this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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I think not.
We've been bathing in private for the past 200 or so years hereabouts. It is difficult, if not improbable, to reverse such a trend in society and culture so quickly.
While I may actually feel this is a thing that society might benefit from; I don't see this happening outside of nations with a lower societal taboo, and more robust cultural norms and practices on the subject of nudity. It works in Japan simply because that's how their entire society has been structured from the start, and their society largely agreed that communal bathhouses made much more sense logistically and economically; largely due to the fact that it is an island nation, and land space is more precious there.
Furthermore; I personally also prefer privacy. As a trans individual; that privacy is strongly necessary to me for many valid reasons concerning my own safety and health; and for ensuring others do not feel unsafe; regardless of their reasons for feeling that way.
Society is not ready for this kind of thing anymore and has mostly chosen to abandon the practice to antiquity.
But it may be something to work towards to, isn't it? Or at least get rid of these societal taboos?
Where I live and grew up (Germany), there isn't that much of a taboo on nudity. I liked showering in my gym for example where there is only a shared (gendered) shower. Since starting my transition I wouldn't feel welcome in any gendered shared public shower however. I would really like to stop hiding my body but instead feel more included among cis people. One day I hope...
I still prefer going swimming naked (if there are not too many people around) because it avoids gendered swim wear. At most lakes in Germany you can find people going swimming naked or with swim wear. Just coexisting :)
Germany took ~150 years of Lebensreform movements (which itself had Freikörperkultur as one line of thought and action among many) to get there. As the articles mention, things that contributed a lot included the fact that they still had living traditions of public bathing in sparsely populated areas (add Scandinavia and rural areas to the mix), and that Germany was a very industrial and educated country, that had the infrastructure to generate what were essentially academics in academical circles theorizing and practicing all of these ideas first, and there was still a strong memory of pre-industrial life in general (that these movements saw as better in those lines of way of life, to react to the then novelties of industrial and urban living). How would we translate that german social environment to places and societies a lot different ? example, much poorer with less intelligentsia, no prestige or memory of premodern living, multicultural multiethnic societies with low cohesion, with outright hostility to all these nature-weirdos that want veganism, nakedness, primitivism, etc while the current media landscape is dominated by hollywood idolizing private wealth, luxury and puritanism (like the amount of sex in Marvel films, after Iron Man 1).