Public nudity is one of our society’s taboos, making it both a potent tool for ingraining compliance and one that therefore cannot be used in routine situations. The fact that it has been used on a regular basis in hazing rituals is telling.
As for partial public nudity, in the form of spankings, it used to be a routine form of punishment; both in homes and in schools. Its demise (and relegation to pornographic fantasies, or so I hear) is relatively recent.
Both hazing and spanking involve full or partial nudity, contributing to their ickiness, and in my cultural experience at least, both have a moderately strong association with the school system.
I mentioned those because you seemed to point to the absence of nakedness, in the “teacher giving out graded papers” situation, as an objection to my argument that the school system appeared to have maximum humiliation as an outcome. Implicit in that argument was “maximum given the constraints of the situation” (and I’ve amended my comment to make that explicit). Hazing and correction are two situations where the context allows more humiliation, and that’s precisely what we see: so I see those two as counter-objections to your objections.
Does that help make sense of that comment?
(I could, of course, also be wrong or just plain confused. In this particular case I didn’t think I was.)
Ever heard of hazing rituals? Ever heard of spanking?
Public nudity is one of our society’s taboos, making it both a potent tool for ingraining compliance and one that therefore cannot be used in routine situations. The fact that it has been used on a regular basis in hazing rituals is telling.
As for partial public nudity, in the form of spankings, it used to be a routine form of punishment; both in homes and in schools. Its demise (and relegation to pornographic fantasies, or so I hear) is relatively recent.
Yes. I’m not sure why you ask.
Those were rhetorical questions. (If LW had a Dark Arts penalty jar I’d be putting in a dime in it.)
That they were trying to be rhetorical was obvious. Yet the rhetorical meaning made no sense as a reply to their context.
Both hazing and spanking involve full or partial nudity, contributing to their ickiness, and in my cultural experience at least, both have a moderately strong association with the school system.
I mentioned those because you seemed to point to the absence of nakedness, in the “teacher giving out graded papers” situation, as an objection to my argument that the school system appeared to have maximum humiliation as an outcome. Implicit in that argument was “maximum given the constraints of the situation” (and I’ve amended my comment to make that explicit). Hazing and correction are two situations where the context allows more humiliation, and that’s precisely what we see: so I see those two as counter-objections to your objections.
Does that help make sense of that comment?
(I could, of course, also be wrong or just plain confused. In this particular case I didn’t think I was.)