditions of mankind. Such clothing, in such conditions, serves chiefly to accentuate particular portions of the body, in order to stimulate the sexual appetite of members of the opposite sex. According to Moseley, the savage begins by painting and tattooing himself for the sake of adornment. Then he takes a movable appendage, which he throws round his body, and on which he places the ornamentation which he had previously marked on his skin in a more or less ineradicable manner. Now a greater variation is rendered possible than was the case with tattooing and painting. Thus, by means of vari-coloured and bright bands, fringes, girdles, and aprons, which for the most part are attached in the genital region, attention is drawn to this part—and here a contrast of colours is found extremely effective. The Indians of the Admiralty Islands have as their only article of clothing a brilliant white mussel-shell, which exhibits a striking contrast to the dark colour of their skin. The Areois of Tahiti, a class of privileged libertines and voluptuous individuals, manifested this character in public places by wearing a girdle made of “ti-leaves.”[92]

The first and most primitive form of clothing was this pubic ornament, the original purpose of which was adornment, not concealment. The latter significance it acquired only in proportion as the genital organs became the object of a superstitious feeling of fear and respect, and were regarded as the seat of a dangerous magic.[93] The above-mentioned connexion between sexuality and magic here made itself apparent. It was necessary that this wonderful, daimonic region should be concealed, in order to protect an onlooker from its evil and influence, or, contrariwise, to protect the genital region from the evil glance of the observer. Both ideas are ethnologically demonstrable. According to Dürkheim, the genital organs, and especially those of women, were covered in primitive times, in order to prevent the perception of any disagreeable emanations from these regions. Finally, Waitz, Schurz, and Letourneau propounded the theory that the jealousy of primitive man was the primary ground of clothing, and was indirectly also the cause of the sense of shame. This view is supported by the interesting ethnological fact that in many races only the married women are clothed, whilst the fully-grown unmarried girls go completely naked. The married woman is part of the property of the husband; to the latter, clothing appears to be a protection against glances at his property—to unclothe the wife is a dishonour and a shame. When the idea of possession was extended to the relationship between the father and his unmarried daughters, these latter also were clothed; thus the idea of chastity and the feeling of shame were developed.[94]

We can, however, adduce numerous considerations in support of the view that the first covering of the genital organs, in association with the pubic ornament, did not arise out of the feeling of shame, but, on the contrary, that it served as a means of sexual allurement. By all kinds of striking ornaments, such as cat’s tails, mussel-shells, or strips of hide, fastened either in front or behind, every possible attention was attracted to the genital region or the buttocks.[95] Concealment made itself felt as a more powerful sensual stimulus than nudity. This is an old anthropological experience which still possesses great significance in our modern civilized life.

Virey believed that human beings had more intense and manifold sexual enjoyments than the lower animals, because these latter see their wives at all times without any kind of adornment, whereas the half-opened veil with which the human female conceals or partially discloses her charms increases a hundredfold the already boundless lust of mankind. “The less one sees, the more does imagination picture.”[96] That which causes a refined and sensual stimulus is not the entirely naked, but the half-naked or partial nudity. Westermarck remarks:

“We have numerous examples of races who generally go about completely naked, but sometimes employ a covering. In such cases they always wear the latter in circumstances which make it perfectly clear that the covering is used simply as a means of allurement. Thus, Lohmann relates that among the Saliras only prostitutes wear clothing, and they do this in order to stimulate by means of the unknown. Barth informs us that among many heathen races in Central Africa, the married women go entirely naked, whilst the girls ripe for marriage clothe themselves (in order that they may appear worthy of desire). The married women of Tipperah wear no more than a short apron, while the unmarried girls cover the breasts with vari-coloured cloths with fringed edges. Among the Toungta, the breasts of the women remain uncovered after the birth of the first child, but the unmarried women wear a narrow breast-cloth.”[97]

The significance of clothing and partial clothing as a sexual stimulus, proved by K. von den Steinen and Stratz to exist among primitive peoples, can be shown to form an element in the “fashion” of civilized races, which provides the imagination with entirely new sexual stimuli, by means of the two fundamental elements of the accentuation and disclosure of certain parts, and speaks to man of “hidden joys.” Moses made use of this psychical sexual influence of clothing. He wished to increase the numbers of his small people, and therefore he ordered the concealment of the feminine charms, “in order to stimulate the senses of the male members of his community, and thus increase the fertility of his people.”[98] Nudity, rejected by him as unsuitable, came in the Christian teaching to be regarded as “immoral”; for such a change in the point of view, we can find numerous examples in the public life of the present day.

