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» Ship of Fools   » Special interest discussion   » Dead Horses   » Modest dress/behavior and the ab/normalcy of same gender attraction (Page 2)

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Source: (consider it) Thread: Modest dress/behavior and the ab/normalcy of same gender attraction
Ohher
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Again, I think the difference comes down to inner-directed choice vs. other-directed requirement.

Person A wears sleeves and leg-coverings to avoid skin-to-skin contact with strangers; that's a personal choice for personal reasons. It's not dictated by social custom or law.

Person B wears a padded bra to conceal her (A) breast milk leaking (B) her nipples erecting because this calls embarrassing attention to involuntary physical responses. Again, personal choice; not dictated by social custom or law.

Person C keeps his flies zipped to cover his penis and testicles. Not (necessarily) a personal choice; v. much dictated by law in most jurisdictions of the US, AFAIK.

Person D wears a head covering as a sign of respect to God. Often dictated by religious custom. A personal choice insofar as religious affiliation is the result of personal choice, and insofar as violating a religious custom may compromise one's standing or membership in one's religious community.

Person E is required by local law to keep all limbs, head, and face covered to avoid arousing sexual desire in others.

Which of these things is not like the others?

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mousethief

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quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
quote:
Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
Good god, have you been living in a Tibetan monastery this year?

I did say on a Warm day and mt is in the other Washington, IIRC.
My challenge is to describe why clothing is necessary, other than for weather or other specific conditions.

Because it is culturally called for in one place and not the other. But you know this so I'm not sure what game you're trying to pull.

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Leorning Cniht
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quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
Because it is culturally called for in one place and not the other. But you know this so I'm not sure what game you're trying to pull.

And some of the tensions come from the fact that in a multi-cultural society there is no such thing as "the culture in one place". This is true whether those cultures are a host culture and an immigrant culture, or merely different aspects of a home-grown culture (consider conservative Christian American culture vs normal American culture, for example).
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lilBuddha
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quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
quote:
Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
Good god, have you been living in a Tibetan monastery this year?

I did say on a Warm day and mt is in the other Washington, IIRC.
My challenge is to describe why clothing is necessary, other than for weather or other specific conditions.

Because it is culturally called for in one place and not the other. But you know this so I'm not sure what game you're trying to pull.
I'm not trying to "pull" anything. You said simply because something is cultural doesn't make it wrong.
I am asking you to demonstrate why the cultural use of clothing is better than the cultural absence of clothing. Or at least why it is on parity. 'Because it is culturally called for' is result not reason.
So I will not be further accused of manipulation, I will lay bare my view.
Clothing has practical application for we hairless apes in some climates and situations, so it was developed. Different groups would have separate approaches to its design and construction, thus "fashion" was born. Tribalism influences what is "right" and strictures develop based on this.

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mousethief

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I'll lay my cards out then. Cultures have and need customs and expectations. It's part of what makes a culture a culture, and it's part of what helps everyone to get along together. It can be (and usually is) abused, and from time to time we need to question our various customs and expectations. But we can't exist with none at all. We would cease to be a society, and become the collection of independent monads that the Libertarians think we are.

Why don't people walk around naked? Well, comparing our highly mechanized and electrified and overpopulated society with a smaller and much-closer-to-the-soil society that isn't encumbered with such things isn't terribly helpful in my POV. In a village where everybody knows everybody, having everything hanging out has completely different connotations and potential consequences to a densely populated city of strangers. It's apples and top quarks.

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lilBuddha
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quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
I'll lay my cards out then. Cultures have and need customs and expectations. It's part of what makes a culture a culture, and it's part of what helps everyone to get along together.

Well, I might think it a softer requirement than you, but OK. But Given that each culture has its variations that don't cross to other cultures, but still work internally; exactly what those need to be is subjective.


quote:

Why don't people walk around naked? Well, comparing our highly mechanized and electrified and overpopulated society with a smaller and much-closer-to-the-soil society that isn't encumbered with such things isn't terribly helpful in my POV. In a village where everybody knows everybody, having everything hanging out has completely different connotations and potential consequences to a densely populated city of strangers. It's apples and top quarks.

Except that it isn't. In the Tanakh it says:
quote:
So shall the king of the Assyrians lead away the prisoners of Egypt, and the captivity of Ethiopia, young and old, naked and barefoot, with their buttocks uncovered to the shame of Egypt
Egypt and Ethiopia were hardly villages.
In modern traditional cultures, many interact with other proximate cultures and some are quite large. Like the Yanomami who number ~ 35,000 and live in over 200 villages.

