> Today, the only naked bodies that many Americans will likely ever see are their own, a partner’s, or those on a screen. Gone are our unvarnished points of physical comparison—the ordinary, unposed figures of other people. In their place, we’re left with the curated ideals of social-media posts, AI-generated advertising, and pornography. The loss may seem trivial, but it also may change how people see themselves.
I think the theme of "how we see ourselves" is the defining theme of our age. Never before have we been bombarded with so much imagery while at the same time being seeing so little of real life.
I stayed at a ryokan in Japan recently, and of course the baths and pools are 100% nude, and people strip down naked in the changing rooms to enter them. Men and women separate at all times.
It was a new experience for me but it also felt 100% natural and by the second night it was totally normal and I didn’t feel modest or anything. There was an unspoken understanding that we’re all there to just relax and recover and help our bodies feel good. Nobody made me feel weird or self conscious, nobody stared, no one made comments or really even said much of anything outside of a few funny jokes that we all laughed at that had nothing to do with the setting.
Interestingly, onsen were traditionally mixed sex until relatively recently (Meiji Restoration). As of now, mixed bathing is banned [1], though hidden in the Wikipedia notes is this:
> due to varying interpretations of terminology and local ordinances, rare instances of mixed bathing still exist at places like Tsurunoyu Onsen where the water is opaque.
For the last year and a half I've been living off grid in rural Colorado. I have a membership in the community rec center (which is very nice) and town service (also very nice) so I can use their gym, but mostly to use the shower and hot tub.
Personally, I think that being in locker rooms has been healthy- it's a good reminder that some day I am going to be super wrinkly if I live that long. It's been an interesting experiment in existing in public spaces.
If you're uncomfortable in those kinds of siutations, I wouldn't tell you what to do, but honestly "getting over" being weirded out by old naked folks is definitely a thing you might find worth while to work out.
Decades ago, University of Toronto had floors in the frosh dorms which were unisex, including the washrooms/showers. I don't recall any big protests over this - people just got used to it.
I never heard of any problems, though I doubt the University administration would have publicized any problems.
Naked locker rooms were well on the decline (at least for youth) in the '90s. I attended a martial arts gym with adults and kids, where men would regularly walk out of the shower naked and change all while holding conversations with each other.
I learned the hard way at band camp in high school that such casual nudity among a single-gender was socially unacceptable among my own generation, and after the first day changed my clothes under my towel like everybody else.
It is, I think, indicative of a broader trend. When you drive past the National Cemetery on Wilshire Blvd in Westwood, there is a large statue of a naked woman (personifying victory or the glory to be accorded the fallen?). I believe it was placed there shortly after World War I. I can't imagine a similar statue would be erected today.
CGP Grey did a video on US State flags and added a mosaic to the Virginia flag, making a comment about demonetization. It, having the Seal of Virginia on it, contains a personifcation of virtue with a single breast exposed.
Apparently a Texas school district banned the Virginia flag for the same reason.
> Compounding these issues is the omnipresence of cameras and social media, which has made privacy more precarious.
Buried in an article about shifts in attitudes towards nudity and porn is the actual cause. As a child of the 70s I've never given nudity in the locker rooms a second thought but now, no thank you. For my daughter? Out of the question.
I'll bring up the third rail. I am, despite all my ultra-liberal blue sensibilities, uncomfortable with individuals with XY chromosomes in my locker room. I can put in a bunch of qualifiers - if they're on hormones, if they're post op, if there's really no physical difference then I'm not concerned but there is no guarantee of course. If I look over at the locker next to me and see a penis, I'm out.
> the prevailing trends in locker-room design is privacy, a way to make “a diverse user base” feel comfortable.
One thing that annoys me about this article is the subtle stab at woke / gender identity as a reason for this change. Both Germany and Sweden has a much higher percentage of transgender people compared to the US, and neither have these kinds of locker rooms.
Living in Germany where all-gender nude changing rooms, nude all-gender saunas and nude beaches are very normal and very much not sexualised, it is striking how different the underlying culture is here - Germans find nudity practical and sanitary, and at the same time they very much insist that you wear special bathing shoes.
"The University of Washington’s Intramural Activities Building (IMA) underwent a comprehensive renovation to modernize its locker rooms and swimming pool, untouched since its 1966 construction. Utilizing a progressive design-build process, the project doubled the swimmable area and created one of the nation’s largest gender-inclusive locker facilities. The collaborative effort prioritized equity, accessibility, and universal design principles, resulting in three fully accessible, gender-inclusive locker rooms."