The greatest sensual stimulus is exerted by the half-clothing or partial disclosure of the body, the so-called retroussé—that is, the art of bringing about a refined mutual influence between the charms of clothing and the charms of the body.[99] This plays a very important part in the origination of the so-called “clothes fetichism,” which we shall describe at greater length when we come to the consideration of these sexual anomalies.

There are two fundamental forms of clothing, the tropical (coat and sash) and the arctic (doublet and hose), and these, in addition to their simple function of protecting in the tropics from the powerful rays of the sun, and in the northern climates of protecting from cold, serve also in both sexes as a means of sexual allurement. The changeful phenomena and phases of “fashion in clothing” afford the most certain proofs of this fact; they may, in fact, be regarded as the most valuable sexual psychological documents of the successive epochs of civilization. The celebrated writer on æsthetics Friedrich Theodor Vischer has regarded them especially from this point of view in his original work, distinguished by its pithy style, “Fashion and Cynicism: Contributions to the Knowledge of the Forms of Civilization and of our Moral Ideas” (Stuttgart, 1888). He regards “the rage to excel in man-catching” as “the most powerful of impulses, capable of inflaming to fever-heat the madness of fashion, with its brainless changes, its furious inclinations, its raging distortions.” In a certain sense we may also speak of some of the fashions of men’s clothing as an art of “woman-catching.” Still, on the whole, this feature is much less manifest here than in relation to woman’s clothing.

Clothing has a sexually stimulating influence in a twofold manner: either certain parts are especially accentuated and enlarged by the shape or cut of the clothing and by peculiar kinds of ornamentation, or else particular portions of the body are directly denuded. Both of these have a sexual influence.

The accentuation and enlargement of certain parts of the body by means of clothing takes its origin in man’s belief that by this means he really produces certain enlargements of his personality, as though these portions of clothing were actually a part of himself. This remarkable theory of clothing, according to which the latter represents a strengthening of the body, a kind of outwardly projected emanation of the human personality, a direct continuation of the body, was first enunciated by the celebrated philosopher Hermann Lotze. He writes:

“Everywhere when we place a foreign body in connexion with the surface of our body (for not the hand alone develops this peculiarity), the consciousness of our personal identity is in a certain sense transmitted into the ends and outer surface of this foreign body, and there arise feelings, partly of an enlargement of our personal ego, partly of a change in form and in extent of movement, now become possible to us, but naturally foreign to our organs, and partly of an unaccustomed tension, firmness, or security of our carriage.”[100]

Naturally the reciprocal influence of one person upon another is not wanting, and the observer believes that in the clothing he actually finds the body. Parts that otherwise would not have attracted attention now appear as important objects. For example, the tall hat, as a prolongation of the head, seems to give the latter a certain height and worth. Gustave Flaubert, in “Madame Bovary,” very beautifully describes this remarkable transition, this identification of clothing with the body:

“Beneath her hair, which was drawn upwards towards the top of the head, the skin of the nape of her neck appeared to have a brownish tint, which gradually became paler, and lost itself in the shadows of her clothing. Her dress spread out on either side over the chair on which she was sitting; it fell in many folds, and spread out on the floor. When he chanced to touch it with his foot, he immediately drew the foot back again, as if he had trodden on something living.”

The same association of ideas has led to the idea that clothing “is, as it were, a complete skin to man,” as if it must represent a kind of “ideal nudity.”[101] Clothing represents the person, shelters the nature, the soul. It can, therefore, become the means of expression of human peculiarities, of individual traits of character. There exists a “physiognomy” of clothing; it is a mirror of the physical and spiritual being.[102] Very rightly is it asserted, in a pseudonymous essay on the “Erotics of Clothing,” that clothing, in the course of the many thousand years of the development of civilization, has taken up into itself so much of the spirit of mankind that we should find a solution for all the problems of human civilization if we were able completely and immediately to understand the spirit of clothing. The form of clothing is at the same time also the most subtle and accurate measuring apparatus for the peculiar and personal in a man—for the individual in him.[103]

If the accentuation of certain parts is the first sexual stimulus of clothing the denuding of certain parts is the second. When once the custom of concealing the body has been introduced, the denuding of portions of the body has acquired a sexually stimulating effect which it did not previously possess, and which it does not now possess among primitive communities. In the saying of a thoughtful writer, that there is a great difference from an erotic point of view between a glance at the naked leg of a sturdy peasant girl and a glance at the naked leg of a fashionable young lady, this different conception of nudity finds very clear expression. There is, in fact, a natural, sexually indifferent nudity, and an artificial, erotically stimulating nudity. It is the latter only which plays a part in the history of clothing and of fashion; and it is this, in association with the erotic accentuation of certain portions of the body, which has from early times been cultivated for the allurement of men, and above all by the world of prostitution and by the half-world.

