Studies in the Psychology of Sex Volume Vi Part 4

Ceremonies of initiation into manhood at p.u.b.erty-involving physical and mental discipline, as well as instruction, lasting for weeks or months, and never identical for both s.e.xes-are common among savages in all parts of the world. They nearly always involve the endurance of a certain amount of pain and hardship, a wise measure of training which the softness of civilization has too foolishly allowed to drop, for the ability to endure hardness is an essential condition of all real manhood. It is as a corrective to this tendency to flabbiness in modern education that the teaching of Nietzsche is so invaluable.

The initiation of boys among the natives of Torres Straits has been elaborately described by A. C. Haddon (Reports Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. v, Chs. VII and XII). It lasts a month, involves much severe training and power of endurance, and includes admirable moral instruction. Haddon remarks that it formed "a very good discipline," and adds, "it is not easy to conceive of a more effectual means for a rapid training."

Among the aborigines of Victoria, Australia, the initiatory ceremonies, as described by R. H. Mathews ("Some Initiation Ceremonies," Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie, 1905, Heft 6), last for seven months, and const.i.tute an admirable discipline. The boys are taken away by the elders of the tribe, subjected to many trials of patience and endurance of pain and discomfort, sometimes involving even the swallowing of urine and excrement, brought into contact with strange tribes, taught the laws and folk-lore, and at the end meetings are held at which betrothals are arranged.

Among the northern tribes of Central Australia the initiation ceremonies involve circ.u.mcision and urethral subincision, as well as hard manual labor and hardships. The initiation of girls into womanhood is accompanied by cutting open of the v.a.g.i.n.a. These ceremonies have been described by Spencer and Gillen (Northern Tribes of Central Australia, Ch. XI). Among various peoples in British East Africa (including the Masai) p.u.b.ertal initiation is a great ceremonial event extending over a period of many months, and it includes circ.u.mcision in boys, and in girls c.l.i.toridectomy, as well as, among some tribes, removal of the nymphae. A girl who winces or cries out during the operation is disgraced among the women and expelled from the settlement. When the ceremony has been satisfactorily completed the boy or girl is marriageable (C. Marsh Beadnell, "Circ.u.mcision and c.l.i.toridectomy as Practiced by the Natives of British East Africa," British Medical Journal, April 29, 1905).

Initiation among the African Bawenda, as described by a missionary, is in three stages: (1) A stage of instruction and discipline during which the traditions and sacred things of the tribe are revealed, the art of warfare taught, self-restraint and endurance borne; then the youths are counted as full-grown. (2) In the next stage the art of dancing is practiced, by each s.e.x separately, during the day. (3) In the final stage, which is that of complete s.e.xual initiation, the two s.e.xes dance together by night; the scene, in the opinion of the good missionary, "does not bear description;" the initiated are now complete adults, with all the privileges and responsibilities of adults (Rev. E. Gottschling, "The Bawenda," Journal Anthropological Inst.i.tution, July to Dec., 1905, p. 372. Cf., an interesting account of the Bawenda Tondo schools by another missionary, Wessmann, The Bawenda, pp. 60 et seq.).

The initiation of girls in Azimba Land, Central Africa, has been fully and interestingly described by H. Crawford Angus ("The Chensamwali' or Initiation Ceremony of Girls," Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie, 1898, Heft 6). At the first sign of menstruation the girl is taken by her mother out of the village to a gra.s.s hut prepared for her where only the women are allowed to visit her. At the end of menstruation she is taken to a secluded spot and the women dance round her, no men being present. It was only with much difficulty that Angus was enabled to witness the ceremony. The girl is then informed in regard to the hygiene of menstruation. "Many songs about the relations between men and women are sung, and the girl is instructed as to all her duties when she becomes a wife.... The girl is taught to be faithful to her husband, and to try and bear children. The whole matter is looked upon as a matter of course, and not as a thing to be ashamed of or to hide, and being thus openly treated of and no secrecy made about it, you find in this tribe that the women are very virtuous, because the subject of married life has no glamour for them. When a woman is pregnant she is again danced; this time all the dancers are naked, and she is taught how to behave and what to do when the time of her delivery arrives."

