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I can see why birthrates peaked in the GDR in the early 70s...
I hate to be a downer but I feel like this genre of post is pretty gross. It feels categorically similar to the classic reddit post of Iranian women in bikinis under the shah, where the idea is that we awooga at women's bodies (and it is almost always women) and, in doing so, implicitly support the government they live/lived under.
Is it a cool historical fact that the GDR had company saunas? Absolutely. But I feel like that's not really what this post is about. There have been beautiful people in every time and culture, and the GDR has far more salient successes by which we can laud it without gawking at women.
I'm not going to argue with your opinion, but I think there's more to this image than just
Shared nudity is incredibly vulnerable and intimate, and I cannot imagine any situation where I would want to be nude around my coworkers. It's a cliche nightmare that you hear people describe as a joke. I mean, sure, in a sauna nudity could be considered common (although I've never been in one where anyone was nude, it's always been all bathing suits in my experience). But if we take the caption at face value, the fact that these women who are coworkers share this level of comfort with each other speaks to an integration of labor, social life, and baseline trust that I as a modern worker in the United States cannot fathom.
i had a finnish friend once describe to me that teenagers there do not have fetishes about other teenagers boobs because theyve all seen their grandmas tits (sometimes the friends even saw his grandmas tits!). being nude with family and friends is just normalized and not a
situation
tldr american brainworms make you inherently reactionary, expunge the horniness from yourself and realize that we will all be dust soon
After moving there, yeah nudity is more normalized, at least in places where nudity is expected. There are saunas in work buildings and coworkers can have business meetings in the sauna. I read somewhere that in the sauna, everyone is equal, something about removing all the symbols of status. Also when I go swimming, it was a shock that Finnish changing rooms are very public, everyone is just naked there. It was uncomfortable for me at first, but once you get over the hurdle of realizing no one gives a shit, we've all got bodies, it became quite freeing.
Describing sexual attraction to a secondary sex characteristic as a fetish is such a take
The way it manifests is a fetish, though.
Plenty of societies were completely naked, the form of sexual attraction and sexual acts were very different due to this material reality.
What do you think the word fetish means?
Peoples in climates that experience lower than mid 70s F require clothing, so most
I'm seeing you've got some pretty big hang ups on this if you can't comprehend that the mode of sexual attraction isn't universal. I recommend reading about societies beyond our place and time and seeing what various courtship rituals there are and what people fantasized about. How we relate to each other's bodies is definitely taught and not some inherent primal urge to ogle women or something
And a fetish is anything beyond having actual sex with someone, you can fetishize big naturals, yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partialism
Obviously you didn't even bother reading your link.
I really don't think an even small minority of people have a breast fetish as is described by that Wikipedia article.
Fam I'm done here you're just absolutely refusing to understand anything, read the definition not the DSM criteria as that is a different concern
Once again your link defines fetish in a DSM
Casually assigning mental disorders to people isn't great
Workplace conditions definitely factor into it, and workplace saunas were decidedly not a thing in West Germany. But the entire concept is built on an idea of nudity being no big deal in appropriate contexts that was not specific to the DDR, but has existed in European culture since the naturalist movements in the earliest days of the 20th century, a movement that was largely normalized in both German cultures by the 1970s. It always had more traction in the DDR, and that may have indeed been due to the less performative, less perfectionist, less stressful culture that arose under AES material conditions, but we should not forget that America is just extremely fucked up about nudity. To the point that even West Germans have always joked about the American double standard of being super prudish about boobs while having no problem with the most egregious displays of violence.
gawking is kinda how you feel about it, but i am mostly being jealous
Sis I'm envious too but the comrade who posted this added "I can see why birthrates peaked in the GDR in the early 70s". The post, in general, is obviously leering at these women.
Edit: also, even in centering one's relationship to the subjects as envy, this indicates that the way this post works sees the womens' (attractive) bodies as the central content, and historical context as pastiche which can project meaning onto it.
Just to give Yuritopia a get out of jail free card for no reason, you could argue that third spaces like this are the reason they had such fulfilling social relationships rather than just "wow people could fuck here" don't fuck in the communal sauna that's gross it will smell weird
Zero spaces for bonding & vulnerability on this level for workers in the US today what are they gonna do go to the Shape Store.
Biased as my only sauna option in the US had literal finance bros who I would deliriously torment in utter deadpan. Actually the same thing I do here. Wait a minute...
I'm more jealous of the whole concept of just being in one of their shoes, it seems they're having a good time. Of course they're attractive and that's part of the context but I don't have any good friends I feel I can hang out like this with really here in America without it getting weird cause Americans are really weird about nudity. I've been to saunas with people in Germany before but I wouldn't describe them as good friends.
Gotcha - apologies for misreading intent to your message, that's definitely a failing on my part. I'm sorry that you feel isolated that way, and I do hope you can find some friends who you can connect to on that level.
You can't construct a one-sentence reply to your post as "centering the women's bodies" when that reply exists specifically because you brought the subject up. I agree that the OP sounds gross, but it's absolutely worth pointing out that there's different ways to relate to naked women than immediately sexualizing everything, not to mention that there's ways to view women in a sexual way that do not involve objectifying them.
We should stop getting so worked up about naked bodies. The problem isn't nudity, the problem is that somewhere out there, heterosexual men still exist and taint people's ways to look at naked women.