zil, that though the Bakairi of Central Brazil have no feeling of shame
about nakedness, they are ashamed to eat in public; they retire to eat,
and hung their heads in shame-faced confusion when they saw him innocently
eat in public. Hrolf Vaughan Stevens found that, when he gave an Orang
Laut (Malay) woman anything to eat, she not only would not eat it if her
husband were present, but if any man were present she would go outside
before eating or giving her children to eat.[29] Thus among these peoples
the act of eating in public produces the same feelings as among ourselves
the indecent exposure of the body in public.[30]

It is quite easy to understand how this arises. Whenever there is any
pressure on the means of subsistence, as among savages at some time or
another there nearly always is, it must necessarily arouse a profound and
mixed emotion of desire and disgust to see another person putting into his
stomach what one might just as well have put into one's own.[31] The
special secrecy sometimes observed by women is probably due to the fact
that women would be less able to resist the emotions that the act of
eating would arouse in onlookers. As social feeling develops, a man
desires not only to eat in safety, but also to avoid being an object of
disgust, and to spare his friends all unpleasant emotions. Hence it
becomes a requirement of ordinary decency to eat in private. A man who
eats in public becomes--like the man who in our cities exposes his person
in public--an object of disgust and contempt.

Long ago, when a hospital student on midwifery duty in London slums, I had
occasion to observe that among the women of the poor, and more especially
in those who had lost the first bloom of youth, modesty consisted chiefly
in the fear of being disgusting. There was an almost pathetic anxiety, in
the face of pain and discomfort, not to be disgusting in the doctor's
eyes. This anxiety expressed itself in the ordinary symptoms of modesty.
But, as soon as the woman realized that I found nothing disgusting in
whatever was proper and necessary to be done under the circumstances, it
almost invariably happened that every sign of modesty at once
disappeared.[32] In the special and elementary conditions of parturition,
modesty is reduced to this one fear of causing disgust; so that, when that
is negated, the emotion is non-existent, and the subject becomes, without
effort, as direct and natural as a little child. A fellow-studen