restrain even the conventional touch manifestation of ordinary affection
and esteem. In China fathers leave off kissing their daughters while they
are still young children. In England the kiss as an ordinary greeting
between men and women--a custom inherited from classic and early Christian
antiquity--still persisted to the beginning of the eighteenth century. In
France the same custom existed in the seventeenth century, but in the
middle of that century was beginning to be regarded as dangerous,[2] while
at the present time the conventional kiss on the cheek is strictly
differentiated from the kiss on the mouth, which is reserved for lovers.
Touch contacts between person and person, other than those limited and
defined by custom, tend to become either unpleasant--as an undesired
intrusion into an intimate sphere--or else, when occurring between man and
woman at some peculiar moment, they may make a powerful reverberation in
the emotional and more specifically sexual sphere. One man falls in love
with his future wife because he has to carry her upstairs with a sprained
ankle. Another dates his love-story from a romp in which his cheek
accidentally came in contact with that of his future wife. A woman will
sometimes instinctively strive to attract the attention of the man who
appeals to her by a peculiar and prolonged pressure of the hand--the only
touch contact permitted to her. Dante, as Penta has remarked, refers to
"sight or touch" as the two channels through which a woman's love is
revived (_Purgatorio_, VIII, 76). Even the hand-shake of a sympathetic man
is enough in some chaste and sensitive women to produce sexual excitement
or sometimes even the orgasm. The cases in which love arises from the
influence of stimuli coming through the sense of touch are no doubt
frequent, and they would be still more frequent if it were not that the
very proximity of this sense to the sexual sphere causes it to be guarded
with a care which in the case of the other senses it is impossible to
exercise. This intimacy of touch and the reaction against its sexual
approximations leads to what James has called "the _antisexual instinct_,