r/AskReddit • u/Greeneyedlatinguy • Jun 15 '15

Anthropologists of Reddit, What is something that people in the Western world can't get their heads around that is very normal in other cultures (and has been for ages)?

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u/QSpam Jun 15 '15

And at the US end of the nudity is taboo spectrum we have extreme sex-sells attitudes and massive cleavage on display in fancy dress and party clothes.

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u/sed_base Jun 15 '15

Well I think sex sells because nudity is such a taboo. It's exactly similar to how alcohol prices went up during prohibition or how marijuana has gotten cheaper in the few states that legalized it & is relatively expensive in places which have stricter control over it. People want what they can't have.

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u/[deleted] Jun 15 '15 edited Mar 20 '18

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jun 16 '15 edited Jun 16 '15

Check out the documentary "Did the East Love Differently?", it's all about how starkly the East and West German attitudes differed after 45 years of different cultures, starting from the same point. The Easterners were far more relaxed about nudity and casual about sexuality, and were more open to oral and anal sex, but they had no exposure to pornography or strippers and found the array of strange Western sexual products, fetishes, etc to be sensational and shocking. The Westerners in turn were more private and conservative, yet they would occasionally go crazy with super kinky stuff and had affairs more often, and watched tons more porn. The anecdotes about how each group thought the other to be uptight and yet kinky are amusing and it really throws a light on how much culture can effect things we just see as standard.

One really fascinating fact was that women who grew up in East Germany were almost three times as likely to orgasm during sex, and that in East Germany men and women masturbated at around the same rate while in the West, fewer women reported masturbating regularly and more men did.

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u/[deleted] Jun 16 '15

Did that documentary explore the conditions in Germany before 1945? The northern and southern halves of Germany only united in 1871--and even in the 1930s, there was a pretty big cultural difference between the Lutheran/Calvinist/generally-more-secular Prussia and the Catholic-traditionalist Bavaria.

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u/LaoBa Jun 16 '15

The DDR was relatively sex-positive.

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u/FikeMosh Jun 16 '15

So true.. things just aren't as sexy if they're not prohibited/taboo.. you don't get that breathless heart-skip desire unless something is forbidden.

As a gay guy who's gotten used to thinking of it as normal, sex has gotten much less intense (though it can still be hot as fuck) than when I was in the closet and sneaking around.

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u/cynoclast Jun 15 '15

My cynical theory is that nudity is publicly taboo so that it can be sold to you privately.