Among the Yuman Indians of California, as described by Horatio Rust ("A p.u.b.erty Ceremony of the Mission Indians," American Anthropologist, Jan. to March, 1906, p. 28) the girls are at p.u.b.erty prepared for marriage by a ceremony. They are wrapped in blankets and placed in a warm pit, where they lie looking very happy as they peer out through their covers. For four days and nights they lie here (occasionally going away for food), while the old women of the tribe dance and sing round the pit constantly. At times the old women throw silver coins among the crowd to teach the girls to be generous. They also give away cloth and wheat, to teach them to be kind to the old and needy; and they sow wild seeds broadcast over the girls to cause them to be prolific. Finally, all strangers are ordered away, garlands are placed on the girls' heads, and they are led to a hillside and shown the large and sacred stone, symbolical of the female organs of generation and resembling them, which is said to protect women. Then grain is thrown over all present, and the ceremony is over.

The Thlinkeet Eskimo women were long noted for their fine qualities. At p.u.b.erty they were secluded, sometimes for a whole year, being kept in darkness, suffering, and filth. Yet defective and unsatisfactory as this initiation was, "Langsdorf suggests," says Bancroft (Native Races of Pacific, vol. i, p. 110), referring to the virtues of the Thlinkeet woman, "that it may be during this period of confinement that the foundation of her influence is laid; that in modest reserve and meditation her character is strengthened, and she comes forth cleansed in mind as well as body."

We have lost these ancient and invaluable rites of initiation into manhood and womanhood, with their inestimable moral benefits; at the most we have merely preserved the sh.e.l.ls of initiation in which the core has decayed. In time, we cannot doubt, they will be revived in modern forms. At present the spiritual initiation of youths and maidens is left to the chances of some happy accident, and usually it is of a purely cerebral character which cannot be perfectly wholesome, and is at the best absurdly incomplete.

This cerebral initiation commonly occurs to the youth through the medium of literature. The influence of literature in s.e.xual education thus extends, in an incalculable degree, beyond the narrow sphere of manuals on s.e.xual hygiene, however admirable and desirable these may be. The greater part of literature is more or less distinctly penetrated by erotic and auto-erotic conceptions and impulses; nearly all imaginative literature proceeds from the root of s.e.x to flower in visions of beauty and ecstasy. The Divine Comedy of Dante is herein the immortal type of the poet's evolution. The youth becomes acquainted with the imaginative representations of love before he becomes acquainted with the reality of love, so that, as Leo Berg puts it, "the way to love among civilized peoples pa.s.ses through imagination." All literature is thus, to the adolescent soul, a part of s.e.xual education.[39] It depends, to some extent, though fortunately not entirely, on the judgment of those in authority over the young soul whether the literature to which the youth or girl is admitted is or is not of the large and humanizing order.

All great literature touches nakedly and sanely on the central facts of s.e.x. It is always consoling to remember this in an age of petty pruderies. And it is a satisfaction to know that it would not be possible to emasculate the literature of the great ages, however desirable it might seem to the men of more degenerate ages, or to close the avenues to that literature against the young. All our religious and literary traditions serve to fortify the position of the Bible and of Shakespeare. "So many men and women," writes a correspondent, a literary man, "gain s.e.xual ideas in childhood from reading the Old Testament, that the Bible may be called an erotic text-book. Most persons of either s.e.x with whom I have conversed on the subject, say that the Books of Moses, and the stories of Amnon and Tamar, Lot and his daughters, Potiphar's wife and Joseph, etc., caused speculation and curiosity, and gave them information of the s.e.xual relationship. A boy and girl of fifteen, both friends of the writer, and now over thirty years of age, used to find out erotic pa.s.sages in the Bible on Sunday mornings, while in a Dissenting chapel, and pa.s.s their Bibles to one another, with their fingers on the portions that interested them." In the same way many a young woman has borrowed Shakespeare in order to read the glowing erotic poetry of Venus and Adonis, which her friends have told her about.

The Bible, it may be remarked, is not in every respect, a model introduction for the young mind to the questions of s.e.x. But even its frank acceptance, as of divine origin, of s.e.xual rules so unlike those that are nominally our own, such as polygamy and concubinage, helps to enlarge the vision of the youthful mind by showing that the rules surrounding the child are not those everywhere and always valid, while the nakedness and realism of the Bible cannot but be a wholesome and tonic corrective to conventional pruderies.

We must, indeed, always protest against the absurd confusion whereby nakedness of speech is regarded as equivalent to immorality, and not the less because it is often adopted even in what are regarded as intellectual quarters. When in the House of Lords, in the last century, the question of the exclusion of Byron's statue from Westminster Abbey was under discussion, Lord Brougham "denied that Shakespeare was more moral than Byron. He could, on the contrary, point out in a single page of Shakespeare more grossness than was to be found in all Lord Byron's works." The conclusion Brougham thus reached, that Byron is an incomparably more moral writer than Shakespeare, ought to have been a sufficient reductio ad absurdum of his argument, but it does not appear that anyone pointed out the vulgar confusion into which he had fallen.

