Meaning no concept at all of modesty/privacy whatsoever, and everything is out in the open. Or does everyone draw the line someplace and it’s just a question of where?
I suspect that a lot of Europeans claiming a total lack of inhibition by various native groups was because they observed a lack in one or two areas, and by extension assumed a lack elsewhere. It would also come in handy for showing that the “natives” weren’t civilized. So I distrust early reports.
I’ve heard of early reports that Australian aborigines had no shame, wearing virtually no clothes, and even defecating around others, even when they were eating. But I’m suspicious of them.
Are we talking about general prudishness or just going around naked?
There are a number of things people may not want to display…
Nakedness
Sexual activity
“Bathroom” activity - elimination of bodily wastes
Nakedness would be a side effect of the availability and need for clothing. Australian aborigines probably only need clothes in the cool of the night. However, males everywhere seem to have a propensity for tool-covering. (Whether it’s for feelings of inadequacy or simply safety when swinging other tools, I wonder… Women who have to breastfeed frequently probably don’t want to cover up unless the climate dictates or they have really good button technology. (Jared Diamond in “The World Until yesterday” says that breastfeeding is shorter but more frequently, and goes on much longer than in western societies, often to age 3).
Nobody needs or wants to see or smell bodily elimination; simple sanitation dictates it should be done well away from camp/village.
Really, then, we’re talking sex - the main topic of any gossip. Presumably most people don’t want a peanut gallery watching while they go at it, but in a society where homes are one room if that, it’s too hot for blankets, and people are everywhere with not much else to do, I’m sure the urge to do it overrides the need to “get a room”. Sometimes sex figures prominently in some rituals; Captain Cook describes how the Hawaiian Islanders put on a show that featured a fairly young lady performing “the rites of Venus” with an older man as part of some ceremony, while a large assembly watched and apparently some of the older women yelled helpful hints from the sidelines. Compared to the Church of England, I assume this seemed uninhibited.
IIRC one of the things that did in Magellan was that they arrived in the Indonesian Islands where the local women were not adverse to having a casual good time with a bunch of foreigners. This probably shocked and delighted sailors who’d been at sea for 2 years and whose previous encounters with women had been in a much more repressive and religious environment.
I recall reading something similar about the native women and their encounters with the Hudson’s Bay Company traders. It wasn’t so much “no inhibitions” as that women were allowed to make up their own minds and do what they wanted. In the grand scheme of things, who’s a better catch - some guy in a tent, or the guy who has a thick wood and rock building, and whose job is essentially to hand out magical trade goods?
Outside of Europe most cultures simply didn’t have the “sex is bad” mentality nor use slut-shaming to control how women behaved.
OTOH, there’s the journal entry of, I think it was Alexander MacKenzie, first following the MacKenzie river north with a large party of Indian helpers. They ran across an Indian woman who had been captured by a war party and made into a slave. She had escaped her captors and was living on her own. An argument ensued among the helpers over who would get her - the chief said he should get her. One of his nine wives said “Why? You can’t manage to satisfy the ones you’ve got already!” He proceeded to beat that wife to a pulp, she died a few days later.
So all was not sweetness and light in native life.
Not suggesting that there were NO rules against sex or its public display in some other societies, just that the rules would be very different. It would just seem uninhibited when they did something that the explorers of the day thought “Blimey! We would never see that back home, not even in a west end club!”
All societies are prudish. They just vary in what they are prudish about.
Some temples in India, for example, have carvings that promote fertility. (Or, as someone pointed out once, “but some of those arrangements are not for fertilizing”) Yet modern India has a conniption when a couple kisses onscreen… Time and circumstances.
A lot of that presumably comes from Christianity, which isn’t a European invention. And the related religion, Islam, is an obvious counter to this idea.
The rest is pure speculation, so feel free to pick as many holes as you can:
Is sex without “rules” actually likely to occur in human societies? The amount of investment involved in reproduction is high, and it seems to me that, without birth control, women would not find it advantageous to have sex and potentially become pregnant without a partner to share the burden with.
On top of this, Woman x would not appreciate sharing Man x with Woman y, because it reduces the resources he can spend on her and her child. Man x would not appreciate sharing Woman x with Man y because that reduces the chances that all the resources he is devoting to her and her child are benefiting his genes in any way.
