I can see why birthrates peaked in the GDR in the early 70s…

  • blunder [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    25 天前

    I’m not going to argue with your opinion, but I think there’s more to this image than just awooga

    Shared nudity is incredibly vulnerable and intimate, and I cannot imagine any situation where I would want to be nude around my coworkers. It’s a cliche nightmare that you hear people describe as a joke. I mean, sure, in a sauna nudity could be considered common (although I’ve never been in one where anyone was nude, it’s always been all bathing suits in my experience). But if we take the caption at face value, the fact that these women who are coworkers share this level of comfort with each other speaks to an integration of labor, social life, and baseline trust that I as a modern worker in the United States cannot fathom.

    • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      25 天前

      i had a finnish friend once describe to me that teenagers there do not have fetishes about other teenagers boobs because theyve all seen their grandmas tits (sometimes the friends even saw his grandmas tits!). being nude with family and friends is just normalized and not a awooga situation

      tldr being american makes you inherently reactionary, expunge the horniness from yourself over a piece of cloth being on someone or not and realize that we will all be dust soon centrist

      • wheresmysurplusvalue [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        25 天前

        After moving there, yeah nudity is more normalized, at least in places where nudity is expected. There are saunas in work buildings and coworkers can have business meetings in the sauna. I read somewhere that in the sauna, everyone is equal, something about removing all the symbols of status. Also when I go swimming, it was a shock that Finnish changing rooms are very public, everyone is just naked there. It was uncomfortable for me at first, but once I got over the hurdle of realizing no one gives a shit, we’ve all got bodies, it became quite freeing.

        • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          24 天前

          The way it manifests is a fetish, though. three-heads-thinking

          Plenty of societies were completely naked, the form of sexual attraction and sexual acts were very different due to this material reality.

    • Workplace conditions definitely factor into it, and workplace saunas were decidedly not a thing in West Germany. But the entire concept is built on an idea of nudity being no big deal in appropriate contexts that was not specific to the DDR, but has existed in European culture since the naturalist movements in the earliest days of the 20th century, a movement that was largely normalized in both German cultures by the 1970s. It always had more traction in the DDR, and that may have indeed been due to the less performative, less perfectionist, less stressful culture that arose under AES material conditions, but we should not forget that America is just extremely fucked up about nudity. To the point that even West Germans have always joked about the American double standard of being super prudish about boobs while having no problem with the most egregious displays of violence.