LogFAQs > #959260606

I think it's only traumatizing because we treat it like it's traumatizing.

Kids are good at picking up social cues and body language. If you treat nudity as something perverse or something to be ashamed of, kids will learn to consider it perverse or something to be ashamed of, and it will shape their reactions. But if they grow up somewhere where nudity is generally seen as being normal, they'll just consider it normal.

The same applies for plenty of other things. Words only have the power we choose to give them, and the most offensive words you can think of are only offensive because you've been taught to think of them as being offensive. Various sexual preferences or kinks are only "normal" or "weird" because of the context culture has given them. Culture changes and evolves (not always for the better, though we're kind of hardwired to assume that OUR cultural assumptions are inherently superior to anyone else's, because they're ours), and our assumptions about what is right and wrong, good or bad, acceptable or not changes as our peers and our media and our parents and a thousand other influences program us to see the world in specific ways.

You do far more harm to kids treating sex or nudity like something evil, or acting like some words have dark magical powers, or otherwise teaching them to react to the world with revulsion. Because that's the sort of thing that leaves scars in the psyche, not whether or not you might have seen a nipple once.
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