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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 con
by Vivtek 16y ago
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.
- panacea 16y ago"it nearly killed me." Proximity to an unshielded nudity core can have that effect.
- kabdib 16y agoThe Nude Bomb? (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081249/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081249/ -- safe for work)
- tastybites 16y agoWhat's funny is most of the people in Indiana ... are German.
- nailer 16y agoThere 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.
- tastybites 16y agoThanks for explaining America, captain obvious. I said "What's funny" because it's supposed to be a joke.
- nailer 16y agoYou should read this: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Vivtek 16y ago"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.
- hieronymusN 16y agoVery 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.
- tomn 16y agoOddly, 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?
- hieronymusN 16y agoNo 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.
- teyc 16y agoPublic baths are segregated by gender.
- sliverstorm 16y agoThey weren't before Western culture got involved.
- seanalltogether 16y agoFor 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.
- gaius 16y agoYou 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).
- sliverstorm 16y agoI 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.
- jules 16y agoWhy? 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.
- baltcode 16y agoPeople get uncomfortable with nudity for reasons other than arousal, eg., feeling unsanitary, a sense of privacy with respect to physical features and grooming, etc.
- RK 16y agoSimilar 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!"
- oewolf 16y agoI 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. :)