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Comment by Vivtek | Hacker News Reader

True dat about German nudity. I lived in Germany a few years and sang in a few choirs (one very good way to learn good pronunciation, actually) - after one concert, everybody backstage changed clothing. Together. I was about 19 at the time, and I'm from Indiana - it nearly killed me.

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Similar story, except it was mixed showering after martial arts practice in Germany. It wasn't especially uncomfortable, but I was thinking, "my friends back home are never going to believe this!"

Oddly, in Britain this kind of thing happens quite a lot -- most older men certainly aren't shy about showering naked in public after swimming, for example.

Thinking rationally, being shy about our bodies doesn't really make sense -- are there any logical reasons why nudity isn't ok?

No it doesn't make sense, but its somehow culturally ingrained. Asia has a very different view, such as Japanese Onsen where everyone is naked in the big group pool, but you don't put your head underwater, no sir.

Public baths are segregated by gender.

They weren't before Western culture got involved.

For a long time humans have been using their intelligence to bypass evolution pressures. Nudity isn't necessarily the 'natural' state of being for most humans.

You can't "bypass" it, you can only redirect it. Natural selection always applies, you merely get to influence the environment in which it happens a bit (and in practice, almost always forget to account for second-order effects).

I personally suspect prudishness about clothing is related to how important clothing was, historically, in a given country. For example, Britain is very cold, very wet, and the British used to sail all over the stormy oceans in wooden boats. Consequentially, clothing would have been extremely valuable for warmth.

Same for the Swedes, but they get naked at the drop of a hat.

Time to move to Sweden

I just heard an echo in my mind of Tasha Yar in Star Trek: The Next Generation saying "Any. Hat." What is it about colder environments that the colder they are, the less clothing the natives wear? :D And I agree wholeheartedly with many of the assertions in the original post. Particularly the assertion that alcohol was distilled so that we Brits could build up the courage to reproduce. :)

I like this theory and shall adopt it as a perfect explanation until i hear otherwise.

I don't see naked people in Saudi Arabia.

That's because clothes are important in the desert. It's not intuitively obvious at first, but the right clothes shield you from the sand & sun, combat dehydration, and actually keep you cooler while also keeping you warm during cold desert nights.

Yes you are right. Apologies for snarkiness.

One observation though, even the aborigines in Papua would cover up their privates in little tubes or bits of hide. I thought this surprising.

"it nearly killed me."

Proximity to an unshielded nudity core can have that effect.

The Nude Bomb?

(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081249/ -- safe for work)

Why? In my experience an nudity in a non-sexual context does nothing. I have never been aroused by changing clothes with other people. It seems that the brain has a switch that is quite independent of nudity, which makes sense in times when people didn't wear clothing.

People get uncomfortable with nudity for reasons other than arousal, eg., feeling unsanitary, a sense of privacy with respect to physical features and grooming, etc.

I know this is a particular case, but want to share anyway.

I always heard in Mexico that German people were very cold and dry. When I visited north Germany about 4 years ago, I was introduced to my aunt's mother-in-law, and as I'm accustomed I went right up to her, gave her a big hug and a kiss on the cheek. Well her reaction amused me, she got in a very cheerful mood and I got an extra spoonful of food at the table. :)

Very true - you can be walking through the Tiergarten in Berlin on a sunny day and stumble across a group of nude sunbathers. You know, just sunning.

What's funny is most of the people in Indiana ... are German.

There are people with German ancestry, sure. But having parents or heritage from a country does not make you a countryman. People in Indiana who don't speak German, haven't lived in Germany for a substantial part of their lives, and don't know much about Germany aren't Germans. This is probably a good example of that.

Thanks for explaining America, captain obvious. I said "What's funny" because it's supposed to be a joke.

You should read this: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Most" is pretty inaccurate. And I don't consider people who can't pronounce "Schwartz" to be German, do you?

I mean, I don't speak a word of Gaelic or Shawnee.

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