informed by medical science--no
longer prohibit intercourse during menstruation, or regard it as
only a venial sin.

We have here a remarkable, but not an isolated, example of the tendency of
the human mind in its development to rebel against the claims of primitive
nature. The whole of religion is a similar remolding of nature, a
repression of natural impulses, an effort to turn them into new channels.
Prohibition of intercourse during menstruation is a fundamental element of
savage ritual, an element which is universal merely because the conditions
which caused it are universal, and because--as is now beginning to be
generally recognized--the causes of human psychic evolution are everywhere
the same. A strictly analogous 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