In other words, why did humans start feeling shame?
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Covering your genitals can be a useful and simple strategy in complex human interactions.
In a young female could hide (or advertise) the signs of menstruation and or high fecundity /arousaL.
Same with males. it could hide wanted and unwanted erections.
Clothing doesn’t just keep you warm, it also keeps you from being incinerated by the sun and sand in the deserts and eaten alive by bloodsucking insects in the swamps.
Different cultures have different tolerance for levels of public nudity but nearly all of them that have the means to wear clothing do so.
In the Western Christian tradition, remember this faith originated in the deserts of the Middle East, where anyone walking around nude would get fried to a crisp and sand-blasted. Head-to-toe white linens in Saudi Arabia isn’t merely a fashion choice, it’s highly practical.
For many animals, familiarity is powerful motivation. Familiarity is safety. Unfamiliar things are risky, so many animals will gravitate towards the familiar.
If a group of people very often cover their bodies because of necessity (weather, exposure, etc), this becomes the familiar practice. Once it’s familiar, it’s not long until the people perceive clothing as the “safe/correct” way to do things.
The reverse side of that when it becomes uncommon to see a naked person, that becomes unfamiliar. It’s not long after that, that nakedness becomes the “unsafe/incorrect” way to do things.
People then see clothing as familiar (ie safe/correct) and nakedness as unfamiliar (ie unsafe/incorrect). Social norms grow, and this distinction becomes socially ingrained as proper vs taboo, which you call “shame.”
There was a forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden and humans couldn’t keep their grubby little hands off it.
Nobody knows. But the safe money is a lot of different things sort of coincided.
– The development of monogamy requires long term partnerships to support the life of vulnerable children/mothers; very long gestation, then very long development period. To ensure males stick with a female, and that a female retains the spawn of the original male, clothing can help reduce stimulation of sex drive in males and thus increase chance of survival.
– Clothing can be developed into better and more pleasing forms, but it takes time/money, so a great way to show off your wealth/power is to develop more elaborate clothes, and more of them, which covers you more.
– Development of religions led to a benefit when they decided to declare that people should be more chaste. Socially it reduces complications from sex with multiple partners. For the clergy it gives them a means of control over the populace. It also adds a ritual aspect which enabled the religious in-group to reinforce its norms and that increases the power of leaders as well as the dedication to the group/religion.
– A lot of people may have mental issues like poor self worth or have been abused and the feeling of shame helps reinforce their poor self image. This goes well with a religion that calls a lot of things shameful.
– After a while people got used to the idea of body shame and taught it to their children and it became self perpetuating.
– Victorian England took it to extremes and linked the body to virtue, such that covering yourself became one of the primary ways to show you were a good person. They even made up a lot of propaganda about the past to reinforce the idea that when people used to not cover themselves, everything was horrible. These ideas are still present in our society as misconceptions about the history of sex and comfort with bodies.
I have heard a theory that the concept of sexual modesty only really took root with agriculture. once people had property worth leaving to their heirs all of a sudden men started really caring that their offspring were actually theirs and started jealously guarding partners and valuing virginity. If people had already been wearing clothes for practical reasons then the only time you would see a naked person was for sex and if promiscuity is bad then public nudity would become taboo.
That’s all guesswork. I don’t know if it’s possible to come up with substantial evidence of something like this happening so long ago.
We’ll never truly know. But one theory I’ve heard is that behaviour which makes you more likely to survive becomes morally charged. This may be because it’s misinterpreted as a punishment /blessing, or could be that by making it a moral issue, you can increase the likelihood that people do it. Or maybe the causal relationship is reversed, and those who make it a moral issue are more likely to survive, and pass on their morality.
For example, Judaism is thought to have forbidden pork, because in that climate, pork goes bad very quickly. Eating it would make you sick, and so it became forbidden. There are a number of similar rulesvin various religions which seem to stem from ‘this rule is a smart rule to have based on our environment’.
In a similar way, clothing has a lot of very useful benefits for us. Protecting us from the cold, and from the sun, acting as camouflage, and even showing off our hunting and stitching skills to potential mates. So maybe it became morally charged in the same sort of way.
Edit: Spelling
I guess the first step toward what we call civilization was covering the gonads. Maybe this was an attempt by women, to reduce the stares of men, who are very visual in their reproductive processes.
If you can’t see Satan’s Doorbell you are less likely to press it.
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Once having reached the point of establishing being clothed in public as a strict, social norm, the state of being naked is more closely and specifically associated with privacy, bathing, and sexual intercourse.
So, you feel ashamed because outdoors, among other people, you are not supposed to bathe yourself or engage in sexual activity. There is nothing inherently sexual about being naked but just as you wouldn’t find it appropriate to put your mouth around someone’s finger because it is associated with sex or eating and not proper social conduct, you would also be uncomfortable with being naked, just as you would other things like defecating, picking your nose, making funny facial expressions, scratching certain body parts in front of other people. It’s simply inappropriate.
Furthermore, clothes are also symbolic of our identity. To walk around without clothes can be just as shameful as walking around in clothes you do not want to wear. It would be fair to assume that a man who is not gay would be quite ashamed to walk around in a blouse and skirt just as an old man who lived his golden years in the 50s would not like to walk around in modern street punk outfits. Even people who dress casually and reveal lots of skin feel ashamed to walk around in clothes that are otherwise more formal and show less skin because it does not represent their identity or preference. It can either be too much or too little or simply not of a familiar quality.
TLDR: It became shameful to be naked when we got intelligent enough to associate nakedness with sex and intimacy as well as clothing with status and identity.
Also, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to look good. Your clothing is a huge part of that.
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