This may be
noted among savage as well as among civilized women. The
comparatively evanescent character of modesty has led to the
argument (Venturi, _Degenerazioni Psico-sessuali_, pp. 92-93)
that modesty (_pudore_) is possessed by women alone, men
exhibiting, instead, a sense of decency which remains at about
the same level of persistency throughout life. Viazzi ("Pudore
nell 'uomo e nella donna," _Rivista Mensile di Psichiatria
Forense_, 1898), on the contrary, following Sergi, argues that
men are, throughout, more modest than women; but the points he
brings forward, though often just, scarcely justify his
conclusion. While the young virgin, however, is more modest and
shy than the young man of the same age, the experienced married
woman is usually less so than her husband, and in a woman who is
a mother the shy reticences of virginal modesty would be rightly
felt to be ridiculous. ("Les petites pudeurs n'existent pas pour
les meres," remarks Goncourt, _Journal des Goncourt_, vol. iii,
p. 5.) She has put off a sexual livery that has no longer any
important part to play in life, and would, indeed, be
inconvenient and harmful, just as a bird loses its sexual plumage
when the pairing season is over.
Madame Celine Renooz, in an elaborate study of the psychological
sexual differences between men and women (_Psychologie Comparee
de l'Homme et de la Femme_, 1898, pp.
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