Beauty to Some Extent Consists Primitively in an Exaggeration of the Sexual Characters—The Sexual Organs—Mutilations, Adornments, and Garments—Sexual Allurement the Original Object of Such Devices—The Religious Element—Unæsthetic Character of the Sexual Organs—Importance of the Secondary Sexual Characters—The Pelvis and Hips—Steatopygia—Obesity—Gait—The Pregnant Woman as a Mediæval Type of Beauty—The Ideals of the Renaissance—The Breasts—The Corset—Its Object—Its History—Hair—The Beard—The Element of National or Racial Type in Beauty—The Relative Beauty of Blondes and Brunettes—The General European Admiration for Blondes—The Individual Factors in the Constitution of the Idea of Beauty—The Love of the Exotic.
In the constitution of our ideals of masculine and feminine beauty it was inevitable that the sexual characters should from a very early period in the history of man form an important element. From a primitive point of view a sexually desirable and attractive person is one whose sexual characters are either naturally prominent or artificially rendered so. The beautiful woman is one endowed, as Chaucer expresses it,
"With buttokes brode and brestës rounde and hye";
that is to say, she is the woman obviously best fitted to bear children and to suckle them. These two physical characters, indeed, since they represent aptitude for the two essential acts of motherhood, must necessarily tend to be regarded as beautiful among all peoples and in all stages of culture, even in high stages of civilization when more refined and perverse ideals tend to find favor, and at Pompeii as a decoration on the east side of the Purgatorium of the Temple of Isis we find a representation of Perseus rescuing Andromeda, who is shown as a woman with a very small head, small hands and feet, but with a fully developed body, large breasts, and large projecting nates.[[134]]
To a certain extent—and, as we shall see, to a certain extent only—the primary sexual characters are objects of admiration among primitive peoples. In the primitive dances of many peoples, often of sexual significance, the display of the sexual organs on the part of both men and women is frequently a prominent feature. Even down to mediæval times in Europe the garments of men sometimes permitted the sexual organs to be visible. In some parts of the world, also, the artificial enlargement of the female sexual organs is practised, and thus enlarged they are considered an important and attractive feature of beauty.
Sir Andrew Smith informed Darwin that the elongated nymphæ (or "Hottentot apron") found among the women of some South African tribes was formerly greatly admired by the men (Descent of Man, Chapter XIX). This formation is probably a natural peculiarity of 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.)