It may be said that the special attractiveness which the nakedness of great literature sometimes possesses for young minds is unwholesome. But it must be remembered that the peculiar interest of this element is merely due to the fact that elsewhere there is an inveterate and abnormal concealment. It must also be said that the statements of the great writers about natural things are never degrading, nor even erotically exciting to the young, and what Emilia Pardo Bazan tells of herself and her delight when a child in the historical books of the Old Testament, that the crude pa.s.sages in them failed to send the faintest cloud of trouble across her young imagination, is equally true of most children. It is necessary, indeed, that these naked and serious things should be left standing, even if only to counterbalance the lewdly comic efforts to besmirch love and s.e.x, which are visible to all in every low-cla.s.s bookseller's shop window.

This point of view was vigorously championed by the speakers on s.e.xual education at the Third Congress of the German Gesellschaft zur Bekampfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten in 1907. Thus Enderlin, speaking as a headmaster, protested against the custom of bowdlerizing poems and folk-songs for the use of children, and thus robbing them of the finest introduction to purified s.e.xual impulses and the highest sphere of emotion, while at the same time they are recklessly exposed to the "psychic infection" of the vulgar comic papers everywhere exposed for sale. "So long as children are too young to respond to erotic poetry it cannot hurt them; when they are old enough to respond it can only benefit them by opening to them the highest and purest channels of human emotion" (s.e.xualpadagogik, p. 60). Professor Schafenacker (id., p. 98) expresses himself in the same sense, and remarks that "the method of removing from school-books all those pa.s.sages which, in the opinion of short-sighted and narrow-hearted schoolmasters, are unsuited for youth, must be decisively condemned." Every healthy boy and girl who has reached the age of p.u.b.erty may be safely allowed to ramble in any good library, however varied its contents. So far from needing guidance they will usually show a much more refined taste than their elders. At this age, when the emotions are still virginal and sensitive, the things that are realistic, ugly, or morbid, jar on the young spirit and are cast aside, though in adult life, with the coa.r.s.ening of mental texture which comes of years and experience, this repugnance, doubtless by an equally sound and natural instinct, may become much less acute.

Ellen Key in Ch. VI of her Century of the Child well summarizes the reasons against the practice of selecting for children books that are "suitable" for them, a practice which she considers one of the follies of modern education. The child should be free to read all great literature, and will himself instinctively put aside the things he is not yet ripe for. His cooler senses are undisturbed by scenes that his elders find too exciting, while even at a later stage it is not the nakedness of great literature, but much more the method of the modern novel, which is likely to stain the imagination, falsify reality and injure taste. It is concealment which misleads and coa.r.s.ens, producing a state of mind in which even the Bible becomes a stimulus to the senses. The writings of the great masters yield the imaginative food which the child craves, and the erotic moment in them is too brief to be overheating. It is the more necessary, Ellen Key remarks, for children to be introduced to great literature, since they often have little opportunity to occupy themselves with it in later life. Many years earlier Ruskin, in Sesame and Lilies, had eloquently urged that even young girls should be allowed to range freely in libraries.

What has been said about literature applies equally to art. Art, as well as literature, and in the same indirect way, can be made a valuable aid in the task of s.e.xual enlightenment and s.e.xual hygiene. Modern art may, indeed, for the most part, be ignored from this point of view, but children cannot be too early familiarized with the representations of the nude in ancient sculpture and in the paintings of the old masters of the Italian school. In this way they may be immunized, as Enderlin expresses it, against those representations of the nude which make an appeal to the baser instincts. Early familiarity with nudity in art is at the same time an aid to the attainment of a proper att.i.tude towards purity in nature. "He who has once learnt," as Holler remarks, "to enjoy peacefully nakedness in art, will be able to look on nakedness in nature as on a work of art."

Casts of cla.s.sic nude statues and reproductions of the pictures of the old Venetian and other Italian masters may fittingly be used to adorn schoolrooms, not so much as objects of instruction as things of beauty with which the child cannot too early become familiarized. In Italy it is said to be usual for school cla.s.ses to be taken by their teachers to the art museums with good results; such visits form part of the official scheme of education.

