Sexual Shame

[Angrboda]

Anyway, I was thinking: Is this a religious idea, or something that pre-dated religion/ is part of human nature? Obviously you've got the Adam and Eve story, so whoever wrote that must have already had the idea of sexual shame.

Clothes probably were developed long before religious nuts became obsessed with controlling everyone's sex life. Or at least that makes sense to me, since clothes had other benefits (at least for those who were living in less temperate climes).

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An excellent response. I was going to point out that modesty and sexual shame are likely evolved psychological responses to biological and social challenges, but you beat me to it.

A few additional points.

First, such reactions are strong and tend to veto whatever response our conscious brain would, perhaps, like us to feel, if we didn't have this intrusive mental event preventing our conscious brain center from shrugging it off as senseless prudery. This intrusiveness and other aspects suggest that the response isn't something we designed and teach to our children, something we invented out of whole cloth as it were, but something we were born with.

Along those lines, it's axiomatic that we have sexual responses to body parts that figure in sexual reproduction. Our brains come preloaded to have reactions to pubic triangles, breasts, nipples, cocks, hip shape, buttockses, and other body parts that are either directly relevant to the reproductive drives, because they are directly involved in sex, or are proxy markers for things like fecundity and sexual availability. We have strong responses to nudity of these parts because having strong reactions to them plays a key role in ensuring the successful passing on of our genes through sex and reproduction. No patriarchal father sat down on a rock and made a list of what parts we'd react strongly to seeing; nature did that.

Along those lines, it's important to note that these reactions are muted in contexts where sexual reproduction is not an issue. Nudity of children below puberty is not considered as important a taboo as nudity of adults or adolescents, and vice versa, nudity of a parent in front of a pre-pubescent child is not considered as significant as nudity of a sexually active other in front of the same child. So it isn't just nudity which is at issue in these reactions, it's sexuality and availability as well.

And my final point is that it isn't at all unexpected that the rules should be broken down according to sex as each sex faces different practical results from the same behaviors, so the taboos on each sex are going to be different. The consequences of a woman being promiscuous with men is radically different from the consequences of a man being promiscuous with women, and those consequences are again different from those of a woman who is promiscuous with other women. The rules of the social game of reproduction and sex are different for the different players, because the mechanics of how each sex plays the game are different. Under no variant of the game does a man end up carrying a baby for 9 months, so why would it make sense for his rules and taboos to be the same as those of a woman? It wouldn't, and so they don't. (And this speaks to Ivy's example, which, admittedly, revolts me, but likely has an explanation that lies outside of blaming the behavior on a strictly religious impulse. Tribes that aren't held together by religious beliefs have similar rituals of shaming and shunning, for reasons likely having nothing to do with any "made-up" double standard.)