(Last Updated On May 30, 2022)
This item was recently sold on an internet sales site. This is perhaps a holdover from the popular Edwardian style of photographing children. Do these children look stigmatized to you? It is kind of interesting that the faces are partially obscured without it being too obvious.
Finnish Sauna Postcard (1970s)
I could be in this picture. I am a Finn and was born in the beginning of the 70s. I bathed in sauna often with my sister when visiting my father’s or with my cousin, a girl about one year younger than me.
Still many families go to sauna together untill the children are approaching their puberty. It is quite a natural way to learn to be naked with your loved ones. I should not, however, say that there is nothing sexual seeing your close relatives naked. I was interested seeing my sister and cousin. However, you learn to behave and respect each other even naked.
When I was a kid, we were allowed to go to sauna and swim on our own very young. I remember running back and forth between a sauna and a lake as soon as we learned to swim, at the agenof about seven.
So, even now, close to 50 years old, seeing a woman walking from the sauna to the sea or a lake for to swim is nothing unheard of. I just think that a girl, a woman or an elderly lady is going to swim. Yes, it might be a bit erotic to see someone beautiful doing that but there is no reason to stare at her.
As a painter and writer, I see nudity, especially female, between the ages of 6 and 12, the most beautiful work of art ever conceived by nature. Unfortunately, some retrograde minds tend to misrepresent this noble and human feeling.
I strongly agree, but personally I would say “female and male equally”.
That is an interesting image! This idea that photographing someone stigmatises them is an interesting one and seems to echo the fear that primitive people had in the early days of photography that somehow the essence of them, the soul of them, was being stolen by the infernal process. I look at that photograph and it reminds me how happy and unconcerned I was when I was eight or so. Nobody photographed me naked then, we were English (!), but I wouldn’t have objected any more than I objected to being photographed with my clothes on. Undressed had no more significance than dressed and I do remember thinking that boys’ and girls’ differences were far more behaviourally obvious than they were physical. For me this photo is a perfect expression of our childhood before adults sullied it with the ideas of an ‘innocence’ that can only exist in the presence of wrongfulness. Surely it is adults that are projecting ‘wrongfulness’ upon naked children in order to allow them ‘innocence’? The children themselves, as this image so clearly shows, and my memory reminds me, had no conception of any wrongfulness in simple nudity. In the absence of factual evidence to the contrary, surely we must accept the absence of wrongfulness or else we impose it upon them – and surely that is the act of an abuser?
Very well stated. We often have to think about our own childhood to recognize how bizarre and convoluted our civilization has become. -Ron
To me a human body is a human body, no matter the age of the people, from 8 months to 88 years old. We shouldn’t be ashamed to show and to look what nature (and here innocence) are. We are all made the same way. We were all born naked.
Yes, that should really go without saying and is one of the main points of this site. But alas, many many people still need to get used to the idea. -Ron
Anarys, how right you are!