Thanks that rings a bell. I remember reading complaints about how the change reduced the overall shower capacity and led to longer shower waits during peak hours.
Upending convention for one identity category while reinforcing body-shaming is privileging selective discrimination and inconsistent. Oops! Perhaps not forcing or shaming/guilt-tripping people into hiding themselves in changing stalls would be the moral thing to do and those who are offended can close their eyes or look elsewhere. I'd be cool if those stalls were entirely optional. I'm ambivalent about gendering or ungendering changing/shower rooms and WC's, but the user group of the space have to agree on a convention, hopefully one that doesn't double-down on another form of social bullshit while only addressing (no half-pun intended) one dimension.
In many European countries, it's not at all controversial to have nude mixed-gender saunas (and concerns about homosexuals recede once it's possible to be ogled heterosexually in such spaces).
You need to understand that straight women don't fear gay women the way straight men fear gay men. Additionally, concerns might recede for men, but I wouldn't think for women. Straight men ogle them more than gay women ogle them. Very different situation.
This is highly cultural. And I'd be surprised if, in the US, men "fear" gay men the way you're making out. But as OP clearly stated, there are countries where mixed sex naked saunas/spas are a thing and ogling or other kinds of harassment are not a big issue.
Ogling for women carries with it the implied risk of rape due to natural differences in physical strength, and women experience rape at a much greater rate than men, so that threat would have higher salience than any equivalent gender-based insecurity.
Not everybody is comfortable being naked in front of others generally, and that's okay, but straight men who genuinely fear the possibility of simply being visible to gay men need therapy. The assumption that everybody is just going to be ogling everyone else just doesn't hold up to reality where there's a very long history of people being naked in locker rooms, showers, bath houses, beaches, saunas, etc. while still being polite and respectful of each other. That isn't to say that rude people have never existed, but that is far from the norm and nothing to be fearful of.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "pursue". If a person knows that somebody is not attracted to their sex and that person still asks them out or hits on them that's just plain rude. I 100% agree that's wrong. Nobody likes that.
Asking out someone before you know how they feel about you (and the rest of your sex) is perfectly normal and sometimes that's going to result in a gay man asking out a straight man and that's okay too as long as that person backs off after getting a polite decline. I personally think it'd still be weird/rude to do that to a stranger while one or both of you are naked, but it probably does happen in places where people are more comfortable in that setting.
AFAIK Finland always had more separated sauna culture. They have so many saunas that you specifically pick when you want to go to mixed sauna.
In Germany or parts of eastern europe saunas are popular but there are not that many of them so they end up mixed gender. Also everybody is going to saunas in Finland where as in Germany its much more thing for "fans" or "experienced" sauna goers that maybe accept it as part of the whole thing.
It's pretty common in Australia for people to strip and change at beaches in the carparks .. usually with, say, a car door open so they're partially hidden, often with a bit of towel wrap as a nod toward "decency" - but it's accepted that the easiest way to change from wet to dry clothes is via bit of interstitial nudity.
Depends on beaches, the larger big city beaches often have changing rooms, it's more smaller suburban beaches, country and remote (but popular) beaches.
Friends might arrive together, change together as they talk, go to beach, return, change again, leave - lot's of solo people do it - the only thing that'd be odd would be somebody wandering about clearing having a perve.
This is a bad example. Nude mixed gender saunas self select for a specific part of the population, which is not made uncomfortable by being stared at by people sexually attracted to them.
I would never visit auch a place and neither would large part of the population in these European countries. To be honest I find these places disgusting. And yes I am from a part of Europe where they exist.
The idea that just because nude saunas exists, everyone who wants to go swimming has to be subject to those conditions is ridiculous.
I don't understand what you imagine to happen in saunas. They are places where you relax yourself or with a couple of friends, you're not there as a showpiece for others nor do you ogle at the fellow saunagoers.
Edit: I saw your other comments, we have no common ground so let's not continue this discussion.
Well, first of all, nothing disgusting about swingers clubs; wouldn’t be my cup of tea personally, but provided they’re consenting adults there’s nothing wrong with it.
But also, like, mixed saunas, generally, aren’t sexual at all. The mere presence of naked people does not imply sex.
German saunas are nude and all-genders and no one minds. So please kindly don't blame the prudes' harmfulness on queers. We can handle our and each other's naked bodies fine, thank you.
I am a German. I know more about the sexual norms in my country than you.