This first occurred in classical antiquity, to which, however, true “fashion” was unknown, because clothing was not then, as it is in modern times, fused with the body, and therefore did not appear to be a continuation and representation of the bodily personality. In general, the refined quality of the modern “mode” was lacking, in regard to the accentuation of particular parts of the body by means of clothing. Very aptly has Schopenhauer, in the second volume of his “Parerga and Paralipomena,” pointed out the thorough-going difference between antique and modern clothing in this relationship. In the days of antiquity clothing was still a whole, which remained distinct from the body, and which allowed the human form to be recognized as distinctly as possible in all its parts. Sexual stimulation could be effected only by the employment of diaphanous fabrics, which were preferred in the circles of the half-world and by effeminate men. Varro, Juvenal, and Seneca chastise with biting words this immorality of “coacæ vestes,” and of the network clothing imported from Egypt. Then there appeared for the first time as a peculiar type the woman in man’s clothing, a proof of the wide diffusion of the love of boys, on which those prostitutes who went about clothed as men must have speculated when they assumed this dress.

The analysis of clothing into upper-clothing and under-clothing signifies a differentiation of clothing very effective as regards erotic influence. For the first time could the individual portions of the body appear in definite significance in relation to the body as a whole. And the indication of the waist became characteristic of fashion in clothing.[104]

The analysis of clothing was carried a stage further in the separation of clothing, properly speaking, from that which lies beneath it, the more intimate covering of the body, the washable underclothing—shirt, chemise, petticoat, etc. More especially had this differentiation a great erotic significance. It was the increase in the number of individual articles of clothing which first gave rise to the erotically tinged idea of the gradual “dressing” and “undressing,” to the idea of the intimate “toilet.” The possibilities of disclosure, half concealment, and semi-nudity were notably increased, and a much larger playground was opened to the erotic imagination.

In association with this, the waist, especially in the case of woman, indicated a separation of the bodily spheres into an upper sphere, associated chiefly with the intellectual, and a lower sphere, belonging rather to the purely sexual.

“The waist, which is already, roughly speaking, indicated by the sash or girdle, but which, in consequence of the progressive differentiation of feminine clothing, comes to play a principal part in women’s dress, divides the woman’s body into thorax and abdomen. The fully clothed woman becomes an insect, a wasp, with two sharply defined emotional and sexual spheres, with a heavenly and an earthly division.”[105]

With this classification and differentiation of clothing there now developed a fertile field for the activity of “fashion,” which therefore, as such, first really takes its rise in the middle ages. According to Sombart,[106] it was in the Italian States of the fifteenth century that it first became a living reality. Fashion is a product of the Christian middle ages; the specific element that this period introduced into feminine clothing—the corset—is a witness to Christian doctrine.

Stratz remarks on this subject:

“Strange as it may seem, it is very remarkably true that the corset derives its origin from the Christian worship of God. Owing to the strict ecclesiastical control in the middle ages—strict, at least, as regards public life—the dominant ascetic point of view demanded the fullest possible covering of the feminine body, and the mortification of the flesh; it insisted, at any rate, that those portions of the body should be withdrawn from the view of sinful man which are regarded as especially characteristic of the female sex. Through woman sin had entered the world, and therefore woman must, above all, take care to conceal as much as possible the sinful characteristics of her baser sex. Whilst man, by the greatest possible increase in breadth of shoulders and chest, endeavoured to suggest a more powerful and warlike aspect, we find that among women from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, the endeavour was dominant to make the breasts as flat and childlike and as narrow as possible, and for this purpose, for the compression and obliteration of the breasts, an early form of the corset was employed.”[107]

It is characteristic that fashion later employed the corset in precisely the opposite sense—namely, in order to make the breasts “stand out more prominently above the upper margin of the corset, which continually became shorter.” Thus there arose a conflict between medieval fashion and the ascetic tendencies of the times. Fashion was victorious along the whole line, as we can learn in detail in Ritter’s interesting essay regarding the nudities of the middle ages.[108]

Since the middle ages, two portions of the body have in the female sex been especially accentuated by clothing—the breasts, and the region of the hips and the buttocks.

