How does a young boy react upon seeing a nude woman for the first time?
How does a young girl react upon seeing a nude man for the first time?
My feeling is that a boy would enjoy seeing a nude woman and that a girl would be terrified or disgusted. Could this be due to our upbringing? Are we creating an unnecessary taboo in our children’s minds?
We always hear about a man being arrested for indecent exposure but never, or hardly ever, about a woman being arrested for indecent exposure. And yet, there are men and women who expose themselves indecently, even in public, to young children. A girl would normally go and tell her parents, whereas a boy would tell his mates but not his parents. Is this the way we are meant to be or some social behavioural norm that we ‘invented’ so that girls would be protected from a possible assault? I wonder.
Or maybe the boy will be horrified that she’s “missing parts”, and the girl will laugh hysterically because penises are rather silly looking. I expect it’s different from person to person.
I think it depends on the age, and how much culture they’d imbibed. Little kids? No reaction at all, or possibly the inevitable questions about people’s looks. A bit older, but still before puberty? Well, remembering a school trip to a beach that had a nudist section a little way along it, everyone (girls and boys alike) was curious to see if there was anyone naked there, but not much beyond that. IIRC, we weren’t actually allowed to wander far enough to get a look.
On the other hand, visiting the same place with a few friends, at the same age - again, both boys and girls - no one really cared enough about the naked sunbathers to comment beyond “oh, hey, there are naked people over there”. Interest dropped at that point - playing on the beach was more important.
How do you define the first time a girl sees a naked man? My two daughters saw me naked regularly from when they were babies. Their reaction started at nothing, then they noticed I looked different from them and they were curious, then they thought I looked hilarious and then they thought it was embarrassing. It was around the hilarious/embarrassing phase that I started making a point of covering up. That would have been when the oldest was around 6.
I’ve done a lot of clothing optional festivals with families present. Kids are uniformly clueless and self absorbed when very small (infants/toddlers) and curious when slightly older (preschool) and far more interested in their play than in bodies once they’re school aged. I’ve never seen a one “terrified”, “disgusted” or “enjoy” adult nudity. So I think your premise is entirely flawed, based on projection of your adult cultural mores, not experience with actual children.
Somewhere around 10 or 11 is when kids raised around nudity start to get self conscious and cover up, and when sensitive adults start to cover up around them. No real gender difference that I’ve observed, although the boys are a little slower to re-embrace nudity in their late teens, while many of the girls start to uncover again around 15-16.
So there’s an answer from another culture; it’s not too terribly different from the mainstream culture.