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Comment by tomn | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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. :)

Time to move to Sweden

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.

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

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).

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