“Millennials don’t like to get naked—if you go to the gym now, everyone under 30 will put their underwear on under the towel, which is a massive cultural shift,” he continues.
* Because getting naked only works in very specific and rare situations. Ie a safe and homogeneous society with people whose behavior you can predict, like Germany and Scandinavia in the 20th century.
When people around you become too different, you’re forced to play it safe wherever you go, and you don’t just switch off that mindset at home.
This is why the prediction that white people’s clothes are going to get less and less sexual is a very safe bet. 20th century style safety was a historical anomaly, sadly. It didn’t have to be, but that’s what we wanted.
* I think all these causes folks have noted are part of it:
– diversity and end of the mass, one-nation, all on the same team culture
– end common\expected military service
– individualism
– the issue of homosexual child predators being “out there”
– homosexuality normalized
– smaller families, larger houses, more privacy growing up
– prosperity, more individual amenities (inc. my own shower)
– cell phone cameras
This has been a long time developing. My freshman dorm built in ’69 or ’70 had individual shower stalls. The dorm i was in my middle and senior years built in the 40s (and all the others of that vintage) had gang showers. The local community pool from 60s\70s vintage has gang showers. My old health club–80s\90s vintage–individual shower stalls, some with curtains–which some of the non-white foreigners seem to prefer. (I’ve never been in my kids HS locker rooms, it’s hard to imagine they build enough individual shower stalls to accomodate an entire gym class showering and changing … don’t know what they do.)
But it’s quite noteable in millenials. My son though much more fit than me–quite reasonably being 36 years my junior–looking like Micheangelo’s David, is nonetheless much more modest about being seen naked. That seemed to be generally true of his buddies in scouts as well.
And yet:
– the binikis are even smaller. There’s all this personal modest amongst basically friends\classmates, but then there is very little covering up on the public beaches, little “left to the imagination”. Even urban workout attire is skimpy and gives you pretty much the full picture of how everything is situated.
– the millenials hug everybody. I first had this rubbed in my face, when i saw my adolescent daughter giving a hug to some guy who was really just an acquaintance. (Didn’t like that. I hugged one girl in HS–the girl i was dating. You didn’t hug the world.) One of my older daughter’s friends, whom i’d never met before, came with her for thanksgiving dinner. At the end of the evening, she initiates a full on solid pretty intimate hug. (I don’t mind being hugged by young women, but it’s sure different than a generation back.) It’s definitely a thing … hugs, hugs, hugs
* From junior high school in the 60′s through grad school in the early 80′s I showered naked in shower rooms without stalls. It never really crossed my mind that this was unusual in any way, and I remember how totally astonished I was in 1996 when I read that Times article about the new prudery.
I belong to two health clubs: the one near my home has a working class clientele; while the one near work is quite upscale. Nobody ever gets naked in the former, and the showers are almost unused. People do shower in the latter (they have to go back to the office!), and there is a certain amount of nudity, mostly among older men. But even there, I notice much more modesty than I did 20 years ago.
I’m convinced the fundamental reason for the new prudery is the sexualization of everything — in particular the normalization of homosexuality, and the moral panic over pedophilia. The whole thing strikes me as quite sad, but I don’t see us going back any time soon. Now that everybody is a potential sex object for everybody else, the only way people could become comfortable with nudity again would be by jumping all the way to full blown nudism, which always involved potential sex partners traipsing around naked in each others company, and which was always seen as kind of weird. Given the outfits you see on the beach these days you might think we were almost there already, and yet somehow those tiny strips of fabric carry huge symbolic significance. Geez, people are so strange…
* One big driver of modern modesty in America is the promotion of aggressive homosexuality (and latterly trans-wackiness) by the powers that be. All young people are afraid to forfend or resist sexual assault by demanding enforcement of locker-room decorum lest they be denounced as “queer bashers” or “haters” (with “racist” thrown in for lagniappe), so they just try to avoid exposing themselves to leering, groping, and potentially rape by adminstratively-licensed assailants. Teachers are correspondingly afraid to keep order in locker rooms because offenders can invert any discplinary measures by false accusations of LGTBQ-insensitivity.
* Some nudist colonies are actually child porn rings. When I first became involved in the hospitality industry, we received a mailer from a Florida nudist colony which sold videotaped children’s beauty pageants for over a hundred bucks a tape, it should go without saying that the kids were in the buff. The owners who received the mailer laughed it off like, “Can you believe those wacky hippies?” Until I explained what it was and told them to take it to the local p.d. to ask it be forwarded to the FBI.
