Our average young wife seeker, following the action of Diogenes, conducts a vigilant search and after a time he finds the girl who is his conception of the perfect feminine and marries this most fortunate young lady. Then in the course of events he discovers or thinks he discovers a shadow in his wife’s early career, a shadow occurring before he illuminated with his presence the horizon of her life.
In a great display of righteous indignation he rises upon his hind legs, lays back his ears and in a loud voice fairly quivering with holy wrath and outraged decency, he verbally and sometimes physically flays his wife.
And then to secure balm for his wounded spirit he hies himself with all possible haste to the divorce courts, where he assures the world that he is a worthy young man of impeccable character; that he, a paragon of virtue, has been tricked into a marriage with a creature of the streets and that he is ineradicably besmirched. Is he not a member in high standing of the Y.M.C.A. and the B.Y.P.U. and therefore blameless?
After he has succeeded in establishing his claim to godliness through the process of dragging his wife’s name through the mire of the courts he feels the need of consolation; so cranking his trusty automobile, he flivvers down some shady avenue, inviting passing flappers to share the honor of his society and the pleasure of his car.
Puritanically speaking, such a standard of morality was considered quite the proper thing but Puritanism flourished during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which time incidentally, is far removed from the present.
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Far be it from us to harp too much on styles. We believe if a girl has shapely limbs and a sparkling pair of eyes she has as much right to show one as the other and as an anonymous writer in a Minneapolis newspaper says, “There is no such thing as immodest dress—it is all in the mind.”
Samuel Butler says: “Even Euclid had to assume something before he could prove anything. Truly we live by faith.” Thus it can be said that it is all in the mind. But I do submit that what a thing is to anyone, lies in his reaction or response to it not in the thing itself. If in a painting, a statue or a shapely pair of legs beneath a short skirt, one person sees only the beauty, an esthetic reaction to grace, perfect proportion or symmetry, while another “sees red.” Where lies the cause? The object viewed is the same. Therefore, as someone so aptly put it, “it is all in the eyes of the beholder.”
If short skirts and low necks arouse sex instincts, why howl about it? Rather be happy in the knowledge that one is normal, for the sex instinct is a natural one. When sex desire stops, the physical manifestations of life will cease. Those thoughts may require self-control, but since that element is a necessary concomitant to civilized society, the exercise of it will be beneficial. The trend of human progress, while almost imperceptible, appears to be toward the ideal in human relations and away from the cocoanut throwing hit-her-on-the-head-with-a-club status, and if some men can’t withstand the sight of bare knees they are insufficiently advanced in the scale of civilization.
Which brings us to a quotation by Stevenson, that all reformers and custodians of the neighbors’ morals would do well to heed. It is: “There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbors good. One person I have to make good—myself. But my duty to my neighbor is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him happy if I may.” Live and let live.