Oh, NYT, no.

[mme_hardy]

 The NYT Style Section has an article about why many gyms are changing to private showers.  It includes such gems as:

Each day, thousands upon thousands of men in locker rooms nationwide struggle to put on their underwear while still covered chastely in shower towels, like horrible breathless arthropods molting into something tender-skinned. They writhe, still moist, into fresh clothes.

Wow.  It's as if men, just like women, have issues about modesty and about their bodies being judged.  Who would have thought?  Oh, wait, that isn't the reason.

Old-timers, guys that are 60-plus, have no problem with a gang shower and whatever,” Mr. Dunkelberger said. “The Gen X-ers are a little bit more sensitive to what they’re spending and what they’re expecting. And the millennials, these are the special children. They expect all the amenities. They grew up in families that had Y.M.C.A. or country club memberships. They expect certain things. Privacy, they expect.”

I know a fair number of 50-somethings who have wrenching memories of being naked in front of other adolescent boys, and being judged for their bodies.   It shows up  in essays and memoirs all the time.  Apparently I'm wrong, and this feeling is unique to millennials. 

Your gym wants you to have gym buds, with whom you buy expensive carb-infested juices on site and with whom you swap tips about trainers and teachers (but with whom you definitely don’t swap spit). And now your gym wants you to feel a little more at ease in that most sensitive space: the men’s locker room.
 

Your gym -- but definitely not the author of this essay -- expects you to be straight.   

Showering after gym class in high school became virtually extinct in the ’90s. And if Manhattan’s high-end gyms weren’t riddled with ab-laden models or Europeans (or both), there would be few heterosexuals under 40 who have spent any naked time with other men.
 

See previous comment.  There is no distinction between nakedness for the purpose of nookie and nakedness for the purpose of getting dressed.  Anybody who's up for the first is clearly up for (as it were) the second.

Mr. Dunkelberger believes that women pick a gym based on whether it is clean and safe. Only then do they imagine themselves in the environment. Men choose a gym more abstractly, less sensibly, more ineptly.
 

This article has been fatally lacking in stereotyping of women. Let's fix that.

For the conceivable future, the all-gender blowout bar looks to be the only moderately intimate gym location where men and women are likely to mix. For a city now seemingly mostly composed of subsidized young people from posh liberal arts schools who all dormed and often showered together, it’s queer, and a little sad, to see that desires for privacy and gender segregation are still entrenched in design.
 

Even though men don't like being non-sexually naked around each other, men and women should totally like being non-sexually naked around each other.

“We had an attempt at a coed sauna, thinking it would work well,” Mr. Kavanaugh said. “But it didn’t. I was surprised at the amount of puritanical behavior around mixing the sexes. I guess it goes to wanting more privacy.”

 

“If there was a man in there, women wouldn’t go in,” he said. “If there was a woman in there, men wouldn’t go in. It became very strange. I’m surprised at how less enlightened we are about crossing and mixing genders.”

Who knew?

Comments

[vom_marlowe]

My eye started twitching so badly I had to skim. WTF. The body shaming was TERRIBLE for everybody! Maybe, instead of stereotyping like crazy, we could, like, empathize or something?!?

[recessional]

who all dormed and often showered together

. . . this person seems to have a very odd idea of what living in a dorm, or even using a dorm shower, looks like.

Like, unless dorms at NYC-area schools are WILDLY DIFFERENT than any others I have ever experienced or heard of, the showers were still gender-segregated, and so were roommate-assignments, even if the building was co-ed. Also within the general shower-room, most stalls were quite definitely separated for privacy. So I fail to see why this should have prepared them for being naked around the opposite sex.

[mme_hardy]

There weren't single-sex shared bathrooms when I was in college, but I think there are now. Which are, almost universally, equipped with door markers for which gender was currently using it.

[caulkhead]

We had mixed-sex shared bathrooms (left over from when my hall was single-sex). There were four shower heads in each, but the outer door locked, so there was only ever one person in there at a time. The queues were epic.

[recessional]

Wow that seems like terrible organization.

[caulkhead]

Organisation is really not the word here.

It got a lot better after the first month, when we worked out the answer was to take showers at weird times of the day, rather than all try to get in before breakfast.

[nineveh_uk]

What a truly bizarre article. And not a single mention that it doesn't have to be like that - that there are modern western cultures in which adult same-sex nudity in non-sexual situations, and some mixed-sex nudity, can happen and be treated like a thing that shouldn't be automatically accompanied by body-shaming and ritual humiliation. I hated, hated, hated changing for games/swimming as a child and teenager, but then I went to Scandinavia and discovered that it is possible for people to walk merrily round the changing room with no clothes on, and shower with cheery little diagrams reminding you where you should wash. And yes, it was a big culture shock to start with and took some getting used to, but then I realised that it really was the case that no-one in these not UK places seemed to give a shit and now I actively prefer nude saunas and have been to mixed-gender ones. Unfortunately you can't just create a mixed-gender sauna that people are fine with by building only one sauna, you need the non-shitty culture first.

[mme_hardy]

Same, so I hear, with Japan. It's not even a non-shitty culture, it's just a shared expectation that shared public nudity is not, nor should be, in any way sexualized. "Naked" doesn't mean "nekkid", to put it in a Southern way.

