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OPINION

NUDITY

‘Let’s promote nudity in a healthy way’

Swedish parents need to get more comfortable being naked around family members to help their children develop a healthy attitude to nudity, argues journalist and blogger Lotta Gray.

Published: 4 August 2015 08:30 CEST
'Let's promote nudity in a healthy way'
Lotta Gray and her son Lennox. Photo: Private

They're flooding in. Facebook and Instagram are being filled up with pictures of naked children of all ages. The entire social media world is exploding in bottoms and chubby children's bodies at various beaches both at home and in warmer climes. Crawling and creeping, documented by granular snaps as well as professional photographs.

But how does our thinking go when it comes to nudity and children? Do we think at all? And someone like myself, a professional blogger who puts my entire life on public display every day, what do I think?

For never before has it been so important to safeguard the naked as it is in today's day and age. Otherwise, it will be massacred, become such an object of public attention that it does not even provoke a raised eyebrow, rather a hidden yawn.

We should put up an iron wall between children's nudity and 2,000 social media followers. However, nakedness within the family is a different issue. Being naked should not be made into something peculiar, that is my motto. In our house, we sleep naked, we bathe together and we don't hide ourselves in panic when our now almost ten-year-old child enters the bathroom.

I am of course not naked at home when his friends sleep over. Not at all. And I am also careful to point out that one's own naked body is never something you should let anybody else touch, that it is your own private sphere and that you should not walk around naked in other people's homes.

And it seems to work, he seems to have caught on, because towels are being fumbled with and doors locked when changing in public places. That's all good and well. But that nudity remains normal within the family, I think that is important.

In other cultures, there's an outcry if you have a bath with your naked son, or let him see your body in the shower. A Tanzanian friend of mine was severely shocked and told me I must immediately stop when he found out that I sometimes sleep in the same bed as my child without clothes.

My Senegalese dad almost chokes if he so much as sees my underwear hanging outside to dry and you have to respect that. These are other cultures. But at my place, I like that nudity is okay as long as my son's bottom does not end up in the online spotlight.

If what is natural is presented as natural it does not become as exciting. A body is a body just like any body, and to be effortlessly inside it is good, it's healthy. Seeing your parents naked, as well as your brothers and sisters, I think that creates a healthier mindset as a young adult than all of the hushing and covering-up we're seeing today.

Of course you can't force nudity on anyone and do the helicopter in the kitchen just because you feel like it. Children can tell when they feel it's no longer okay and then you have to respect that.

In conclusion: let's promote nudity in a healthy way. Joke about it, talk about it, disarm it and embrace it… but for heaven's sake, don't let it go viral.

Lotta Gray is a journalist and writer who runs one of Sweden's most popular family blogs. This is a translation of an opinion piece originally written in Swedish for Metro.

Member comments

  1. i have been going naked since i was 15 years old my mother never said niothing about it my brother asked her one day why does he have to go naked she told him he likes to be cool

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OPINION & ANALYSIS

‘The Sweden Democrats no longer need to worry about how they appear’ 

The Sweden Democrats spent years distancing themselves from their extremist past, but recently the far-right party has edged back closer to the fringes of the nationalist movement, says Expo Foundation researcher Jonathan Leman. 

Published: 10 March 2023 10:40 CET
‘The Sweden Democrats no longer need to worry about how they appear’ 

When the Sweden Democrats entered the Riksdag for the first time in 2010 they were isolated and shunned by all other parties. In 2014 their share of the vote grew and the establishment parties cobbled together the so-called December Agreement to keep the Sweden Democrats at bay. 

By 2018 the sands of Swedish politics had shifted again. Months after the election that September the leader of the Christian Democrats, Ebba Busch, ripped down the cordon sanitaire that had surrounded the Sweden Democrats when she shared a meatball lunch with its leader Jimmie Åkesson. The Moderates, then the biggest party on the right, soon followed suit and the party that had emerged in 1988 from the ashes of the racist Keep Sweden Swedish movement was finally in from the cold. 

This centre-right embrace kickstarted a new approach from a party that for years had publicly washed its hands of the more extreme elements of the broader nationalist movement, says Jonathan Leman, a researcher with the Expo Foundation which monitors and exposes far-right extremism in Sweden. 

“The Sweden Democrats no longer need to be worried about how they appear so that they can be accepted. Because once the door is opened to them by parties who are willing to cooperate with them, their worry about appearing racist or extremist becomes rather a worry of appearing politically correct or not radical enough,” he tells The Local’s Sweden in Focus podcast (out Saturday, March 11th). 

By re-building the bridges it had previously burned with Sweden’s complex and influential network of right-wing alternative media outlets the party could neutralise a potential enemy and re-connect with the grassroots nationalist movement. 

“These alternative outlets are either a friend or a foe. As a friend, they will sort of pave the way for you, they will attack your political opponents. And as a foe, they will give you a headache. So I think it’s a calculation that ‘we can get away with the closer relation with this alternative media environment now.’” 

In 2022 the Sweden Democrats became the biggest party on the right of Swedish politics, with a voter share of 20.5 percent, and Leman says he’s worried that the three governing parties’ reliance on support from the Sweden Democrats means they are reluctant to express criticism when the party oversteps accepted boundaries. Like many other countries, Sweden upholds a principle that politicians should stay at arm’s length from decision-making in the cultural sphere: they help establish the framework but agree to stay out of day-to-day decision making. 

But what happens when a party refuses to accept this principle? And is there cause for concern when, as happened recently, Sweden Democrats at the local level move to block cultural events like drag queen story hours, or a Lucia procession fronted by a student who identified as non-binary?

“I think it’s very worrying. And I think that this sort of relative silence from the other parties in the Tidö cooperation makes it even more worrying,” says Leman. “I think it encourages SD to move forward with this sort of culture war, this sort of war they’re waging on constitutional democracy or liberal democracy.”

__

Tune in to Sweden in Focus on Saturday to hear more from Jonathan Leman on why the Sweden Democrats espoused the idea of “open Swedishness”, how far its anti-racist zero tolerance policy stretches, whether the party’s links to pro-Kremlin sections of the alternative media sphere represent a security threat for Sweden, and how the party will navigate a balancing act between the centre-right and extreme right as it seeks to further broaden its appeal to voters. 

Follow the podcast: Apple | Spotify | Google

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