This, from Wikipedia, reinforces my point about the artificiality of clothing restraints.
quote:
Public nudity might be offensive or distasteful even in traditional settings; Cicero derides Mark Antony as undignified for appearing near-naked as a participant in the Lupercalia festival, even though it was ritually required.[16][17] Negative connotations of nudity included defeat in war, since captives were stripped, and slavery. Slaves for sale were often displayed naked to allow buyers to inspect them for defects, and to symbolize that they lacked the right to control their own body.[18][19] The disapproval of nudity was less a matter of trying to suppress inappropriate sexual desire than of dignifying and marking the citizen's body.
Measures, then, of status.

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mousethief

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You appear to have changed the subject. You were asking about nakedness "in the Amazon." Not about nakedness used by conquering armies to shame their vanquished foes. "In the Amazon" is what I was talking about when I was referring to small villages. You were asking about why nakedness was okay there but not okay here in Seattle.

Dragging in conquering armies and saying "they're not small villages" makes no sense to me. Now you're no longer talking about a small society that has no problem with nakedness. You're dragging in entirely new problems and issues. I feel like it makes for a better discussion if one person doesn't drag in a bunch of new stuff before the discussion about the old stuff reaches some kind of conclusion (if only "agree to disagree"). It smacks of the Gish Gallop.

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Leorning Cniht
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We're all familiar with tribes in the Amazon, and in Africa, where nudity is the cultural norm. I don't think the acceptance of nudity in those cultures has much to do with being "small societies where everyone knows everyone".

It's not uncommon in Europe for female toplessness to be common at swimming pools and on beaches. Nobody stares, and it doesn't cause problems. Sure - guys look at pretty girls, but guys also look at pretty girls in bikinis.

I don't have difficulty imagining that a large society with nudity as the norm could exist, in principle, and in such a society, nobody would pay any attention to the naked genitals. They're just naked bodies - you see them everywhere.

But in practice, I think such a society is remarkably unlikely. Clothes are just too useful - for warmth, for protection of delicate body parts, and for providing pockets to keep things in that I think it's inevitable that the presence or absence of clothing, and particular kinds of clothing, becomes a status indicator. And so you develop a clothed culture, and when you have a clothed culture then the display of normally-covered body parts acquires a sexual connotation.

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mousethief

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quote:
Originally posted by Leorning Cniht:
We're all familiar with tribes in the Amazon, and in Africa, where nudity is the cultural norm. I don't think the acceptance of nudity in those cultures has much to do with being "small societies where everyone knows everyone".

It's nice you think so. Do you have any REASON to think so? Or are you arguing by assertion here?

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Leorning Cniht
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quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
It's nice you think so. Do you have any REASON to think so? Or are you arguing by assertion here?

I think it's less of an assertion than your claim of the opposite.

Existing societies where nudity is normal don't seem to have any qualms abut displaying their nudity to visitors. They are nude within their own community, but also nude with the photographer from National Geographic.

Logically, if you begin with a society without a nudity taboo, you don't have an issue with seeing sex organs. Why, with that background, would you develop a desire to hide your sex organs from strangers, and how would you develop a culture where strangers seeing each others' sexual parts would generate whatever kind of sexual misbehaviour you're hinting at?

If you don't have a nudity taboo, there's nowhere for all that stuff to come from.

There's my argument, in a nutshell. It's not a watertight logical proof by any means, but it's consistent and coherent.

What's your reason for thinking that being naked in front of strangers has "completely different connotations and potential consequences" than being naked in your small village, that does not rely on the nudity taboos that our actual societies have?

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lilBuddha
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quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
You appear to have changed the subject. You were asking about nakedness "in the Amazon."

No. I was using Washington and the Amazon as specific examples of the general question about nakedness, not setting geographic limitations.The Yanomami are in the Amazon BTW.
quote:

Not about nakedness used by conquering armies to shame their vanquished foes. .

The Tanakh quote came from an article which was speaking of the cultural differences, not what one army had done 'to shame' but what an observer felt was shameful. My bad for not including more of the context. But you appear to have missed the other quote about the context of nudity.
quote:

Dragging in conquering armies and saying "they're not small villages" makes no sense to me. Now you're no longer talking about a small society that has no problem with nakedness. You're dragging in entirely new problems and issues. I feel like it makes for a better discussion if one person doesn't drag in a bunch of new stuff before the discussion about the old stuff reaches some kind of conclusion (if only "agree to disagree").

Not new parameters, but additional support as I was never only talking about small societies. You assumed that limitation.
quote:

It smacks of the Gish Gallop.