[legionseagle]

I was very happy with the Harrogate Turkish Baths, which have women's only, men only and mixed sessions, with swimsuits optional in the same sex sessions. But it is again a cultural thing that makes me happy wandering around naked there while being self-conscious at school about it.

[oursin]

I had some slight resonance here with the experience I had over years of going to the Sanctuary (women's only health spa in Covent Garden): when I first started going, no-one wore cozzies for swimming or steaming or sauna-ing, and the most recent time I went cozzies were very much in evidence and it seemed more or less generational.

But I think that article is muddling together a whole pack of different issues.

[meara]

What are cozzies?

The NYtimes is so ridiculous so often. Good grief. That said, I wouldn't likely go into a sauna at my gym where there were naked dudes! Yet at single sex spa I go to, it's all naked in the hot tub area (robes in the rest) and it's funny how some friends are like "yeah, sounds good lets go" and others are "hell no" and it doesn't seem to have much to do with age at all?

[oursin]

Swimming costumes.

[recessional]

Yeah my thought has always been "you know, does it occur to anyone that back when nakedness was expected of spa goers (single-sex or otherwise) that possibly the people not comfortable being naked just didn't go, because there was literally no possible way for them to feel remotely comfortable?" (Sort of like how I actually know a large number of people who just don't swim, and just don't use hot-tubs, because for one reason or another they're unable to be comfortable in swimming suits, so it's not that big of a stretch, here.)

Especially when I think about the endlessly featured "the agony of the changing room/showers" in memoirs and fiction and otherwise, and the massive tendency of people to go "well I didn't feel uncomfortable about it back then so clearly no one did", because of course we know that our experiences and feelings are universal.

...or, you know, it could be those for whom the communal nudity was horrible and traumatizing and painful just made damn sure that as adults they never had to go through it again, and definitely not in their supposedly leisure time.

[meara]

Plus I feel like so much is situational--I have almost no nudity hang ups (heck, ended up naked at the spa on a date recently, and that was all the nudity there was before or after!). But if some people are naked and others aren't? Then I'm uncomfortable and like "wait, should I be naked? Should I not? Am I a weirdo if I am/am not? Do I need to compare myself to others to decide? Are people judging me for my decision???"

[recessional]

Yup. And I have no body-shy hangups about nakedness per se, but man do I have some about just general appearance stuff so, like, I actually have no problems with people seeing my boobs or the rest, and no problems with changing or massage or whatever, but if I'm just sort of sitting around naked that means they might be looking at my tummy? Which I kind of hate right now? and I mean like kinda fuck them if they're judging me, but on the other hand they might be judging me, oh god, am I sitting up straight? what do I look like right now? and like . . . that is not a relaxing frame of mind for a spa. I am just saying. How about I put a robe back on and then I know you're not looking at my flabby tummy because you CAN'T, there is a robe in the way.

And I feel like requiring everyone to have completely come to terms with the body-hate pushed on us 24/7 and all its perniciousness before they get to go to a gym is kind of . . . not reasonable. :P

And again where it's expected and known to be expected, anyone who's going to have any kind of problem (especially one that CAN'T be rooted in Understandable Objections like morals) is just . . . not going to go. So you'd never know. See also: people who can't stand wearing swimsuits and having people see them.

Because among other things, then you get mocked - possibly in the new york times! - for being a prude. :P

[legionseagle]

There were certainly more people in cozzies at Harrogate than I remembered from the 1990s, too.

[movingfinger]

Do install that Chrome extension that replaces "Millennials" with "snake people."

And if this guy doesn't think a weight bench (e.g.) is intimate, in the sense of person-revealing and personality-revealing, maybe he doesn't use a gym?

[rinue]

It is indeed a sanity-saving extension.

[athenais]

"And the millennials, these are the special children. They expect all the amenities. They grew up in families that had Y.M.C.A. or country club memberships."

If privacy is an expectation, it's not their age but of the amount of privilege they grew up with. I'm a Baby Boomer, we had a country club membership and we didn't get showering privacy. We did get gendered changing rooms and so on. Boy does this article make me want to shake the writer.

[genarti]

Oh glory. Wow, what a terrible article.

[naryad]

Back when I used to play handball, there was a YMCA (a residential one, at that) with courts in the basement, as well as locker rooms. Apparently, back in the day, before there was also a women's locker room in the basement, the men would play handball naked. Which, wow, that sounds rather dangerous.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

I am a somewhat-single gay cis-male who goes to the gym, and I am very appreciative of the separate showers it has. I have zero interest in looking at other gym attendees while naked, sexually or otherwise. In the distant past when I went to the gym with my ex, we didn't look at each other or attempt any sexy stuff when changing. When I go to the gym, it's to go to the gym.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

But! But! Gay men are sexual ALL THE TIME! Ask any nervous straight guy!!!!

SUCH a dumb article. So much.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I believe that it has less to do with "being Millennials" and more to do with "being in their twenties."

Look at the progression: guys in their eighties don't even notice. Guys in their sixties just don't care. Guys in their forties can deal with it. Guys in their twenties are shy about their bodies.

It doesn't have to do being "greatest generation/baby boomer/Gen X/Millennial". It has to do with being "80/60/40/20." Twenty years ago, it would have been about how people my age just couldn't deal with it. Seventy years ago, I bet Regular Army guys were laughing at all the draftees coming in who were all weirded out by showering together.