As we have already pointed out, the corset was especially employed to accentuate the breasts, the corset having already produced the stimulating contrast between the prominence of the breast and the slenderness of the waist, increased by lacing. At the same time, at an early date the denuding of the upper part of the breasts was associated with this accentuation, the top of the dress being cut away in front à la grand’ gorge, whilst the corset, strengthened by rods of whalebone or steel, produced a bonne conché. This accentuation of the breasts dominated feminine fashion down to the present day. Besides the use of the corset in this matter, the region of the breasts was also rendered more prominent by the use of artificial breasts made of wax, by ornaments in the form of breast-rings, etc.

The partial denuding of the breasts represents the true décolleté of our balls and parties, a custom which a man so tolerant in other respects as H. Bahr condemns on æsthetic grounds.[109]

“The art of undressing and enjoying in imagination beautiful girls and women,” says Georg Hirth, “is learnt chiefly at Court and other balls, at which the feminine guests are compelled by fashion to bare the upper part of the body. It is astonishing how quickly, how invariably, the girls of the upper classes accustom themselves to this exhibition, which exercises so stimulating an effect upon us of the opposite sex. And yet they would turn up their noses if, at the parties of non-commissioned officers and servants, the women allowed such extensive glimpses of their charms. I once heard a girl three years of age express a naive surprise when she saw the décolletage of her mother, who was about to go to a ball. What a scolding would the poor servant-girl get if she were to exhibit her nudity to the children in such a manner!”[110]

Fr. Th. Vischer also severely criticizes this exposure of feminine nudities coram publico. Moreover, the free enjoyment of alcohol customary among men at these evening entertainments is likely to induce a frame of mind in which the charms thus freely displayed before their eyes will receive an attention not purely æsthetic.

As regards the corset more particularly, it is not only unæsthetic, but also unhygienic.

The corset draws in the beautiful outline of the feminine body in the most disagreeable manner; the wasp waist which it produces is an ugly exaggeration of the natural condition. The lady editor of the Documents of Women instituted an inquiry amongst a number of artists in regard to the corset. One of these, the architect Leopold Bauer, replied as follows:

“Nature has endowed the feminine body with a most beautiful outline. It is almost incomprehensible that the ideal of beauty should during so lengthy a period aim at the destruction of this wonderful and unique perfection. The corset makes an ugly bend in the vertebral column, it makes the hip shapeless, it suggests an unnatural and even repulsive development of the breasts, which transforms our sentiment of the sacred beauty of the human body into the lowest sexual and perverse impulses. That the corset does not really make the body appear slender is no longer open to doubt. All the suggested advantages of the corset are prejudices.... It is only when women’s dress is freed from the tyranny of this detestable corset that it will be able to develop in a free and artistic manner.”[111]

Physicians are unanimous regarding the unhygienic nature of the corset. The deleterious influence of tight-lacing upon the form and the activity of the thoracic and abdominal organs has been thoroughly elucidated by many authors. I need refer only, among many, to the writings of Hugo Klein,[112] Menge,[113] and O. Rosenbach,[114] regarding the dangers of the corset. The corset hinders the sufficient inspiration, which is so necessary for the adequate activity of the respiratory and circulatory organs, and herein we find a principal cause of anæmia (O. Rosenbach); it exercises the most harmful pressure on the abdominal organs, especially on the stomach and the liver, and presses them out of their natural situation, so that it gives rise to a descent of the kidneys, the liver, and the genital organs. The extremely ugly “pendulous belly” is also dependent on the influence of the corset. The pressure of the corset also often gives rise to an atrophy of the mammary glands, and to abnormal changes in the nipples. Thence ensues, further, a serious hindrance to the function of lactation, which may indeed be rendered completely impossible. For this reason, Georg Hirth, in his admirable essay upon the indispensable character of the maternal breast, exclaims: “Away with the corset!”[115]

The dorsal and abdominal muscles also undergo partial atrophy in consequence of the habitual wearing of the corset, because this garment to some extent relieves these muscles of their natural function. Anæmia, gastric and hepatic disorders, and intercostal neuralgia are also dependent upon this “most disastrous error of woman’s dress,” as von Krafft-Ebing calls the corset. Menge has very thoroughly studied the hurtful influence of the corset on the feminine reproductive organs. He enumerates, as a result of wearing it, among many evil results, inflammatory states and enlargement of the ovaries, relaxation of the uterine muscles, atrophy and excessive proliferation of the uterine mucous membrane, the onset of the extremely disagreeable fluor albus, premature termination of pregnancy, displacements of the uterus (retroflexion, anteversion, prolapse), abnormal stretching of the entire pelvic floor, retention of urine, constipation, and nervous troubles of the most varied character. Very often, also, sterility in woman is causally dependent upon the constriction and pressure exercised by the corset.

