THE NATURAL 



vanishes, in part, or entirely, according to the degree of 

 security, and the degree of excitement. For a crowd 

 of populace on a fete night there is hardly any modesty 

 save "legal modesty"; the example of one bolder couple 

 is enough, if there is no authority to be feared, to set 

 loose all the appetites, and one then sees clearly that 

 man who does not hide in order to eat, only hides to make 

 love under pressure of usage. 



From the genital act, modesty is stretched over the 

 exterior sexual organs by a mechanism very simple and 

 very logical. But here, I think, one must distinguish 

 between genital modesty bred from the custom of cloth- 

 ing the whole body, and that which has led men to cover 

 only a particular part. Heat, cold, rain, insects explain 

 clothing, but not the savage's cotton drawers or the fig 

 leaf; especially when the leaf, imposed on married 

 women, for example, is forbidden to virgins, or when 

 this symbolic leaf is so reduced that it serves no purpose, 

 save that of a sign. In this last case, it has not even 

 any direct relation to genital modesty; it is only a 

 matrimonial ornament, analogous to the ring or the 

 collar, a sign, indeed indicating a condition. It is pos- 

 sible also, that among certain peoples where the men go 

 entirely naked, the women wear an apron merely to 

 keep off flies, gad-flies, rather as a peasant drapes his 

 horse's muzzle with grass and leaves. Quite often, how- 

 ever, one is forced to recognize in these customs, the 

 proof of a particular genital sensibility, analogous to 

 civilized modesty. An English sailor, at the time of 

 the first explorations got himself rejected by the Maori 

 women not because he appeared without clothing, a 

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