Page:The sexual life of savages in north-western Melanesia.djvu/16

Rh superficial and imaginative vision of the natural man. But Rousseau had really been a careful student of the narratives of explorers in his time, as there is clear evidence to show. The conclusions he drew were not more extravagant than those at the opposite extreme drawn by later generations and sometimes still persisting to-day. Diderot, likewise, when he wrote his famous Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, to exhibit to his fellow-countrymen the superior reasonableness in matters of sexual ethics of the Tahitian, brought forward various correct facts — already set down in the attractive narrative of the great French navigator — but misleadingly, because he was ignorant of the social framework to which they belonged.

In the nineteenth century the more sombre view prevailed. The explorers were now mainly English, and they carried with them the Anglo-Saxon Puritanism for which all sexual customs that are unfamiliar are either shocking or disgusting. "Obscene" was the word commonly used, and it was left to the reader's imagination to picture what that might mean. The sexual behaviour of savages seemed mostly unspeakable. The urethral sub-incision practised by some Australian tribes was mysteriously named "the terrible rite." A similar mutilation of the nose or ear, or anywhere a little higher up or a little lower down, would not have seemed "terrible"; but at that particular spot it aroused a shuddering and shame-faced awe.

In the twentieth century we have moved towards a calmer attitude. We are learning to view our own sex

Rh