[31] The
special secrecy sometimes observed by women is probably due to the fact
that women would be less able to resist the emotions that the act of
eating would arouse in onlookers. As social feeling develops, a man
desires not only to eat in safety, but also to avoid being an object of
disgust, and to spare his friends all unpleasant emotions. Hence it
becomes a requirement of ordinary decency to eat in private. A man who
eats in public becomes--like the man who in our cities exposes his person
in public--an object of disgust and contempt.
Long ago, when a hospital student on midwifery duty in London slums, I had
occasion to observe that among the women of the poor, and more especially
in those who had lost the first bloom of youth, modesty consisted chiefly
in the fear of being disgusting. There was an almost pathetic anxiety, in
the face of pain and discomfort, not to be disgusting in the doctor's
eyes. This anxiety expressed itself in the ordinary symptoms of modesty.
But, as soon as the woman realized that I found nothing disgusting in
whatever was proper and necessary to be done under the circumstances, it
almost invariably happened that every sign of modesty at once
disappeared.[32] In the special and elementary conditions of parturition,
modesty is reduced to this one fear of causing disgust; so that, when that
is negated, the emotion is non-existent, and the subject becomes, without
effort, as direct and natural as a little child.
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