The exact
attitude and the particular gestures of the hands in achieving
the desired end vary with the individual, and with the
circumstances. The hand may not be used at all as a veil, and,
indeed, the instinct of modesty itself may inhibit the use of the
hand for the protection of modesty (to turn the back towards the
beholder is often the chief impulse of blushing modesty, even
when clothed), but the application of the hand to this end is
primitive and natural. The lowly Fuegian woman, depicted by
Hyades and Deniker, who holds her hand to her pubes while being
photographed, is one at this point with the Roman Venus described
by Ovid (_Ars Amatoria_, Book II):--
"Ipsa Venus pubem, quoties velamnia ponit,
Protegitur laeva semireducta manus."
It may be added that young men of the lower social classes, at
all events in England, when bathing at the seaside in complete
nudity, commonly grasp the sexual organs with one hand, for
concealment, as they walk up from the sea.
The sexual modesty of the female animal is rooted in the sexual
periodicity of the female, and is an involuntary expression of the organic
fact that the time for love is not now. Inasmuch as this fact is true of
the greater part of the lives of all female animals below man, the
expression itself becomes so habitual that it even intrudes at those
moments when it has ceased to be in place.
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