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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38436 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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Do you never do things like bath with our children when they're young?

Never! That sounds bizarre to me. Definitely taboo. Fully grown penises should not be floating next to toddlers.

I don't want to make fun of you, I just don't even get how you manage to avoid them seeing nudity until a certain age.

You can be nude around a baby, but once they're smart enough to start talking you treat them like other people. Do you walk around nude in public? Maybe you do, but that isn't done here. With our oldest I remember the day that my wife scolded me for letting our toddler see me on the toilet. She was about 2 years old, I think.

An important piece of context that might be missing is that gender really matters. My wife can be naked around our young daughters, that's not taboo. If we had young sons I could be naked around them, though it's not something you'd do casually. But in my America little girls shouldn't be looking at adult penises. It's taboo.

With our oldest I remember the day that my wife scolded me for letting our toddler see me on the toilet. She was about 2 years old, I think.

Ha, I guess the only constant is that we all get scolded by our wifes. I just want to sit on the toilet in peace, but both her and our daughter constantly come in for various reasons and if I complain I'm scolded for being silly, it's not like there's anything they haven't seen a million times before!

You can be nude around a baby, but once they're smart enough to start talking you treat them like other people. Do you walk around nude in public? Maybe you do, but that isn't done here.

Come on, "we treat our children like adult strangers" is hardly a generalising conservative principle, if anything it's usually progressives that are often criticised for that. I'm also neither changing the diapers of other people nor am I scolding them for improper manners and in general I will keep my distance, both emotionally and physically. Intra-family behaviour is just something else entirely from public behaviour. Also, we have public nude beaches here, although they are fringe they also aren't looked down upon, so I guess our culture in general is more comfortable with nudity and less sexualised.

Come on, "we treat our children like adult strangers" is hardly a generalising conservative principle, if anything it's usually progressives that are often criticised for that.

Oh I don't think any of this is a generalized conservative principle. I'm not saying this is how it should be, just how it is in conservative American culture. At least, my corner of it. I'm describing, not prescribing.

That referred to the "Do you walk around nude in public?". No, and I do not consider my behaviour around strangers to have much bearing on how I behave around family.

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