]

If we recall the psychological standpoint that the emotions are an
organic disturbance of equilibrium occurring when factors difficult
of reconciliation are brought to the attention, and if we have in
mind that the association of the sexes has furnished so powerful an
emotional disturbance as jealousy, it seems a simple matter to explain
the comparatively mild by-play of sexual modesty as a function
of wooing, without bringing either clothing or ornament into the
question.

We saw a minimum expression of modesty in the courtship of animals,
where the modesty of the female was a form of fear on the organic
side, but the accompanying movements of avoidance were, at the same
time, a powerful attraction to the male. And we have in this, as
in all expressions of fear--shame, guilt, timidity, bashfulness--an
affective bodily state growing out of the strain thrown upon the
attention in the effort of the organism to accommodate itself to its
environment. The essential nature of the reaction is already fixed
in types of animal life where the operation of disgust is out of the
question, and in relations which imply no attention to the conduct of
others. If any separation between the bodily self and the environment
is to be made at all, it is putting the cart before the horse to make
out that modesty is derived from our repugnance at the conduct of
others, more immediately than through attention to the meaning of our
own activities. The fallacy of the disgust theory lies, in fact, in
the attempt to separate the copies for imitation derived from our own
activities from those derived from our observation of the activities
of others.

When habits are set up and are running smoothly, the attention is
withdrawn; and nakedness was a habit in the unclothed societies, just
as it may become a habit now in the artist's model. But when, for any
of the reasons I have outlined, women or men began to cover the body,
then putting off the covering became peculiarly suggestive, because
the breaking-up of a habit brings an act clearly into attention. And
when dress becomes habitual in a society whose sense of modesty has
also developed to a high degree, the suggestive effect is so great
that the bare thought of unclothing the person becomes painful, and we
have the possibility of such a phenomenon as mock modesty. But, so far
as sexual modesty is concerned, the clothing has only reinforced the
already great suggestive power of the sexual cha