The choice of a mate.

  • Ludovici, Anthony M. (Anthony Mario), 1882-1971.
Date:
[1935]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The choice of a mate. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    411/546 (page 381)
    TROUSERS CONDEMNED and accessible to the air. The Egyptian males, for instance, wore kilts. The Greeks and Scots wear kilts to this day, and it is the old male dress of the Irish. The Greeks and Romans, as we have seen, wore garments which were in the nature of flowing robes, leaving their external genital organs free and accessible to the air. And the same is true of almost every race and people on earth. By some extraordinarily adverse fate, however—so extra ordinary, indeed, that it makes one almost wonder whether there was not from the very dawn of history a curse upon the sexual instincts of Europeans—the Arctic pattern of clothing for both sexes, the trouser, became the garment adopted by the men in all temperate climes populated by Europeans, while the women, who might well have adopted the Arctic pattern of clothing without injury to themselves, were somehow left with the tropical pattern, i.e. the skirt, kilt, long tunica, or stola. If differentiation was necessary at all, it seems strange that here, at these important sartorial cross-roads, the wrong choice should have been made. At all events, it was made, and almost all European males and their cousins and kinsmen overseas have thus come to wear the worst garment that could possibly have been selected from the standpoint of hygiene, virility and, indirectly, female happiness. With the exception of the modern Greek peasant and the modern Scot, all European men do themselves injury every time they dress for the day’s duties. In addition to being extremely ugly, the trouser is essentially a non-male garment, i.e. a garment unfit for men to wear and appropriate only for the female; and it is simply one more of the innumerable errors of taste which Europeans seem to have been doomed to commit ever since the grossly over-rated Greeks started them on the road to decline. It must be obvious to everyone why the trouser is an ugly garment—not so, however, why it is specially injurious to the male. The reason is one which will soon occur to anybody who chooses to observe the males of other mammals than man. He will find that, unlike the males of many other orders, the males of mammals all have external testicles, which have left the region of the abdomen, and become suspended in a receptacle outside it; and that this receptacle, the scrotum, is, compared with the rest of the animal, comparatively naked, often devoid of hair, and, in the case of horses and cattle, actually devoid of the thick leathery coat.