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

[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