There can be no doubt that such early familiarity with the beauty of nudity in cla.s.sic art is widely needed among all social cla.s.ses and in many countries. It is to this defect of our education that we must attribute the occasional, and indeed in America and England frequent, occurrence of such incidents as pet.i.tions and protests against the exhibition of nude statuary in art museums, the display of pictures so inoffensive as Leighton's "Bath of Psyche" in shop windows, and the demand for the draping of the naked personifications of abstract virtues in architectural street decoration. So imperfect is still the education of the mult.i.tude that in these matters the ill-bred fanatic of pruriency usually gains his will. Such a state of things cannot but have an unwholesome reaction on the moral atmosphere of the community in which it is possible. Even from the religious point of view, prurient prudery is not justifiable. Northcote has very temperately and sensibly discussed the question of the nude in art from the standpoint of Christian morality. He points out that not only is the nude in art not to be condemned without qualification, and that the nude is by no means necessarily the erotic, but he also adds that even erotic art, in its best and purest manifestations, only arouses emotions that are the legitimate object of man's aspirations. It would be impossible even to represent Biblical stories adequately on canvas or in marble if erotic art were to be tabooed (Rev. H. Northcote, Christianity and s.e.x Problems, Ch. XIV).

Early familiarity with the nude in cla.s.sic and early Italian art should be combined at p.u.b.erty with an equal familiarity with photographs of beautiful and naturally developed nude models. In former years books containing such pictures in a suitable and attractive manner to place before the young were difficult to procure. Now this difficulty no longer exists. Dr. C. H. Stratz, of The Hague, has been the pioneer in this matter, and in a series of beautiful books (notably in Der Korper des Kindes, Die Schonheit des Weiblichen Korpers and Die Ra.s.senschonheit des Weibes, all published by Enke in Stuttgart), he has brought together a large number of admirably selected photographs of nude but entirely chaste figures. More recently Dr. Shufeldt, of Washington (who dedicates his work to Stratz), has published his Studies of the Human Form in which, in the same spirit, he has brought together the results of his own studies of the naked human form during many years. It is necessary to correct the impressions received from cla.s.sic sources by good photographic ill.u.s.trations on account of the false conventions prevailing in cla.s.sic works, though those conventions were not necessarily false for the artists who originated them. The omission of the pudendal hair, in representations of the nude was, for instance, quite natural for the people of countries still under Oriental influence are accustomed to remove the hair from the body. If, however, under quite different conditions, we perpetuate that artistic convention to-day, we put ourselves into a perverse relation to nature. There is ample evidence of this. "There is one convention so ancient, so necessary, so universal," writes Mr. Frederic Harrison (Nineteenth Century and After, Aug., 1907), "that its deliberate defiance to-day may arouse the bile of the least squeamish of men and should make women withdraw at once." If boys and girls were brought up at their mother's knees in familiarity with pictures of beautiful and natural nakedness, it would be impossible for anyone to write such silly and shameful words as these.

There can be no doubt that among ourselves the simple and direct att.i.tude of the child towards nakedness is so early crushed out of him that intelligent education is necessary in order that he may be enabled to discern what is and what is not obscene. To the plough-boy and the country servant-girl all nakedness, including that of Greek statuary, is alike shameful or l.u.s.tful. "I have a picture of women like that," said a countryman with a grin, as he pointed to a photograph of one of Tintoret's most beautiful groups, "smoking cigarettes." And the ma.s.s of people in most northern countries have still pa.s.sed little beyond this stage of discernment; in ability to distinguish between the beautiful and the obscene they are still on the level of the plough-boy and the servant-girl.

[18]

These manifestations have been dealt with in the study of Autoerotism in vol. i of the present Studies. It may be added that the s.e.xual life of the child has been exhaustively investigated by Moll, Das s.e.xualleben des Kindes, 1909.

[19]

This genital efflorescence in the s.e.xual glands and b.r.e.a.s.t.s at birth or in early infancy has been discussed in a Paris thesis, by Camille Renouf (La Crise Genital et les Manifestations Connexes chez le Ftus et le Nouveau-ne, 1905); he is unable to offer a satisfactory explanation of these phenomena.

[20]

Amelineau, La Morale des Egyptiens, p. 64.

[21]

"The Social Evil in Philadelphia," Arena, March, 1896.

[22]

Moll, Kontrare s.e.xualempfindung, third edition, p. 592.

[23]

This powerlessness of the law and the police is well recognized by lawyers familiar with the matter. Thus F. Werthauer (Sittlichkeitsdelikte der Grosstadt, 1907) insists throughout on the importance of parents and teachers imparting to children from their early years a progressively increasing knowledge of s.e.xual matters.

[24]

"Parents must be taught how to impart information," remarks E. L. Keyes ("Education upon s.e.xual Matters," New York Medical Journal, Feb. 10, 1906), "and this teaching of the parent should begin when he is himself a child."

[25]

Moll (op. cit., p. 224) argues well how impossible it is to preserve children from sights and influence connected with the s.e.xual life.