Cute.
This hardly makes for a better discussion. And whilst I can be accused of mangled logic on occasion, this is never a tactic I have used.
From the beginning, I have been talking about the subjective cultural mores of nudity. And you have not given me a good reason that nudity should be less acceptable than clothed.

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mousethief

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quote:
Originally posted by Leorning Cniht:
What's your reason for thinking that being naked in front of strangers has "completely different connotations and potential consequences" than being naked in your small village, that does not rely on the nudity taboos that our actual societies have?

What's your reason for thinking those are two different things? The different connotations and potential consequences ARE the nudity taboos that our actual societies have.

quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
From the beginning, I have been talking about the subjective cultural mores of nudity. And you have not given me a good reason that nudity should be less acceptable than clothed.

There are no absolute cultural mores. We cannot stand outside all cultures and look and see which ones are reasonable and which are not. There is no extra-cultural vantage point. We can only look at the Yanomamo (or whomever else) from the vantage point of OUR culture. So it is meaningless to ask for a "good reason" for nudity to be less acceptable than clothed.

Unless you mean a good reason in the context of our culture. And that reason is that it is against our subjective cultural mores.

Mores change over time, of course. If you wish to change the mores of our culture so that nudity is acceptable, I won't try to stop you. But my suggestion is that you talk about how that would work in our culture, not how it works so well for the Yanomamo. We aren't the Yanomamo.

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Leorning Cniht
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quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
What's your reason for thinking those are two different things? The different connotations and potential consequences ARE the nudity taboos that our actual societies have.

That's my point. If we're positing an alternative nudity-accepting society, we can't start by importing the taboos from the societies that we have - because then we're just talking about our society.
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Golden Key
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Nudity is also used as a protest, as by these women in Africa:

(NSFW)

"South Africa's topless protesters are fighting shame on their own terms" (The Guardian).

"Bodies That Matter: The African History of Naked Protest, FEMEN Aside" (Okay Africa).

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lilBuddha
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Jesus Christ on a unicycle, mt.

I asked you what good reasons our cultures have nudity taboos. Answer that.

Or don't, your choice of course. But I am not playing these sidestepping games.

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Aijalon
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Great thread topic.

Let's get back to the basics. Adam and Eve had their eyes opened. They immediately were ashamed. As I recall (not looking it up now) this is to mean, simply, that they were embarrassed.

I don't know what aroused them before they sinned, but I don't think we can safely say they ever were aroused, or acted sexually. Point is, they were suddenly aware that their bodies had new meaning.

What was that meaning.

I am saddened by comments like Brenda's, but not surprised. The view that we should have no expectations of the people around us to dress modestly is a severely jaded view. That view supposes, wrongly, that we have no responsibility to one another, publicly, to display ourselves in any sense of respect to each other.

Oh yes, our manner of dress is an action, it is done with intent, it is an outward expression of our view of those around us. There is this thing called dignity, and these things called manners. Throwing them away because "it's my right" is destructive and hurtful to others. It's simple human selfishness though, narcissism at play.

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Soror Magna
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quote:
Originally posted by Aijalon:
... I don't know what aroused them before they sinned, but I don't think we can safely say they ever were aroused, or acted sexually. Point is, they were suddenly aware that their bodies had new meaning. ...

Does this mean that if the Fall hadn't happened, there would still only be 2 humans on the planet? Cuddling? God's original plan was for only non-human life to be fruitful and multiply?

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Crœsos
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quote:
Originally posted by Aijalon:
The view that we should have no expectations of the people around us to dress modestly is a severely jaded view.

Jaded, huh? What's the word you'd use for the expectation that other people should follow your orders on how to dress themselves?

quote:
Originally posted by Aijalon:
That view supposes, wrongly, that we have no responsibility to one another, publicly, to display ourselves in any sense of respect to each other.

Or at the very least that our responsibility to obey the wishes of others is subordinate to following our own desires. Browbeating people in the name of "respect" seems counterproductive, though fairly common.

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Crœsos
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Interesting question: Does the abandonment of the 1950s rule on women wearing gloves count as part of the slide towards immodest dress? How, exactly, do we distinguish between what's immodest and what's merely changing fashion?

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Brenda Clough
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Here's a concrete example (SFW and free click): She got arrested for wearing this. But it was in Saudi Arabia. Almost anywhere else on this planet, nobody would even look twice.
Decent, or not? It clearly depends on whether you're in Riyadh or not. If it varies depending on geography, it cannot be a universal standard.

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lilBuddha
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The invention of clothing was about protection. The parameters prescribing its use are about control, stratification, tribalism and communication.

