Kultur 4 - Andrew McBride

The articles for this chapter that I found the most interesting were those regarding German attitudes toward social nudity. This primarily stems from my undergraduate major in Women's Studies where there is much discussion around issues of the body and how it exists in social contexts. It was quite fascinating to read how much less anxiety Germans tend to have around the idea of the naked or exposed body. I would have appreciated it if the articles had gone more into the possible cultural and historical reasons why this is the case, though they did touch on those a bit. FKK as a concept is something that is most certainly not widely practiced or accepted here in the United States, though such ideas have gained currency in certain subcultures in the 20th century. I also found the regional differences quite interesting, with the possible explanation being that, under Communism, social nudity was one of the few expressive outlets that was permitted. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Communism is an atheist ideology. Anti-body, especially anti-nude-body attitudes, have tended to stem from religious ideologies; for example, we can look to the Puritan origins of the United States for some of its rather regressive attitudes toward the body and sex.

The second, longer article on the decline of social nudity had a couple of interesting points. One was why social nudity has declined in eastern Germany. The article seems to contend that it was the coming of western capitalism that brought a decline in social nudity; with a class-stratified system, why would people be interested in a practice that does away with visual markers of class status? I also found curious the discussion of people getting fatter as a reason for the decline of social nudity. This points to a bit of a contradiction in FKK, namely that the philosophy says that bodies are good and it is good to display and expose them, but apparently this only applies to certain types of socially acceptable bodies, not all bodies.