Exporting Shame: The Americanization of Public Nudity Norms in Europe
- AT
- Jan 16
- 8 min read
For much of the twentieth century, Europe appeared to stand outside the American trajectory traced in the previous article, “Constructing Shame: The Evolution of Public Nudity Attitudes in 20th Century America.” While the United States gradually eliminated non-sexual nudity from public life—first through moral reform, then through political signaling, and finally through therapeutic risk logic—many European societies retained social spaces in which the naked body remained ordinary, contextual, and non-alarming.
Even today in the twenty-first century, Europe has not fully fallen to American gymnophobia: communal showers persist in schools, mixed-age sauna culture endures, and public nudity is often regulated not through categorical prohibition, but through situational judgment. The naked body, while never wholly neutral, is still not automatically sexual.
This difference has often been attributed to religion, temperament, or cultural maturity. But such explanations mistake stability for permanence. Historically, European tolerance of non-sexual nudity was not the absence of moral structure, but the presence of interpretive capacity—the ability to distinguish between nudity and sexuality, between exposure and harm, between bodies and intent. That capacity, however, is neither timeless nor immune to erosion.
In recent decades, a subtle but consequential shift has taken place across much of Europe. Practices once regarded as mundane—communal changing rooms, mixed saunas, nude bathing by children—have increasingly been reframed as problematic, not because they are immoral, but because they are unsafe. Nudity has not been condemned, but it is arguably in the process of being recoded. The language surrounding it is not theological or even overtly moral, but administrative, therapeutic, and precautionary. Where earlier objections invoked decency, contemporary ones invoke safeguarding, vulnerability, and risk.
This shift closely resembles the final stages of the American process discussed in “Constructing Shame,” but with a crucial difference: it is not driven by religious activism or national moral campaigns. Instead, it arrives through institutional risk management, globalized media platforms, and imported child-protection frameworks that treat visibility itself as danger. In this sense, Europe is not retracing America’s path so much as receiving its endpoint—an already-abstracted logic of suspicion, stripped of its historical origins and deployed as common sense.
What has been described as a “European cover-up” is therefore not a spontaneous cultural retreat, nor the triumph of newfound prudishness. It is the gradual replacement of contextual judgment with categorical avoidance—the same structural transformation that produced American gymnophobia, now unfolding in societies that historically maintained a wider range of meanings for the naked body.
Europe Was Not Innocent—But It Preserved Ambiguity
Europe’s historical relationship to nudity was neither uniform nor idyllic. Christian modesty norms, class distinctions, and gendered expectations shaped bodily exposure in different ways across regions and eras. Victorian prudishness was not confined to Britain, and moral regulation existed everywhere. A clear indication that sexual risk was the main reason for not-yet sexually mature children to cover up is the often gender-segregated attitude towards public nudity among children. In many places (both in Europe and the Americas), boys could be naked while girls of the same age had to wear swimsuits when participating in swim lessons or other water activities.
Yet despite these constraints, most European societies never fully collapsed nudity into sexuality, nor visibility into danger. This distinction mattered. Nude bathing, communal hygiene, and shared bodily spaces were understood as socially situated practices rather than moral absolutes. A naked body in a sauna, a changing room, or a riverbank did not require justification; its meaning was supplied by context. Children’s nudity, in particular, remained broadly desexualized, treated as ordinary and non-threatening rather than symbolically charged. And, even today, European children are far more likely to free from the sexualized stigma with which American culture has cursed its children.
This interpretive flexibility was embedded not only in custom, but in law. In many European countries, public nudity was neither explicitly prohibited nor universally permitted; it was governed through local norms and situational assessment. Nudity could be inappropriate without being obscene, visible without being sexual. The state, crucially, did not assume that exposure itself constituted harm. Historically, much like in North America, children would bathe naked in public without any stigma attached to their exposure.
What distinguishes Europe from the United States, then, is not permissiveness, but ambiguity tolerance. The naked body can mean different things in different places, and those meanings do not need to be resolved in advance.
The Shift from Immorality to Unsafety
The erosion of this ambiguity did not arrive as a moral revolution. There was no European equivalent of the Comstock Movement, no mass campaign to redefine nakedness as sinful or indecent. Instead, nudity has begun to disappear under a different classification: risk.
In some parts of Europe, communal showers and shared changing areas have become less common over recent decades, due to evolving ideas about privacy, religious accommodation, and hygiene — trends that sometimes echo concerns familiar from American discourse but are driven by local factors and vary widely by country and context. For instance, sauna etiquette in Northern Europe remains diverse, with traditional settings often normalizing nudity and the use of towels for hygiene, while certain mixed-gender commercial facilities may encourage or require swimwear for comfort. These variations reflect local custom and setting rather than a clear, continent-wide shift.
Nevertheless, where we do see a push towards age/gender segregation and discouragement of nudity, the rationale is familiar: protection of children, prevention of discomfort, avoidance of liability. Adults are not accused of impropriety; they are treated as potential risks. Children are not explicitly portrayed as sexual beings, but rather as permanently vulnerable sexual objects, thereby embarking on the same path of hyper-sexualization of children as in America. In this framework, intent ceases to matter. Exposure itself becomes the problem.
This logic mirrors the late American shift described earlier, when nudity no longer needed to be sexual to be unacceptable. The body itself presents a risk, even – or perhaps especially – the bodies of children. What had once been a matter of judgment has now become a matter of management.
Online platforms as Moral Infrastructure
One of the most significant differences between the American and European trajectories lies in the mechanism of enforcement. In the United States, the collapse of non-sexual nudity was legally entrenched through obscenity law, school policy, and litigation. In Europe, it has been increasingly mediated through online platforms.
Global social media companies—almost all American—operate under content moderation regimes that treat nudity as inherently suspect and context as largely irrelevant. Artistic images are flagged, educational material suppressed, and photographs of children’s bodies—even in non-sexual contexts—removed or penalized. These standards are not tailored to local norms; they are exported wholesale.
The effect is cumulative. Institutions that rely on digital visibility—schools, museums, sports clubs, cultural organizations—begin to self-censor. Sauna businesses adjust their practices not because of local outrage, but because images cannot be shared. Parents preemptively cover children in public spaces, not because nudity is socially condemned, but because documentation is feared and they are constantly subjected to the messaging that their children are constantly at risk of falling victim to sexual predators.
In this sense, platforms function as a new form of obscenity law: transnational, automated, and insulated from public deliberation. Like the Comstock regime before them, they eliminate ambiguity by design and contribute to a discourse that constructs nudity as inherently sexual and inherently dangerous.
Child Protection as Carrier Ideology
As in the American case, the most decisive factor in this transformation has been the rise of child-protection discourse as an all-encompassing framework. Originally developed to address real and severe abuses, this discourse expanded over time to encompass ever-broader categories of exposure, vulnerability, and potential harm.
Within this framework, adults are treated as default risks, children as permanent victims-in-waiting, and public space as inherently unsafe. The naked body, once neutral in certain contexts, becomes a liability simply by being seen. Protection no longer requires evidence of harm; it requires the elimination of possibility.
This logic travels easily across borders. It does not rely on religion, tradition, or national identity. It presents itself as universal, scientific, and incontestable. And because it frames its interventions as preventative rather than punitive, it resists critique. To question it is to appear indifferent to harm at best, or to have sinister motives at worst.
Yet the cost of this framework is the same as in the American case: the erosion of shared social space and the collapse of interpretive capacity. When every body is potentially sexual, no body can be natural.
The consequences are far more dire than most people realize: the very children the discourse claims to protect become sexualized and robbed of their innocence. Where children could once run free of concern and exist in nature the way they once entered the world, they are now told to cover up because they may attract predators. And beyond that, they develop a skewed body image, seeing only naked bodies when coming in contact with pornographic material, which further erases non-sexual nudity as a concept.
The Loss of Collective Embodiment
The cumulative effect of these changes is not simply increased modesty, but a reconfiguration of how bodies exist in public. Spaces once organized around collective presence—locker rooms, bathhouses, beaches—are redesigned to minimize visibility and interaction. Social trust is replaced by procedural safeguards. Judgment is replaced by avoidance.
This transformation does not make societies safer in any real sense. Instead, it produces a culture in which bodily presence is privatized, surveilled, and anxiously managed. The naked body becomes something that must always be justified, explained, or hidden—never simply present.
As in the United States, this outcome feels natural only because its construction is obscured. The disappearance of non-sexual nudity is treated as inevitable, even progressive, rather than as the result of specific institutional choices and imported norms.
Conclusion: Shame as Infrastructure
It is still true that Europe’s gymnophobia has not reached the levels of the United States, and regional differences must still be acknowledged – it does not look the same in every corner of Europe. But Europeans who care about retaining the concept of non-sexual nudity – the erasure of which arguably produces far more real risks to children through the sexualization of the body – need to open their eyes to the discursive processes that shape their understanding of public nudity.
Europe’s changing relationship to nudity is not a story of moral decline or cultural failure. It is a story of convergence. The same structural forces that produced American gymnophobia—risk absolutism, ambiguity intolerance, and the collapse of contextual meaning—are now operating on a global scale.
The difference is that shame no longer needs to be preached, legislated, or even consciously endorsed. It is embedded in systems, platforms, and policies that treat the naked body as a problem to be solved rather than a condition to be understood.
If norms were made, they can be re-made. But doing so requires more than nostalgia for a lost openness. It requires recovering the capacity to interpret—to distinguish bodies from danger, visibility from violation, and nudity from harm. Without that capacity, societies become more sexualized and, thus, more unsafe for our children.
Identifying the source of this cultural shift is the first step in mounting a counter-discourse. But it requires a collective effort, one that transcends the borders of individual states and emphasizes our shared humanity, the natural beauty of the human body, and the reassertion of non-sexual nudity as a concept.
Comments