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LutheranChik
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" Modest dress" is a moving target that to me has little to do with the classical virtue of modesty and everything to do with controlling women out of a concern for the effect of their mere presence on men. Just note the secular parallel in the concern for dress codes, in public schools, which invariably target girls more than boys...and even if boys are disciplined for violations, those generally relate to sloppiness or overt vulgarity -- inappropriate novelty shirts -- whereas the girls' transgressions are all about " creating distractions."

A friend of mine who's a pastor is really irritated by the capricious, silly dress code at his daughters' school and their constant fear of being " coded" -- They're little girls wearing standard school appropriate attire.

Getting back to the OP, though: I think that, gay or straight, if the sight of someone else inflames you with lust, thst problem is on you, not on the object of your lust. Some people are turned on by niqabs or uniforms or Little House on the Prairie dresses. Again, " immodest " is a moving target.

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keibat
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I'm a little startled by the introduction of Adam and Eve, complete with speculation about Before and After, in a way which seemed to be taking them as an objective referent ... Genesis is surely one of the, if not THE most culturally-specific component books in the Hebrew Scriptures.

(As are Leviticus and Deuteronomy, but they positively ooze first-order power manipulation, whereas Genesis feels more like authentic mythic stories – subjected to editing, of course, but after all, still with internal inconsistencies and contradictions ...)

My point being, nudity in Eden [innocence] vs subsequent clothedness reflects specific cultural attitudes. Not eternal values.

Having lived for more than half my life in Finland, where nakedness has a massively lower tabu rating, I find the level of nakedness tabu back in the anglo cultures quite weird.

In Finland, nakedness is the norm in the sauna – and the lake afterwards.
Before entering the pool in a public swimming bath, everyone takes a shower (obligatory) and goes to sauna and showers the sweat off (in male and female washing faciilties respectively) before entering the pool, and it is forbidden to wear your swimming costume in the sauna (it would just soak up sweat which you'd then take into the pool with you). In the pool itself, on the other hand, swimming costume is required. One massive advantage: very low levels of chlorine in the pool.

In Germany, it is widely assumed that the sauna should be not only naked but also mixed-sex. In Finland, only within the nuclear family – or in student gatherings.

It's all cultural (including, for that matter, the dislike/phobia of other people's sweaty skin and body odour – now there's a Late-Modern tabu).

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lilBuddha
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quote:
Originally posted by keibat:

My point being, nudity in Eden [innocence] vs subsequent clothedness reflects specific cultural attitudes. Not eternal values.

This. With LutheranChik's modifier, of course.

quote:
Originally posted by LutheranChik:
" Modest dress" is a moving target that to me has little to do with the classical virtue of modesty and everything to do with controlling women out of a concern for the effect of their mere presence on men.



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no prophet's flag is set so...

Proceed to see sea
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quote:
Originally posted by keibat:
Having lived for more than half my life in Finland, where nakedness has a massively lower tabu rating, I find the level of nakedness tabu back in the anglo cultures quite weird.

Growing up, manners in my family was the turn your back if changing. I was quite startled to learn the modesty level different people from different cultural origins expected. The locker room at gym class was particularly interesting. Some us simply went to the showers walking around naked, some tried to refuse showers (not allowed then, allowed now), and some wore underpants, and tried to avoid all view of the privy parts.

I think the exposure to nudity when young provides for better understanding of the varieties of human bodies and makes sexual interest and arousal something that must be definitely targetted. I have trouble understanding why some think pornography is interesting or arousing this reason. The people pictured cannot possibly interact with you. I also remember being told it was quite difficult to flirt with me, as I found it awkward for the person flirting and not at all interesting.

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mark_in_manchester

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LC's point about hot car seats took me back to about 1980; wearing short trousers; the hot, worn, mustard-coloured vinyl interior of our Mk3 Cortina; the smell a mix of burning oil, un-burnt petrol, and overheated plastic. Reading a book (The Bobsey Twins - how do I remember that?) half-way to Wales and then puking up.

quote:
Having lived for more than half my life in Finland, where nakedness has a massively lower tabu rating, I find the level of nakedness tabu back in the anglo cultures quite weird.

And this made me think of industrial-placement visiting in a place called Iisalmi (sp?), and sitting naked in a sauna with our placement student and his industrial supervisor (both male). I think the student was the most embarrassed; I imagined his report (if any) to the student body at large would be that their lecturer's physique was overweight but otherwise unremarkable...

[ 07. September 2017, 08:31: Message edited by: mark_in_manchester ]

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