h a blush is produced when a
sufficiently young and susceptible woman is pumped full of
compliments. This blush seems accompanied by pleasure which does
not always change to fear or disgust, but is felt to be
attractive. When discomfort arises, most women say that they feel
this because 'it looks as if they had no control over
themselves.' When they feel that there is no need for control,
they no longer feel fear, and the relaxor effect has a wider
field of operation, producing a general rosiness, erection of
spinal sexual organs, etc. Such a blush would thus be a partial
sexual equivalent, and allow of the inhibition of other sexual
effects, through the warning it gives, and the fear aroused, as
well as being in itself a slight outlet of relaxor energy. When
the relationships of the persons concerned allow freedom to the
special sexual stimuli, as in marriage, blushing does not occur
so often, and when it does it has not so often the consequent of
fear."

There can be no doubt that the blush is sexually attractive. The
blush is the expression of an impulse to concealment and flight,
which tends automatically to arouse in the beholder the
corresponding impulse of pursuit, so that the central situation
of courtship is at once presented. Women are more or less
conscious of this, as well as men, and this recognition is an
added source of embarrassment when it cannot become a source of
pleasure. The ancient use of rouge testifies to the beauty of the
blush, and Darwin stated that, in Turkish slave-markets, the
girls who readily blushed fetched the highest prices. To evoke a
blush, even by producing embarrassment, is very commonly a cause
of masculine gratification.

Savages, both men and women, blush even beneath a dusky skin (for
the phenomenon of blushing among different races, see Waitz,
_Anthropologie der Naturvoelker_, Bd. I, pp. 149-150), and it is
possible that natural selection, as well as sexual selection, has
been favorable to the development of the blush. It is scarcely an
accident that, as has been often observed, criminals, or the
antisocial element of the community--whether by the habits of
their lives or by congenital abnormality--blush less easily than
normal persons. Kroner (_Das koerperliche Gefuehl_, 1887, p. 130)
remarks: "The origin of a specific conn