I made a surprising discovery on my first trip to Austria years ago - regular newspapers feature photos of topless women alongside the news. I was perusing Kronen Zeitung, the country’s most popular daily newspaper, when I was greeted with a half naked woman out of nowhere. Wikipedia describes the paper’s political positioning as “socially right wing and economically left wing” - it’s actually a respected publication. Turning the pages you encounter national news stories, the weather forecast... and boobs. It made me laugh to remember a boy in my 6th grade class bringing his father’s Playboy magazine to school and passing it around. It seemed completely scandalous, but at the same time in Austria, 12 year old boys were stumbling across naked women while flipping through their dads’ papers.
Initially, it struck me as the mark of a sexist culture that objectifies women, but then I remembered that Austria isn’t particularly unjust to women in any other regard. Mothers have access to generous government subsidies in order to pursue higher education and professional careers, and the international SIGI Gender Index shows low discrimination in discriminatory family code.
Forbidden Fruits
I discovered many years earlier as a Summer exchange student that French teens have legal access to alcohol at age 18 - and even younger when you consider the law is neither enforced at home nor in public establishments. American teens on the other hand have far less opportunity to drink, but when they do, they are a lot more likely to overdo it.
Recent research published by the World Health Organization found that in many European countries where the drinking age is 18 or younger, 15 and 16 year-old teens have more drinking occasions per month, but fewer occasions of dangerous intoxication than their American counterparts. In many southern European countries roughly one in ten of all drinking occasions results in intoxication, while in the United States almost half of all drinking occasions result in intoxication. In these countries the introduction of alcohol typically comes from parents in the form of a glass of wine with dinner or at a family function. In the United States, where the drinking age is 21, parents are not legally afforded that opportunity, and as a result initiation to alcohol consumption is not responsibly guided (to put it lightly).
When cultures limit access to things that are innately pleasurable, it’s only natural that people will overindulge when given the chance. You don’t hear about Austrian frat boys photographing topless women against their will. And French teens can stop after one glass of wine because it isn’t their only chance to drink, so there’s no need to down the whole bottle in one sitting. Meanwhile, American underage booze parties often end in black outs, vomiting and precarious sexual encounters.
Religious Roots
So, where did our prudishness begin? The origins of the country lie in 17th and 18th century Calvinism/Protestantism. The Protestant Reformation among other things advocated a modest life - adherence to a simple and rather stern and very modest dress code.
Several of our early colonies were not intended to be secular but were in fact theocracies, and the anti-body sentiment of christianity is well documented - author Georg Feuerstein wrote:
When we inspect the Christian view of sex more closely, we find at its bottom a stubborn denial or denigration of bodily existence. The body - or the flesh - is regarded as the enemy of the spirit. According to the classical Christian model, the body is innately impure and thus is inimical to religious or spiritual life.
This prudishness results in parents and society imposing strict moral rules on children, believing that the rules will actually be obeyed. Ironically, the first few chapters of the book of Genesis - the story of Adam, Eve and the snake - show us that’s not how it works. We are drawn to the forbidden—the taboos. If society prevents us from discussing topics openly, we are less likely to make rational decisions.
The High Price Of Prudishness
The US teenage pregnancy rates are far higher than those of Western European countries. The more teenage pregnancies we see, the harder we try to eradicate all possibility of "committing sins” - not recognizing the root cause of those temptations. As a result, nudity becomes sexualized, making breastfeeding and topless sun bathing impossible in public, and making it very rare for Americans to see naked skin except in pornography, which is all about sex. And that’s how the cycle closes—the more we try to avoid nudity, the more we see it in connection with sex, intensifying the message that it is forbidden, taboo… and exciting. According to the UNODC, the rape statistics in the US are far higher than the average of all western European countries.
Practical Implications
As the founder of an American lingerie company, I’ve had to consider how much skin to show in our marketing materials. A particularly interesting question is how to showcase a mid-body shaping garment that extends up to the bra-line. The American-friendly options are to cut off the top torso in the photo or to include a bra on the model (which implies that we also sell bras, which is not currently the case).
The problem in America is that we think that seeing more nudity automatically leads to more feelings of lust. This might be true in the short term, but in the long term there would be less sexual stimulation from seeing nudity when it’s omnipresent than when it’s forbidden. When I see all of the topless people on South European beaches and the naked families in North European saunas, I have to imagine that they have a less complicated relationship with nudity, which might explain their lack of shame and lower rates of sexual violence.