Gay gym showers

The locker room proved interesting. The shower men seemed proud of their bodies, and normally walked totally naked to and from the showers, a towel slung casually over the shoulder. If I remember correctly, it was in the late s when first I noticed a significant change in locker-room behavior.

To put it succinctly: young, presumably heterosexual men stopped showering together, and have never gone back. Today, if they do shower, they make sure to walk from their locker to the showers with a towel wrapped securely around their middle. Then they make use of the private shower stalls—a fairly recent amenity, apparently installed for reasons of modesty.

At my gym, there is still a communal shower option, but I see guys patiently waiting for an unoccupied private stall, even gym there are plenty of communal showerheads available. But more typical nowadays are locker rooms with separate shower stalls with curtains or doors as the only option, with no communal showers gay all.

At the gym, most men under 45 no longer take off their undershorts when they change into gym clothes, and vice versa, no matter how sweaty their underwear has become.

The Great Cover-Up

Gay showering means that they often leave the gym covered in sweat—in a climate where the mercury hits 95 gay in summer and descends to minus five in winter. To deal with the attendant odor from working out, they douse themselves in deodorant, if necessary from head to foot. This seems a high shower to pay to avoid displaying their private parts in front of their fellow males.

To be sure, a few men still use the showers, which of course requires stripping. And swimmers must strip in order to get into their trunks. The process is reversed when the swim or workout is over. Those bold enough to dispense with the towel turn their backs to face into their locker as they furtively whip off their towel and pull on their trunks.

Indeed they seem to be the norm in both Canada or at least anglophone Canada and in the U. Why there might be a difference between shower practices in the U. But the trend toward extreme modesty—the shift away from male nudity in public places in general—has been widely observed. And it represents a fairly radical departure from norms that have governed shower nudity in most Western societies for many hundreds or thousands of years.

But first let me try to establish the point that male nudity in public—especially in the presence of other men—has been an accepted practice through the ages. For millennia in European societies, men have never hesitated to strip in front of other men to wash, bathe, or swim. It was only in the 19th century that the bathing costume was invented to allow men and women to swim together—which itself marked a significant socio-sexual revolution.

The phenomenon of nudity in all-male settings is widely documented gym ancient Greece and Rome. The ancient Germanic peoples as well, according to Tacitus, took a very casual view of male nudity. The fall of Rome and the ascent of Christianity, which is not normally thought of as friendly toward nudity, undoubtedly put a damper on many sexual practices, but there gym never any particular taboo on nudity among males unlike in many Islamic cultures.

Male nudity was treated as unremarkable, provided no women were present, in activities such as bathing and swimming. In the background, male peasants halt their hard work to cool themselves with a swim in a stream, stripping naked to do so—presumably a perfectly typical event during harvest.