phenomenon, in the sexual sphere itself, is the opposed attitude in barbarism and civilization toward the sexual organs.  Under barbaric conditions and among savages, when no magico-religious ideas intervene, the sexual organs are beautiful and pleasurable objects.  Under modern conditions this is not so.  This difference of attitude is reflected in sculpture.  In savage and barbaric carvings of human beings, the sexual organs of both sexes are often enormously exaggerated.  This is true of the archaic European figures on which Salomon Reinach has thrown so much light, but in modern sculpture, from the time when it reached its perfection in Greece onward, the sexual regions in both men and women are systematically minimized.[103]

With advancing culture—­as again we shall see later—­there is a conflict of claims, and certain considerations are regarded as “higher” and more potent than merely “natural” claims.  Nakedness is more natural than clothing, and on many grounds more desirable under the average circumstances of life, yet, everywhere, under the stress of what are regarded as higher considerations, there is a tendency for all races to add more and more to the burden of clothes.  In the same way it happens that the tendency of the female to sexual intercourse during menstruation[104] has everywhere been overlaid by the ideas of a culture which has insisted on regarding menstruation as a supernatural phenomenon which, for the protection of everybody, must be strictly tabooed.[105] This tendency is reinforced, and in high civilization replaced, by the claims of an aesthetic regard for concealment and reserve during this period.  Such facts are significant for the early history of culture, but they must not blind us to the real analogy between heat and menstruation, an analogy or even identity which may be said to be accepted now by most careful investigators.[106]

If it is, perhaps, somewhat excessive to declare, with Johnstone, that “woman is the only animal in which rut is omnipresent,” we must admit that the two groups of phenomena merge into or replace each other, that their object is identical, that they involve similar psychic conditions.  Here, also, we see a striking example of the way in which women preserve a primitive phenomenon which earlier in the zooelogical series was common to both sexes, but which man has now lost.  Heat and menstruation, with whatever difference of detail, are practically the same phenomenon.  We cannot understand menstruation unless we bear this in mind.

On the psychic side the chief normal and primitive characteristic of the menstrual state is the more predominant presence of the sexual impulse.  There are other mental and emotional signs of irritability and instability which tend to slightly impair complete mental integrity, and to render, in some unbalanced individuals explosions of anger or depression, in rarer cases crime, more common;[107] but the heightening of the sexual impulse, languor, shyness, and caprice are the more human manifestations of an emotional state which in some of the lower female animals during heat may produce a state of fury.