[26]

Girls are not even prepared, in many cases, for the appearance of the pubic hair. This unexpected growth of hair frequently causes young girls much secret worry, and often they carefully cut it off.

[27]

G. S. Hall, Adolescence, vol. i, p. 511. Many years ago, in 1875, the late Dr. Clarke, in his s.e.x in Education, advised menstrual rest for girls, and thereby aroused a violent opposition which would certainly not be found nowadays, when the special risks of womanhood are becoming more clearly understood.

[28]

For a summary of the physical and mental phenomena of the menstrual period, see Havelock Ellis: Man and Woman, Ch. XI. The primitive conception of menstruation is briefly discussed in Appendix A to the first volume of these Studies, and more elaborately by J. G. Frazer in The Golden Bough. A large collection of facts with regard to the menstrual seclusion of women throughout the world will be found in Ploss and Bartels, Das Weib. The p.u.b.ertal seclusion of girls at Torres Straits has been especially studied by Seligmann, Reports Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. v, Ch. VI.

[29]

Thus Miss Lura Sanborn, Director of Physical Training at the Chicago Normal School, found that a bath once a fortnight was not unusual. At the menstrual period especially there is still a superst.i.tious dread of water. Girls should always be taught that at this period, above all, cleanliness is imperatively necessary. There should be a tepid hip bath night and morning, and a v.a.g.i.n.al douche (which should never be cold) is always advantageous, both for comfort as well as cleanliness. There is not the slightest reason to dread water during menstruation. This point was discussed a few years ago in the British Medical Journal with complete unanimity of opinion. A distinguished American obstetrician, also, Dr. J. Clifton Edgar, after a careful study of opinion and practice in this matter ("Bathing During the Menstrual Period," American Journal Obstetrics, Sept., 1900), concludes that it is possible and beneficial to take cold baths (though not sea-baths) during the period, provided due precautions are observed, and that there are no sudden changes of habits. Such a course should not be indiscriminately adopted, but there can be no doubt that in st.u.r.dy peasant women who are inured to it early in life even prolonged immersion in the sea in fishing has no evil results, and is even beneficial. Houzel (Annales de Gynecologie, Dec., 1894) has published statistics of the menstrual life of 123 fisherwomen on the French coast. They were accustomed to shrimp for hours at a time in the sea, often to above the waist, and then walk about in their wet clothes selling the shrimps. They all insisted that their menstruation was easier when they were actively at work. Their periods are notably regular, and their fertility is high.

[30]

J. H. McBride, "The Life and Health of Our Girls in Relation to Their Future," Alienist and Neurologist, Feb., 1904.

[31]

W. G. Chambers, "The Evolution of Ideals," Pedagogical Seminary, March, 1903; Catherine Dodd, "School Children's Ideals," National Review, Feb. and Dec., 1900, and June, 1901. No German girls acknowledged a wish to be men; they said it would be wicked. Among Flemish girls, however, Varendonck found at Ghent (Archives de Psychologie, July, 1908) that 26 per cent. had men as their ideals.

[32]

A. Reibmayr, Die Entwicklungsgeschichte des Talentes und Genies, 1908, Bd. i, p. 70.

[33]

R. h.e.l.lmann, Ueber Geschlechtsfreiheit, p. 14.

[34]

This belief seems frequent among young girls in Continental Europe. It forms the subject of one of Marcel Prevost's Lettres de Femmes. In Austria, according to Freud, it is not uncommon, exclusively among girls.

[35]

Yet, according to English law, rape is a crime which it is impossible for a husband to commit on his wife (see, e.g., Nevill Geary, The Law of Marriage, Ch. XV, Sect. V). The performance of the marriage ceremony, however, even if it necessarily involved a clear explanation of marital privileges, cannot be regarded as adequate justification for an act of s.e.xual intercourse performed with violence or without the wife's consent.

[36]

Hirschfeld, Jahrbuch fur s.e.xuelle Zwischenstufen, 1903, p. 88. It may be added that a horror of coitus is not necessarily due to bad education, and may also occur in hereditarily degenerate women, whose ancestors have shown similar or allied mental peculiarities. A case of such "functional impotence" has been reported in a young Italian wife of twenty-one, who was otherwise healthy, and strongly attached to her husband. The marriage was annulled on the ground that "rudimentary s.e.xual or emotional paranoia, which renders a wife invincibly refractory to s.e.xual union, notwithstanding the integrity of the s.e.xual organs, const.i.tutes psychic functional impotence" (Archivio di Psichiatria, 1906, fasc. vi, p. 806).

[37]