Comment on When did breasts become a thing that needed to be concealed in public and why?
xmunk@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Victorian England is responsible for most of our annoying modesty rules. As to why… I’m not certain, they were just fucking prudes.
modesty 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.
Sure, but modern puritanicalism can mostly be drawn back to Victorian England.
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.)
Victorian England is responsible for most of our annoying modesty rules.
Yeah, it’s why people still avoid showing any skin at all, why women still wear corsets, and why we still wear ridiculously large hats.
And then we just never changed from then.
Hey, man, don’t shit on my corsets and hats.
disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world 5 months ago
And for the first half of the Victorian era, women were considered property of their father or husband.