This fact serves to prove that clothes, which originated from the first coverings, were originally worn to allure. It was not the feeling of shame that caused resort to coverings and created clothes, but the very coverings provoked in time the feeling of shame.[A]
Clothes owing their introduction to the irradiation of sex-attraction, fashion never disowned their origin. Fashion, says Bloch, bears witness of its intimate relationship to the vita sexualis, in that it always started from the ranks of courtesans and at the instance of opulent demi-mondaines. Gunther says: The demi-monde has always, since fashions are in existence, dictated them, in Rome, in Venice and now in Paris.
Fashion has in two ways introduced a sensual element in dress. Either it renders conspicuous certain parts of the body and exaggerates their size, by the shape of the garment, its drapery and trimmings, or it leaves uncovered these parts to catch the eye. Both manoeuvers aim at the production of a sensual effect. The stretching of the skirt over the abdomen and legs in such a way that the outlines of the hips and thighs obtrude themselves upon the eye was surely invented by a Parisian demi-mondaine to serve sensuality. The corset, says Bloch, aims to render conspicuous and prominent the specific female organ, the bosom. It tries to effect an exciting contrast between the form of the bosom and the slimness of the waist, increased by tight lacing. At the same time, fashion dictates for a great number of occasions an ample nudity of this most alluring female organ.
The bosom of the woman, says Berg, is the organ by which she is able to express herself most ingeniously. Its undulations were always her most expressive and skilful rhetoric. The bosom represents the woman’s language and her poetry, her history and her music, her purity and her longing, her policy and her religion, her worship and her art, her secret and her convention, her character and her pride, her consciousness, her magic mirror and her mystery. The bosom is the central organ of all female ideas, desires and humors. No wonder, therefore, that fashion concentrates its greatest endeavors and painstaking effort upon this particular part of the female body. Being Cupid’s most faithful servant, fashion selects this part which it expects to serve best as the target of the winged god’s arrows. To be sure, the individual refined and chaste woman is unaware of the underlying principle of the creators of fashions. She is convinced that clothes were adopted for esthetic reasons, although the sculptor who knows most of beauty seldom covers up the naked body. By heredity and social custom, clothing for refined women has become a mere side current of irradiation of the sensual. Clothes are used, by a majority of women, mainly as a means of beautifying. Ornamental clothing is not any longer a simple lure. It is a sign or symbol of a greater refinement of perception and delicacy of feeling. By the use of clothes the attention is directed rather to the personality than to the person. It is an attempt to display psychical rather than physical features. The impulse of the normal woman to attribute an exaggerated value to clothes is more an imaginative radiation and far remote from the desire of physical exhibition. But as far as fashion is concerned, the original close connection between clothes and the attraction of the sexes is still the commanding principle. Fashion is still standing in the service of sensuality. This explains its modern fickleness. In previous epochs the same mode of dress was worn for centuries, as the European peasant’s dress shows. The present feverishly frequent change of fashion is a pathological phenomenon, betraying the diseased eagerness for ever stronger and more original sensual stimulations.
Love and sex attraction being the chief objects in the lives of a considerable part of mankind, it is surprising that until recently sexuality was not looked upon with great favor, and that a sane knowledge of sex and reproduction was assiduously withheld from the people. While our ancestors considered the sex functions sacred, by a strange mental process it is now considered shameful. So deeply is the sense of shame morbidly associated with the sensual desire that most people, and especially women, frequently disavow their propensity and attempt to hide their ardor from the world. They do not recognize that normal, well-ordered amativeness is a physiological and moral virtue, while manifestations of spurious spirituality are often induced by certain perversions. Indifference to amatory pleasures is frequently professed by those who resort to artificial stimulants. Only those most occupied with amatory delights feign to look with contempt upon sex and to despise its wonderful functions.[B] To the really innocent and pure all things are pure. The result of this morbid sense of shame is that there is scarcely any other subject so completely ignored as the sex function, although so much of the health and happiness of the race depends upon it. This false sense of shame is the cause of our modern fig-leaf modesty and prudery, which attributes a particular obscene meaning to everything sexual. It has created that diseased imagination, depraved beyond all hope, which can find any prurient gratification in the cold, chaste nakedness of ancient marble. The mere nude arms or legs of a small school girl, the furnishings of a public bath-house, the naked limbs of a Tirolian peasant, or the grandest works of art awaken in them lascivious thoughts. Individuals with such traits are accustomed to interject their own diseased imagination, guilty conscience and obscene sentiments into the purest artistic creations, be they sculptured, painted, written or spoken.
The prudery and obscenity of these victims of a diseased imagination and perverted moral sense have succeeded in distorting our judgment on questions of sex in such a way that any desire for scientific instruction in these subjects has become inextricably confused with ideas of prurience and impropriety. Matters pertaining to the generative functions are, as a rule, excluded even from treatises on physiology. But for the anatomists and alienists, nothing would be known about the physiology of normal Love. The zealots wish to persuade us that the population of the earth increases by the stork-method.
Even the physician who is often called upon for advice about things pertaining to the psychological phase of sex, prudishly ignores the mightiest of human instincts which is so intimately related to human weal and woe. He is conversant with the sexual question by virtue of its anatomical and physiological knowledge, and he is well aware of its hygienic, sociological and ethical importance. But when he is to furnish enlightenment on psychic or pedagogic questions of sex, he is embarrassed because of a lack of knowledge of sex psychology. The great teachers in our medical schools, who ought to impart to their pupils all their knowledge about the nature of things concerning Love that they have gathered in their long and extensive experience, seem either to consider Love a subject too sacred for physiological and psychological analysis, or are really afraid to arouse the anger of the zealots who made of the sanctuary of sex-attraction a “noli me tangere.”
Only the writers of fiction and poetry are allowed to approach the sanctuary of Love, because with their abnormal imagination they sang dithyrambs on this natural sentiment and morbidly transformed it into a supernatural, obscure phenomenon. The hyperaesthetic writers of this morbid fiction are encouraged to continue their practice of elevating the natural sentiment of love to the height of a fetich, which only the lover is capable of understanding. The scientist who dared to analyze this sentiment, so important to the human race, and tried to enlighten us about the nature of the attraction of the sexes, was met with the cry, “To the Tarpeian rock.” The unbiased observer was declared incapable of feeling and comprehending this natural sentiment. Even philosophers, such as Schopenhauer, Hartman and Spencer, though they touched upon the subject only from a philosophical point of view, without probing it with the anatomist’s scalpel, have been decried as heartless and soulless cynics whom nature denied the possession of this sublimest of sentiments, because they dared to attack the majesty of Love.
No wonder, therefore, that no other physical function has been treated with so stepmotherly a regard and scant attention as the important instinct of the preservation of the species, no wonder that no other physiological phenomenon has been approached with such hesitancy as the study of love in man. The works on physiology and gynaecology are significantly silent on the subject of this important sentiment, and the practitioner who so often has to deal with the pathological side of love looks in vain for light in his text-books.
In the last decennium, a certain change has taken place in this respect. A wave of sex discussion is sweeping over the civilized countries of the world. The former taboo on the discussion of sexual matters has been more or less removed and the veil lifted. Things which not very long ago could not have been mentioned in polite society except in whispers and with low breath, are now publicly discussed in season and out of season. As it is often the case, we have turned from the one extreme of complete darkness to the other extreme of too glaring light. Sex enlightenment runs rampant at present. It haunts the stage, lurks in innumerable societies and crops out in newspapers and magazines.