Everyone, thanks for your answers. I asked this question because I have always been fascinated with how some people can be so unself-conscious about walking around in the nude, like in a locker room or in a roommate situation, while others, like myself, for instance, feel like undressing as quickly and unobtrusively as possible. I am not as modest as I used to be when I was in high school. Funny, I had this whole way of undressing for gym class where I would keep my shirt on over my shoulders and slip my gymsuit up under it so no one could see me. And that wasn’t even about being naked! If I had had to go to the showers naked like the sports teams, horror! I would have been absolutely mortified at that. And I am not exaggerating. Even in 6th grade when I broke my arm I dreaded going to the doctor so much (because I would have had to undress for him) that I tried to hide it from my Mom. I think part of it has to do with a general shyness more than shame. I don’t think it is completely learned. My parents didn’t make me feel ashamed of my body and I have always had a good body image. The other strange thing is that in a private situation, an intimate situation, I am not shy or modest at all. I am actually quite uninhibited.
I was thinking about this because I’m reading the biography of Maire Antoinette. There was a tradition in France where any foreign born bride-to-be coming into the French royal family would go through the process called a “remise”. At the handover she had to be stripped of any vestiges of her home country. This involved what amounted to a public stripping. So, as a 14 year old future dauphine, with the whole of the Austrian and French entourage watching, she was ritually stripped of all her clothes and redressed in French attire. (Ironically her mother Maria Theresa of Austria had, at enormous expense,had her entire trousseau made from French fabrics, designed by French designers and made by French seamstresses. Still, not good enough) I found this fact quite astonishing. And the author, Caroline Weber, notes that Marie was known to have been quite modest.