Long ago, I dated a woman with an unusual family custom. She and her family were privately nudists at home - parents and multiple siblings hung out together in the buff.
While I don't quite come from Puritan stock, it was a very foreign experience to hear her accounts of her upbringing (I never witnessed it, and can't say if I would have felt comfortable accepting that kind of invitation had it been offered).
The positives were that they were a family with zero body shame, a type of radical self-acceptance that always seemed to me an enormous gift to pass onto one's offspring. That variant of self-consciousness simply wasn't in their vocabulary.
The other interesting feature of their unconventional home life was that it led to observations by a type of "anthropologist on Mars" (to use a term popularized by Oliver Sacks), someone so other than the culture under examination that he or she perceives with unparalleled clarity.
In the case of this woman, she shared a story about the first time her younger brother went to a community gym. He was struck by the fact that, in the men's locker room after his workout, everyone's eyes stayed above the horizon - there was an unwritten rule that no one was to check out another man's junk.
He found this fascinating - why did this prohibition exist? Puritanical practice? An aversion to any action that might inaccurately imply the viewer was gay?
This story came to mind after recent event where a group of strangers assembled under unusual circumstances consistently averted their gaze from one another.
What critical element does eye contact convey that makes others reluctant or fearful to offer it? Acknowledgement? Visibility? Worth? Judgment?