(Not sure if this is best suited for IMHO, GQ or GD. Mods, feel free to move as you want to)
Some of the posts (OK, I admit it, one poster especially) in this thread reminded me of something I’ve been wondering ever so slightly about for some years:
Why is non-sexual public nudity apparently unacceptable in USA? Here in Scandinavia, public nursing is a non-issue (no, they don’t whip it out in fine restaurants or at the office, but in a cafe or in a park is perfectly OK for most people. Myself, I get this (non-sexual!) nice, warm, fuzzy feeling inside when I see that). Also, go to a Scandinavian beach, and in addition to (nowaday just a few, but anyway) topless women that no-one raises an eyelid to you’ll be sure to see butt naked (heh!) toddlers and preschoolers romping around without anyone raising an eyelid. But when Janet Jackson’s tit got about 2/10 of a second of airtime (meh), it seemed as if the country was in an outrage. And when we were living in the US, we had to pay attention to our kids so they didn’t just strip off everything to run free in the sun, like they were used to back home.
Considering that the US has one of the largest porn industries in the world, why do I get the impression that even non-sexual public nudity or partial nudity - up to and including a nursing mother’s areola - is completely unacceptable? I mean, Denmark, probably the most liberal of our three countries with respect to porn, is probably also the Scandinavian country where you’ll see most public nudity. To me, that seems more consistent than how I perceive the US.
Seriously, in the half-dozen page train wreck to follow, I think that’s what you’ll find it all comes down to. It’s just not something in our culture, and like all culture shocky issues, you can rail against it but you’re not gonna change it.
I see women breastfeeding their infants all the time. Like, constantly. Also, I see fewer naked toddlers in public than I imagine I would in Scandinavia, but in the homes of friends and family who have small children, it’s not uncommon for me to see a naked child toddling around.
I knew it was sometimes a contentious issue, and that’s why I imagined that it was actually, you know, occurring regularly enough to be a problem. Is that not the case? Are my experiences less common that I thought?
Public nursing happens; most women just cover up enough so you can’t really tell.
No naked toddlers in public? Fear of pedophiles, I suspect. Personally, I’m kind of thankful for this bit of modesty; I’d rather not see anyone’s naked bits unless I’m changing their diaper or we are of legal age and engaging in mutually enjoyable behavior. (I was at a nude beach in Hawai’i. The clothed beaches were much more pleasant to look at. Some things you really don’t need to see…)
Anyway, yes, the US produces tons of porn. That’s because nakedness = “bad,” and to deal with repressed feelings, we look at porn.
One of the biggest boogeymen in this country is pedophilia; it’s one of the easiest things to get riled up and paranoid about. Plenty of parents are wary of even letting their children walk to school by themselves, let alone running naked on a beach. As for non-sexual adult nudity, it’s just our Puritan roots coming out. 3 out of 4 people in this country identify as Christian, and most major denominations teach that we should be ashamed of our bodies and our genitals in particular.
I also thinkpublic nursing is pretty common, and just not that noticeable. This also really needs to be two threads because these are two really different issues and we are going to have two loosely connected conversations here.
As far as toddler-nudity goes, I don’t think it has a thing to do with sex or prudery and everything in the world to do with class. In the south, at least, naked toddlers are seen as trashy–once a kid is out of babyhood, he/she is supposed to wear pants in public. My wild ass guess is that this stems from the days when poor people tended to dress little kids in smocks until school age, but people with money would dress them up in much more adult outfits, at least for church and other special occasions.
Your premise is flawed. To many Americans, the very idea of non-sexual nudity is a contradiction in terms.
(Not to all Americans, but to enough of them so that it has a significant influence on what are considered public standards of decency. Also, in the case of naked toddlers, there could be health/cleanliness issues in letting them run around naked if they’re not fully potty trained yet.)
I’m certainly not going to go Googling for it, but I’ve read one or two articles (or maybe short stories?) that seemed to indicate some real American pedophiles have collected pictures of healthy naked young Swedish boys doing healthy naked Swedish things in the healthy naked Swedish outdoors, hoping their artistic value would provide a veneer of plausible deniability. Or am I insane? Like I say, I’m not going to go Googling for confirmation . . .
In the US there is no such thing as non-sexual nudity. All nudity is sexualized, even of tiny babies and children.
If there is a naked baby around someone will say “Cover him up or a pedophile will see!” which very handily turns the child into a sexualized being, while making that person feel like she did the “right thing”. A naked breast is the same thing, someone will complain that “someone” will look at it sexually and it should be put away.
The tendency not to let toddlers run around naked in public is much older than the pedophile scare. It’s a class thing, and any sexual baggage was attached later.
In Taiwan there aren’t so many hangups about children and nudity – every other TV diaper commercial has a picture of some kid’s naked butt, if not his weenie – but letting your kids outdoors in their birthday suits definitely isn’t done as far as I’ve ever seen. It’s likewise a class thing; parents who did something like that might fear they’d be mistaken for (horrors) trashy mainland Chinese.
(Sorry, mainland compatriots, I don’t share local biases but do report them as as I see them.)
American culture is a very prudish one. I’m pretty liberal myself, but I can remember the time where I turned beet red when a couple of female German au pairs I befriended nonchalantly asked if I was going to take my clothes off when bedding down to crash at their place. They then proceeded to casually strip down.
This is pretty much it. We are a prudish and childish culture, for all our worldy pretensions. We still tee-hee over a naked breast and tut-tut over a naked child. We’re taught to be ashamed of our bodies, yet get all aroused over cinematic sex. We take photos of nude women at European beaches because we’re just that prurient and stupid.
I have to agree with this. Letting your kid run around naked, or just in a diaper, is seen as trashy. It gives the impression that you’re a country bumpkin - too poor to afford clothes, and/or too lazy to bother to dress your kid. It would be roughly equivalent to walking around in public barefoot (and flip-flops didn’t count as “shoes”), or in pajamas. These things are a lot more common now, but a lot of people still consider them low-class.
ETA: I’ve got an almost one-year old, and the pedophile thing would have never occurred to me. If I let my kid run around naked, or in pj’s, I would assume most people would just think I’m trashy*.
*-ier than they already do
Some things you really don’t need to see…)