Rightly, therefore, the abandonment of the corset plays a principal part in the “reformed dress” of woman—a subject to which we shall later return.

In addition to the accentuation of the breast by the corset and by other apparatus,[116] another aim of feminine fashion has been most persistent in very various forms, namely, the exaggeration of the hips, or the buttocks, or both—in fact, of all the visible parts of the clothed body which are directly related to the sexual functions of woman; that is to say, there has been a persistent endeavour to indicate in the most prominent manner, in a way to stimulate the male, the secondary sexual characters of the female in this region of the body.

“The thoroughly modern women,” says Heinrich Pudor, “coquet at the present day less with their breasts than with their hind-quarters—for this reason, because for the most part they have a masculine type (?). It began with the cul de Paris. Nowadays, clothes are cut in such a way that in the view from the back the gluteal region is especially prominent. This is how the fashionable wife of a German officer strikes us at present.

“‘Tailor-made’ is the phrase that has for some time been in use in England. The tailor has made it—not the milliner. No, the tailor, who perhaps is at the same time bath-master and masseur.... Certain species of baboons are distinguished by their brightly coloured and prominent hind-quarters—there seems to be no doubt that our modern ladies in high life have taken these for their example. Or can it be that they wish to avail themselves of the homosexual inclinations of their male acquaintances? Beyond question this is so. Here we find the fundamental ground of the type of clothing of our own day by which so much attention is drawn to the region of the buttocks. What is repulsive here is not the homosexuality, but the misuse that is made of clothing. In fact, that which is most repulsive to a refined sentiment is this—that women have their clothes cut as tightly as possible round the hips, in order that the broad pelvis, which is especially characteristic of women as a sexual being, shall be as far as possible visibly isolated.”[117]

Similarly Fr. Th. Vischer has castigated the immorality of the gross accentuation of kallipygian charms,[118] which in the eighteenth century was inaugurated by the invention of the so-called tournure (cul de Paris), against which Mary Wollstonecraft inveighed so severely. By the tension of the clothing, not only the buttocks, but also the hips and the thighs, were rendered grossly apparent. In certain epochs, also, the feminine abdomen was very markedly indicated by the mode of dress; for instance, in the middle ages, down to the sixteenth century, fashion provided women and girls with the insignia of pregnancy, as is apparent in the pictures of Jan van Eyck (“The Lamb,” “Eva”), Hans Memling (“Eva”), and Titian (“The Beauty of Urbino”). The fashion of the “thick abdomen” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was only another variation of the same theme.

In close relation to the variations of fashion we have just described is the farthingale (montgolfière) or crinoline. It was first adopted in the sixteenth century by courtesans and prostitutes, who thus exhibited rounded and provocative forms, wishing to allure men by these vertugales, which, according to the bon mot of a Franciscan, expelled vertu, leaving behind only the gale (syphilis). The aptest remarks regarding the repulsive and dirty fashion of the crinoline were made by Schopenhauer.[119] It seems as if the crinoline, which is well known to have celebrated its greatest triumph during the period of the Second Empire in France—who is not familiar with the characteristic daguerrotypes of that period?—has recently endeavoured to come to life once more, for it appears that attempts have actually been made towards the rehabilitation of this monstrosity of clothing.

The physical difference between man and woman is also beyond question the principal cause of the difference between masculine and feminine clothing. According to Waldeyer (Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Congress of Anthropologists at Kassel, 1895, published in the Journal of the German Society of Anthropologists, No. 9, p. 76), it is especially the difference in the length and position of the thigh-bones that is responsible for the differentiation between masculine and feminine clothing. In woman, the upper ends of the femora are, in consequence of the greater width of the pelvis, more widely separated than in the male; and since in both sexes these bones are closely approximated at the knees, in women their position appears more oblique. This, in combination with the comparative shortness of women’s thighs, has a manifest influence upon the gait, especially in running, in which man distinctly excels woman. In this purely anatomical difference is to be found the reason why the masculine mode of dress, which makes the lower extremities very manifest, is not adapted for woman, especially when in the upright posture. This is an important cause for the differentiation between masculine and feminine clothing.

