模倣子 Why Clothing?

 Memetic Index - Quora Link - Earlier Essay 

I’ve got a theory, which may be not at all original, about “why clothing?” Humans being able to walk erect and having hands is not so much for tool use, since other animals can use tools without erect gait like ours. One thing that the erect gait gets you is the ability to CARRY things back to the village, i.e., if you find a bunch of food, like mushrooms, berries, nuts, or some dead animal or something, more than you can carry with two hands, then clothing, i.e., a fur or cloth or such wrapped around you becomes an enabling technology for better foraging, i.e., to use as a sack to carry stuff back, as in “dressed in sack cloth”. So clothes even in hot climates starts to make sense.

Once humans start to migrate out of warm areas then said clothing can be enlisted for double-duty to keep warm, protect from the elements. Having said that, early reports of people living in Tierra del Fuego and such said they did not wear much in the way of clothing, i.e., sort of gives the lie to the idea that humans started making clothes when things got cold. It makes more sense from a technological development standpoint that they were already invented in some other form. Hence clothing that doesn’t seem to “cover up your naughty bits.”

Which brings us to the body shaming part. If clothing is already “available” memetically speaking, then there is an iconic/memetic place to “hang” the shaming memes. A lot of societies are all about shaming and controlling women, so rather than the female body being shameful as such, if clothing is available as a technology, then it’s possible to start to hang/attach shaming memes to this already extant socio-technological object in order to control women. If clothing were not already available, present, then this would be much more difficult to accomplish.