Besides to make things yet more intricate still long-standing moral and artistic conventions insisted that the hair in turn had to be

Besides, to make things yet more intricate still, long-standing moral and artistic conventions insisted that the hair in turn had to be airbrushed out, lest that which it was meant to conceal would further draw attention to the shame.Something interesting has taken place here.We have moved from the mutual humiliationor guilt of Adam and Eve to the female pudenda. The Bible tells of many subsequent instances of shame - for example, Judas Iscariot's when he receives the 20 pieces of silver. But, in traditional Christian teachings, it's always the female body that carries the scar of sin and bears the brunt.It's also the woman's body that is meant to exhibit shame in its positive sense: the virtue of modesty and decency And that is through the blush. To us nowadays, it's astonishing just how much significance was attached to blushing in earlier times. But Polonius-type moralists, and suitors weighing up potential brides, habitually thought a lady's capacity to blush was practically as important as her virginity, indeed was the best index of it.

And the lack of the blush - a woman's inability to crimson over - gave the game away: evidently she was quite shameless. Displaying the all-too-common male prurience in these matters, the novelist Henry Fielding pried into the issue. Why was it, he asked, that women in modern, corrupt times so often powdered their faces and then hid them behind lace and masks? It was precisely to conceal the fact that they had lost the capacity to blush; their red-painted cheeks were intended to serve as an artificial blush, a camouflage (today we use the word blusher to hide the barefaced cheek of shamelessness. "When a woman is not seen to blush," he moralised indignantly, "she doth not blush at all." And all men knew what that meant. In short, humanity's shame ended up being borne by womankind alone.

And this Christian twist in the tale was reinforced by another parable, this time from pagan antiquity, the rape of Lucretia.Go back to the early Rome of the kings. Collatinus, a member of the royal family, boasts to his companions of the peerless virtues of his wife, Lucretia. The king's rakish son, Sextus Tarquinius, resolves to put her virtue to the test. He shows up at Lucretia's house in the guise of a wayfarer and begs hospitality. In the dead of night and armed with a sword, he creeps into her bedroom. When she resists his blandishments and menaces, he threatens that if she does not let him have his way with her, he will kill her and her negro slave, and then, having placed their corpses on top of each other, announce to the world that he had discovered them together in adulterous embrace, and (naturally) killed them on the spot Faced with this danger to her reputation, Lucretia yields. Tarquin then departs.But next morning, she summons a family conference.