Comment on When did breasts become a thing that needed to be concealed in public and why?
FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 2 months agomodesty codes have predated Victorian England by a vast margin.
in fact… by some standards, VE was positively hedonistic. there are cultures where a woman seen un-escorted by her husband would be murdered for it. can you imagine what would have happened if the iranian girls protesting a hijab instead decided to flash people? those laws predates victorian england by quite a lot.
xmunk@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Sure, but modern puritanicalism can mostly be drawn back to Victorian England.
FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 2 months ago
in the US; sure. but the “need” to cover up… is common across most of Eurasia and predates England, never mind victorian england.
every culture has some question of modesty- showing different things might be considered immodest. IIRC, in certain parts of Africa it’s calves that were considered the sexy bits. Which… caused friction when a female missionary was lecturing on modesty. She was, of course, showing calves. and made sure to give the women t shirts (which promptly came back the next day with holes cut in because they got in the way of breastfeeding.)