This section is from the book "Human Sexuality", by J. Richardson Parke. Also available from Amazon: Human Sexuality.
Custom baa established a curious complimentary relationship between the face and the sexual organs, in the former of which the first symptom of modesty—blushing—is commonly revealed. Martial, long ago, remarked that when an innocent girl looks at a man's penis, she always does so through her fingers;* and it is within the experience of every gynaecologist that most women cover their faces during examination, paying little heed to sexual exposure so long as this ostrich-act conceals it from their own view. This curious psychosis, or self-consciousness, shared by man and animals alike, by which the idea is conveyed that invisibility to ourselves involves invisibility to others, is an instinctive impulse of nature, overriding reason, and is very ably dealt with by Professor Stanley Hall in the American Journal of Psychology, Vol. IX, 1898.
The question has been pertinently asked *—is modesty, on the whole, becoming more prominent as civilization advances? I have already intimated otherwise, and the writer who puts the question answers it himself negatively, and with his usual philosophical insight into, not only the origin of human emotions, but, the varying influences of habit and education winch shape and control them. " It is a mistake to suppose," he remarks, "that, in becoming extended, modesty also becomes intensified-"*
 
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