Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

Miss Poubelle's local YMCA hosts a summer camp for kids, and for part of the day they go swimming in our pool. So, for several weeks, Miss Poubelle would show up to workout and encounter a locker room full of ten-year old boys who needed to change out of their wet swimsuits.

The reaction of the boys to each other's nudity and the nudity of the adult men in the locker room was intense. One boy stood staring open-mouthed at the adult men, apparently never having seen a grown-up penis before. (Miss Poubelle has hopes for him.) But much less common than the rather natural interest in looking at the other males was vocal paranoia at the idea of being seen without clothes. Several boys changed in the toilets, behind locked stall doors. Another squeezed himself into a corner between two rows of lockers, changing with a towel over his head. And one boy loudly denounced the others around him with "Stop looking at me! You're all so gay!"

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Besides the summer camp, our local YMCA also has an arrangement with the local Navy training center that lets the Navy men come and use our facilities for free. So at certain times of day, the locker room and sauna are full of 18 and 19 year old sailors. Miss Poubelle has been surprised to see that these young men do not seem much more comfortable about being naked than the ten year olds. At least half of them seem to shower in swimsuits or underwear, and there is a distinctly homophobic level of concern about who's looking at whose dick.

Twenty years to thirty years ago, there was a certain socialization process that involved learning how to be relatively comfortable while naked among other men. This socialization mostly happened in high school physical education classes, where you were expected to change and shower in front of other men. Miss Poubelle remembers that this caused a great deal of nervousness and anxiety among the other boys, but there was also the expectation that you would get over it. While it was not cool to parade around the locker room naked, it was also not cool to appear to be overly concerned about one's nakedness.

It appears that this socialization process is now breaking down to a large extent. A number of years ago, the ACLU threatened to sue the school district of Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, for its policy of requiring showers after physical education. Some civil libertarians have denounced mandatory showers as an invasion of privacy. "Unless a student is drawing flies, it's none of the school's business," said Daivd Millstein, the ACLU lawyer in the Hollidaysburg case. That school district now makes showers optional.

More and more schools around the country have done the same thing. Most fear lawsuits, some on the grounds of invasion of privacy, but also because of increasing paranoia about the sexuality of children. School districts often reason that a situation in which adults are in contact with naked children is likely to lead to trouble, and so they no longer require or encourage showers. The kids may stink, but at least they haven't had to endure public nudity!

As a result, we now have 18 year old sailors who are not comfortable being naked in front of other men. This strikes Miss Poubelle as ludicrous. These young men are presumably trained to kill the enemy in war and to endure a wide range of hardship and psychological stress. But they are terrified of what used to be commonplace the ritual of spending time naked with other men.

It's sad to see this rite beginning to disappear. Boys who never learn to be naked in high school are likely to be uncomfortable with their bodies later in their lives. Locker rooms are one of the few places where we see nudity in a context that is not necessarily sexual. We learn something about our own bodies from seeing the bodies of others, with all their flaws and imperfections. Men come in many sizes, shapes, and ages, and our bodies reflect the differences of our lives and our habits. We gain from our experience of the naked bodies of men of varying ages, races, and social classes. Their wrinkles, their scars, the differences of height, weight, and endowment these all tell us about the many ways of being male, and they help us to understand our own bodies and the nature of aging in a different way. It's a pity to spend a life hiding behind towels and averting eyes when there is so much to be learned in the locker room.