A further fundamental difference between the clothing of man and that of woman is the much greater simplicity and monotony, on the whole, of masculine clothing. This has, with good reason, been associated with the greater intellectual differentiation of man, who, therefore, stands less in need of any peculiar accentuation of the individual personality by means of clothing. Woman, who earlier was only a sexual being, utilized clothing in manifold ways as a means of sexual allurement, as the chief means of compensation for the life of activity denied her by Nature and custom, whereas to man, on the whole, the employment of sexual stimulation by means of clothing was superfluous.

Georg Simmel writes from another point of view. He is of opinion that woman, in comparison with man, is, on the whole, the more constant being, but that precisely this constancy, which expresses the equability and unity of her nature on the emotional side, demands, on the principle of compensation of vital tendencies, a more active variability in other less central provinces; whereas, on the contrary, man, in his very nature less constant, who is not accustomed to cleave with the same unconditional concentration of all vital interests to any once experienced emotional relationship, precisely in consequence of this, stands less in need of such external variability. Man, as regards objective phenomena, is, on the whole, more indifferent than woman, because fundamentally he is the more variable being, and therefore can more easily dispense with such objective variability.[120]

Notwithstanding this, down to the beginning of the nineteenth century there were not wanting, in the fashion of men’s clothing, attempts to employ certain parts of dress for the purpose of sexual stimulation. I refer in this connexion to my earlier contributions.[121] Here I shall allude only in passing to the peculiar and characteristic variations of men’s clothing in the form of marked attention drawn to the male genitals by the breeches-flap (braguettes); to the shoe, à la poulaine, which imitated the form of a male penis; to certain effeminate tendencies in the dress of man which have recurred very often since the days of the Roman Empire,[122] which are connected with the wide diffusion of homosexual tendencies, and which sometimes have given men’s dress so variegated a character, have involved such frequent changes and such occasional nudities, that at these times it could enter into competition with women’s clothing. In this respect, clothing enables us to draw conclusions not merely regarding the nature of the men who wore it, but also regarding the character of the time. There exists also the modern dandyhood, which recalls many peculiarities of earlier times; but, on the whole, fashion in men’s clothing tends to simplicity and sexual indifference. This movement originated in England, and the English fashion in men’s clothing has become dominant throughout the whole world, whereas women’s clothing now, as formerly, receives its fashionable stimulus from Paris.

In addition to the indirect relations of clothing with the vita sexualis, which we have already described, there is a direct relationship, and this is the effect of certain fabrics upon the skin, from which certain associations of ideas and certain abnormal tendencies may arise. Thus, for example, the contact of woollen stuffs and of furs has a sexually stimulating influence. Ryan compared their influence with that of flagellation.[123] In this sense, also, furs and the whip go together—these two symbols of “masochism”; velvet has a similar effect. The celebrated author of “Venus im Pelz,” Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, in his well-known romance bearing this name, deals fully with the sexual significance of furs. According to him, they exert a peculiar, prickling, physical stimulus, perhaps dependent upon their being charged with electricity, and upon the warmth of their atmosphere. A woman in a fur coat is like a “great cat,[124] a powerful electric battery.” Influences of smell also appear to be associated herewith. For, in a letter to his wife, Sacher-Masoch once wrote to tell her what voluptuous pleasure it would give to him to bathe his face in the warm odour of her furs.[125] With the description of the stimulating effect of fur dependent upon sensations of contact and smell, he associated also the fact that fur gave woman a dominant, masterful, magical influence. His “Venus im Pelz” is also to him “one who commands.” Titian found for the rosy beauty of his beloved one no more costly frame than dark fur. It is doubtless the strong contrast-effect between the delicate charm and the shaggy surroundings that evokes that remarkable symbolical relationship to longings for power and cruel despotism. In a thoughtful essay, “Venus im Pelz” (Berliner Tageblatt, No. 487, September 25, 1903), the idea is developed and explained, that the love of woman for furs results from her inward nature. It is the secret longing for an increase of her power and influence by means of contrast.[126]

Men’s and women’s clothing comprises the covering of the entire body with the exception of the face—the idea does not, as a rule, include the head-covering and the way the hair is dressed. In a recent work, H. Pudor brings the face into a peculiar sexual relationship with the clothing. His remarks on this subject, which contain many valuable observations, notwithstanding the fact that much of what he says is overdrawn, run as follows: