Nudity in Northern Europe: Are They Exhibitionists or Are We Prudes?

Hot take: this ain't no consensual reality

One of the great things about being a jazz musician (John’s the musician; I’m the jazz groupie--ha! Psych! Jazz groupies don’t actually exist) is traveling to foreign countries. While John was eating chocolate croissants, sipping café allongé, and reading Le Monde at sidewalk cafes in Paris, I was in Houston washing dog vomit off a blanket in the sink. While John stayed at five-star jazz festival hotels in Warsaw, I was at a monster truck rally with my toddler son, pretending we weren’t surrounded by hopped-up hillbillies.

It’s always been this way: people living the life I want, and me staying behind to pitch manure into the back of the truck. I’m an eternal Cinderella, only the pumpkin stubbornly refuses to turn into six white horses and a carriage. And so it was when John went to Finland one year, long before I knew him, around the same time I was watching Dora the Explorer with my three-year-old daughter and waiting for my brain to finish leaking out of my ears.

Now, of course, I would do anything to watch Dora the Explorer with my daughter. Back then, all I wanted to do was stuff Boots the Monkey into a blender and press puree.

Since John’s mother was Danish, he’d grown up hearing stories about the way Northern Europeans treated the issue of nudity. It’s diametrically opposed to the way America sees nudity, which is as purely sexual. In the United States, an untethered bosom is slapped with a PG-13 rating or higher, pixelated, given an ugly black “modesty” sticker, thunderously denounced from every church pulpit, and if said bosom is providing nourishment for a baby, promptly relegated to a blanket.

Still, nothing had really prepared him for the night after a concert where the Finnish concert promoter, his twenty-year-old daughter, and his twenty-something son, all stripped off their clothes, sat un-self-consciously inside the sauna, ran in their altogether down to the lake, skinny-dipped, got out, drank a beer, and then did it all over again. John and the Canadian bass player, no. There wasn’t enough beer in the world for them to do that.

Finnish smoke sauna

But these weren’t merely drunken shenanigans. This is how Northern Europeans go about their daily lives. There’s nudity, which isn’t necessarily sexual; and then there’s sex, which usually involves nudity. Controversial though it may be, Swedish families dress and undress in front of each other, sauna, even walk naked through the house. There aren’t that many nude beaches, oddly enough, although during the 80s there were a few, but it doesn’t take a trained psychologist to discern that Northern Europeans see nudity in a radically different way than we do in America. To us, nude equals dinner bell. To them, nude is just … nude.

In further proof that the human body can be funny as well as functional, Denmark launched a children’s TV show earlier this year called John Dillermand (the word “diller” is a slang word for penis; dillermand literally means penis-man.) As you might have guessed, Mr. Dillermand has a stupendously long, prehensile penis that solves problems, gets him into (un-naughty) trouble, and then gets him out of it. Not all Danes were on board for this. “Is this really the message we want to send to children while we are in the middle of a huge #MeToo wave?” wrote the Danish author Anne Lise Marstrand-Jørgensen. Others felt that dissenters like Ms. Marstrand-Jørgensen were overthinking it. Proponents claimed that “kids think that penises are funny.”

Not to play devil’s advocate here, but kids also think blowing things up is funny. Doesn’t necessarily mean they ought to do it.

John Dillermand and his disturbingly serpentine penis

Far more mind-boggling to me is another Danish children’s TV show, Ultra Strips Down, targeted at 11-to-13-year-olds. The show’s producers insist the program is meant as an educational tool to fight the perfect, unrealistic, heavily filtered images kids see on social media. It’s designed to combat body shaming and encourage body positivity.

To an American, however, it looks like five naked adults standing in front of preteen children in an overheated TV studio.

Facing these children, and the cameras, these adults stand with their hands clasped behind their backs and submit themselves to our scrutiny. On the mas macho cojones meter, I’d say their bravery is off the charts. Could I do it? No way. But as creepy as it sounds, I get the message. We are setting our kids up for failure by letting them see shamelessly manipulated images day in and day out. Plus, these children are (wisely) allowed to ask questions: “What age were you when you grew hair on your private parts?” “Are you pleased with the size of your penis?” “Would you ever consider having your tattoos removed?”

Ultra Strips Down

As you might expect, the American press has done so much preachy finger-wagging about these two shows, I wasn’t able to find any news clips that didn’t excoriate them. I can’t help but feel that we are seeing, and criticizing, another culture through the very myopic lens of our own. Do I think American children should sit in a TV studio gawking at naked adults? No. It’s not a part of our culture. But where do we get off judging Northern Europe by our own very narrow standards of acceptability? Listening to some of these American news broadcasters, you’d have thought Denmark was reenacting de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom using a studio audience.

I’d probably be more comfortable with the John Dillermand concept if there was a companion series featuring a human vagina, maybe one smoking a cigarette or reclining in a hammock or mushing a dog sled at the Iditarod. I’d like that. Or a vagina that worked at the U.N. as an interpreter, or as a majorette twirling a baton. It’s the phallocentrism that bothers me, not the subject matter.

In the U.S., besides your run-of-the-mill nudists, we have Free the Nipple, a campaign promoting the idea that if men are allowed to go shirtless, so should women. Wrongly, I believe, women’s bare breasts are considered culturally unacceptable. Why? Because they’re bigger? Because men perceive them as “sexual?” But isn’t this the same thing Judeo-Christian societies rail against when it comes to women in burqas? We’re forcing women to carry the burden and responsibility for men’s reactions to seeing them naked. In the U.S., men can go topless; women can’t. In some Muslim countries, men have the freedom to wear what they want; women don’t.

Having a choice is one thing. Not having a choice is something else.

This I will say, and I say it from experience. Constant exposure to nudity desensitizes you within just a few hours. It’s not the nudity itself that we Americans find so titillating. It’s the lure of the forbidden. It’s the sheer naughtiness of seeing something we’re not supposed to see. Stealing or coercing something rare, and therefore precious, makes us powerful, and that power makes us keen.

Perhaps the U.S. isn’t quite ready for John Dillermand or Ultra Strips Down, but we would be wise to consider how we regard nudity, female nudity in particular. Janet Jackson’s nip slip, anybody? She got pilloried for that: national outrage, multiple lawsuits, media frenzy. Timberlake walked away unscathed.

Nudity and being naked are two different things.

Do you have an opinion on nudity, double standards, or Northern Europe? I’d love to hear what you’ve got to say. Feel free to leave your comments below.

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