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?