Yes, most societies seem to have formalized some concept of “marriage”, which in most societies means “this woman belongs to this man”. Men fighting over women has a very long history, and replaying the same divisive fight over and over again is not productive for any society - hence most have the rule “once you two are joined, it is not proper for someone else to try to get involved”.
Polygamy is an exception seen in various societies but the usual proviso is that the man has enough resources to support all his wives.
Islam, or perhaps Arabian culture - I recall reading an unexpurgated version of the Arabian Nights - the author of the introduction makes a point. Unlike Europeans, the Arabs did not have the warped view that “good” women were asexual virginal innocents and any woman who did not adhere to that was a shameful whore. They acknowledged that women could have desires just as strong as men; they just didn’t want them to act on those desires (except with their husband). Hence the reason for keeping them from looking sexy to the neighbours, hence the lockup in some countries. Presumably the imbalance of single men to available women, and the general lawlessness at some times, added to the reasons to keep women from wandering the streets scantily clad.
… Yeah. I don’t much think you know very much about “European” culture. For one thing, there isn’t a “European” culture.
Go hang out with the bonobos sometime. Bring beer for everybody.
In Africa, I got used to seeing topless women every day, but I never saw their legs, which were always kept covered with long wraparounds. In many parts of the world, the rules for the modesty of women in public depends on whether they are married or not.
Prudish is relative, and the word is used to mean “more (or less) prudish than I am about some particular thing”. It’s like if asking is Pygmy culture has zero tallness. From our viewpoint, yes, but among Pygmies, some are taller than others and that is noted among themselves.
The mores about sex are tied up in a number of competing social issues. First, men fight over women. (Illiad, anyone?) Marriage was designed to settle “ownership” issues and minimize that fighting. Society often has rules about how women behaved before marriage, although often one of those conventions was that women didn’t stay unmarried if it could be helped - they were married off around puberty, give or take a year or three. Note the whole Mary-and-Joseph thing, Joseph was obliged to marry so that she had a means of support.
The other important thing, is that children be supported. This is less of an issue, perhaps, in a more hunter-gatherer or similar communal culture. The whole village shares the results of the communal hunt, so daddy is contributing as much as anyone to the children’s needs whether he and the mother are a couple still - or ever. Once the primary food source is agriculture, then someone has to work the fields, typically the ones that belong specifically to him or his family. (or her-hers). In a society that is less likely to pool their food, this introduces the concept of the deadbeat father who leaves their child and someone else works the fields to feed them. Hence socially there is a more urgent need to (a) ensure that women who are of childbearing age are paired up with a mate who supports them and all offspring and (b) women bear only that mate’s children.
So early pairing and exclusivity are more likely an offshoot of agriculture and a stronger individual rather than communal control of resources. And no surprise that these social imperatives are enforced by social pressure - i.e. morality.
There is one group in China (the Mosuo) where women choose breeding partners to get pregnant, but their children are raised with the rest of the woman’s family. New families aren’t spun off, merged, nor created in their society.
I’m not sure what the OP is asking, but the Sentinelese tribe in India, which is completely isolated from the outside world, may qualify, although so little is known about them that it is difficult to say for sure. From the wiki.
From Newsweek: We May Have Evolved to Have Sex in Private to Stop Others Stealing Our Mate, Study Says
Author Yitzchak Ben Mocha, who was based at four institutions for the study including Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, conducted the study in two parts. First, he reviewed more 4,572 accounts of different cultures, known as ethnographies, to analyze the sexual norms of 249 cultures across 35 geographical regions.
In findings in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B , Ben Mocha showed that although people’s living conditions may mean they can’t always find privacy when having sex, individuals from “virtually all cultures” took steps to hide.
I’m not sure if the “virtually” means that he found a tiny number of cultures which were exceptions to this, or if he was just being cautious about what may remain unknown after his survey (I suspect the latter).
How true, The spas and saunas we frequent in Germany and Austria are compulsory naked areas (both sexes together at the same time), it is just the norm. Being British this was something of a culture shock but you quickly get used to it. Even outside of the spas in the normal municipal pools you regularly see people getting naked and changed in full view of everyone else. There is a lack of “prudishness” over nudity generally but such nudity is very much divorced from sexual activity, I’ve never seen anything sexual going on in those areas of nudity, so that level of “prudishness” remains.
But strictly segregated male and female activities and, even now, unable to sit next to others of the wrong kinship relationship.
I won’t say that extremes of private defecation are is just an American thing, because I know that even in America there has been wide variation: I was just watching some (ordinary) movies from the 70’s…