The Sex Researchers (Henry Havelock Ellis)

                 

                                         Henry Havelock Ellis (Feb.2, 1859 – July 8, 1938)

Havelock Ellis was an English physician, writer, progressive intellectual and social reformer who studied human sexuality.

He devoted many decades mastering most of what had been learned about human sexuality since the days of the ancient Greeks. As a counsellor and healer, he studied the sex lives of his contemporaries 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.

His research can be summed up in one brief sentence: everybody is not like you, and your loved ones, and your friends and your neighbors. The first chapter he developed called “The evolution of Modesty” enabled men and women to transcend the limitations of the sexual perspective of the Victorian era. It remains today the best introduction to the scientific study of sex. 

As 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 female human body, adequately clothed. Further, he demonstrated, from a review of the literature of anthropology, that the relations of clothing to modesty, and to modesty to sexual desire, are far more complex than what is supposed. He goes on to cite some examples from his research. For example, in one African tribe women once wore a small triangle of animal skin suspended between their thighs; yet they were so modest that they never removed it. Even during sexual relations they merely raised it. 

Another tribe in the Amazon valley, the men were naked while the women wore a short petticoat. Studying a tribe in North America, Ellis cites in an 1892 issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics, some of the females of the tribe were prostitutes, yet they were so modest that one of them, near death during childbirth, refused to let any man –native or white physician or lover-attend her. 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 that the more naked the people, the more moral and strict they are in the matter of sexual relations. Ellis’s modesty was concerned primarily with covering the male and female genitals and the female breasts.

He respected his Victorian prejudices by concentrating on non-Europeans. The Victorian attitude was that lesser breeds didn’t really count; they were for the most part neither civilized, nor Christian, nor white. But Ellis even went further. He demonstrated from historical sources that modesty taboos have varied widely from century to century among all tribes and all ancestors.

Ellis knew that he lived in the midst of a pathologically modest society. It was a society where ankles must be shielded from view, and in which guests having chicken for dinner asked for a helping of white meat or dark meat in order to avoid mentioning the chicken’s breast or legs.

Ellis could have brought his account closer to his own time and place. Written documents made as late as 1817 show men and women bathing nude together at English beaches. In 1856, letters to the editor of the London Times complained that the men still bathed nude at Margate. "The exhibition is truly disgusting," one correspondent wrote, "but what is more disgusting still is the fact that these exhibitions are watched daily by large numbers of ladies who spend their mornings in close proximity to scores of naked men." 

The following year a physician visiting another English seaside resort named Brighten, reported that when he opened his bedroom window, "the first sight that greeted me, immediately in front of the hotel, was half-a-dozen men, perfectly naked, wading about with the water not much higher than their knees." 

Additionally, in 1857, Lord Westmeath introduced in the House Lordsa bill which would have prohibited nude bathing. "It is the practice," he told his fellow peers, "for women to go down to the sea-bathing places and dance in the water without any covering whatever, to the great disgust of the respectable inhabitants and visitors." His knowledge of these scenes, he added, came from reports of local magistrates at Margate, Ramsgate, and other coastal resorts. Women also continued to appeared nude in poses plastiques on the London stage during the early years of Victoria's reign.

After about 1860, however, the memory of this earlier Victorian freedom was erased.  Even Havelock Ellis, who was born just as it was vanishing, seems never to have heard of it.