Nudity is noisy then?
>To the Victorians, who rarely saw a naked ankle, even the sight of an
>ankle was a charged experience. To those who see the naked form
>repeatedly, it becomes uninteresting or even banal. Indeed, one might
>note that the degree of bodily exposure considered "uninteresting" in
>our society has dropped radically over the last century. ...
>It is not unreasonable to assume that the existance of places
>open to the general public at which large numbers of people were
>"routinely" unclothed would lead to further erosion of current
>societal norms on body modesty as fewer and fewer people noticed or
>eroticized nudity qua nudity.
The question is whether recent historical trends are a one-time
historical transition, or whether it is more a matter of cycles,
multiple equilibria, and other contextual effects. Maybe both the very
prudish and the routinely nude cultures are self-consistent equilibria
in certain contexts. But most of human history has been between these
extremes, and so absent a reason to expect some fundamentally new
development, I'd expect future culture to also lie within historical
ranges.
Robin D. Hanson hanson@hss.caltech.edu http://hss.caltech.edu/~hanson/