In order to understand why modesty might be a contributing factor to unwanted sexual acts, we may find the answer in some earlier sex research papers. Most of us think we have a reasonably clear insight into the sexual behaviour of those we love, and some notion of the sexuality of our friends and neighbors. From this assumption we formulate an opinion of what is normal and what is abnormal.
One of the first and most influential sexologists to investigate this egocentric perspective was Henry Havelock Ellis (1859 - 1939). He contributed more than any other individual to the overthrow of old ideas in the study of human sexuality, and he presented concepts of individual and cultural relativism which underlie almost all significant sex research today.
Ellis devoted many decades of his life to mastering most of what had been learned about human sexuality since the days of the ancient Greeks. As a counselor and healer, he studied the sex lives of his contemporaries directly and recorded his findings in a series of volumes,Studies in the Psychology of Sex, which he published and periodically revised between 1896 and 1928. What he discovered was that: everybody is not like you, you loved ones, and your friends and neighbors.
Ellis was an English Victorian. He accordingly opened his essay on modesty with the generally accepted Victorian belief that virtue consists essentially in keeping the human body , and especially the human female body, adequately clothed. To illustrate this relationship between modesty and clothing, he recounted a visit paid by Jacques (Giacomo Girolamo) Casanova to the public baths near Berne, Switzerland, late in the nineteenth century.
According to the custom of the time and place, Ellis explained, Casanova at arriving at the baths selected a young girl of eighteen from the cluster of attendants awaiting patrons. She undressed him, undressed herself, entered the bath with him, and proceeded to massage him thoroughly all over, "in the most serious manner and without a word being spoken." When the message was completed , Casanova perceived that the girl expected him to make sexual advances. He felt-strangely enough for a world renowned womanizer - no desire to do so. This seducer of scores of women, now near the peak of his career as an international philanderer, felt embarrassed even to examine her nudity below the waist. "Though without gazing at the girl's figure," Casanova had written in his Memoirs, I had seen enough to recognize that she had all that a man can desire to find in a woman: a beautiful face, lively and well formed eyes, a beautiful mouth, with good teeth, a healthy complexion, well-developed breasts, and everything in harmony...Yet I remained extremely cold. What was the cause of this? That was the question that I asked myself."
Casanova thereupon ventured to answer his own question. Perhaps modesty in a woman was one of the factors arousing a man's sexual desire. Perhaps, lacking modesty, the Berne bath attendant lacked sexual appeal. But Ellis was not so sure. He went on to demonstrate, from a review of the literature of anthropology, that the relation of the clothing to modesty, and of modesty to sexual desire, is in fact, far more complex that Casanova had supposed. In Tierra del Fuego, South America, for example, women once wore only a minute triangle of animal skin suspended between their thighs; yet they were so modest, they never removed it. Even during sexual intercourse they merely raised it. Among natives of the Amazon Valley, the men went naked while the women wore a short skirt. Among another tribe in the area, the men always wore a loincloth while the women went naked. According to an article written in an 1892 issue of the American Journal Of Obstetrics, almost every woman in one tribe of North American Indians were sexually free, yet they were modest when one of them , near death during childbirth, refused to let any man attend her. At length consented to be examined by a physician only if her whole body was covered with only the vaginal opening remaining visible. Ellis also recorded another tribe in Africa where it was a punishable offense for a man to expose any part of his leg above the knee, "the wives of the King would attend his Court naked." One African tribe considered it shameful for a man to conceal his penis.According to E. Brecher (1969), in his book The Sex Researchers, when a British anthropologist remarked on the nudity of the women in the Congo, a chief replied that "concealment is food for the inquisitive." Another British anthropologist commented with respect to Central Africa: It has been my experience that the more naked the people, and the more to us obscene and shameless their manners and customs, the more moral and strict they are in the matter of sexual intercourse."
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