FKK is something which is always associated with the boomer generation, which got their sexual norms from the American hippie culture. The whole thing is part of the "Sexboomer" phenomenon, which most of the younger generation see as extremely disgusting and creepy behavior. If you find younger people there (young meaning younger than 60) they are almost always lower class people, who like to indulge in these sexual fantasies, because they have nothing else going on in their life. If you are part of the Bürgertum, roughly "middle-class", and under 40, you want nothing to do with this. Attending is something you would keep secret and admitting it would be extremely shameful and you would get ridiculed for it.
Please stop telling me what the sexual norms in my country are. In so many replies have I seen lies about this, which totally disregard how sexuality is viewed and lived out.
What nationality you have really doesn't matter much when you don't seem to leave your house to actually be in society and see how other people around you act and feel.
I'm not sure why you're sitting on so much inwards frustration and anger, but I'm guessing getting out and talking with other people (not through a screen) could help you a lot to get better at this.
> If you would ask any person around me, none of them would describe me as "frustrated" or "full of anger".
Give them this URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=constantcrying and then after they've read through what you've been commenting here on HN, ask them again, and I'm very sure you'll get a very different answers.
> That you can not imagine people like me
I can very much, types like yours exists everywhere :)
> Just FYI, comments like yours are likely against HN guidelines.
They might, yes. But I only care about you, and want you to get better, and I'm trying to help you ask the questions you should be asking yourself.
People who appear angry when they're behind psedonyms on the internet and seemingly never go outside exists everywhere.
People who are afraid of nudity are a very small minority, and to again answer the question you should be asking yourself: you probably should talk with a psychiatrist or psychologist about that and your anger, because it seems to affect you in your daily life, since you're walking around being "disgusted" by very natural things.
>you probably should talk with a psychiatrist or psychologist about that and your anger, because it seems to affect you in your daily life, since you're walking around being "disgusted" by very natural things.
"Dear shrink, I am totally happy with my life. I suffer from no mental problems, I have healthy relationships, am productive and fulfilled at work and outside of it. I have absolutely no reason to be here, except some guy on the Internet told me to, because I don't want to be stared at by homosexuals when going swimming."
That's a great first start! Try to be less passive aggressive once you meet them, otherwise you'll come off the same as you come off here on HN, and I'm sure they can find the root cause of your homophobia. I don't envy you, must be taxing to live with such condition. Hope you end up getting the help you need!
This is such a modern, Puritanical take on nudity. Casual nudity exists everywhere in the world except where it is explicitly repressed. The relationship between sex and nudity is strengthened by prohibitions against nudity.
It’s just so wildly vainglorious and egocentric to think that you WILL be the object of sexual interest of other people in any given situation.
Besides, if this is how you think about yourself and the world around you, then you really have nothing to worry about on the “people finding you attractive in any way” front.
> Nobody wants to change in a locker where they might be stared at as objects of sexual interest. I would not want to be nude in a changing room with homosexual men or women.
That sounds like a you problem.
Plenty of people around the world getting in the nuddy just fine, not thinking about such thing, not nearly as repressed as your post or tone.
> I would not want to be nude in a changing room with homosexual men or women.
The worst part for you is that whenever you are in public, anyone can look at you with sexual interest at any moment, because humans are humans. It might be a better idea to focus on what makes you so uncomfortable with this nudity and sex thing, instead on focusing on what other people are doing as you cannot control their thoughts and feelings.
I think sexuality is a too complex issue to get a consensus in a handful of posts, but to me no amount of regulation, if you want, can modify personal perception, you can take places where burkas are law as an example. If you feel sexualized (we all are at some point) in a locker room you will do so in any space with extrangers. This I believe is a result of the loss of social interaction of our times.
Europe has no problem with mixed gender nudity in many similar situations, especially communal bathing. For example, nude beaches, saunas, the century-old German FKK movement, etc. Don’t project your own hangups onto the rest of the world.
I think you're misunderstanding what he is saying. I believe he is saying other people have projected their hangups ("top down enforcement in new social norms") which has caused casual nudity cease to function.
And you're saying in Europe people haven't projected sexuality onto nudity, therefore it still works. So you guys are saying the same thing.
> As soon as there are homosexuals or people who want to be perceived as the opposite gender involved, the social contract which made casual nudity work ceased to function.
> I would not want to be nude in a changing room with homosexual men or women.
It’s funny: unless they very rarely go to a public changing room, they likely have disrobed in front of a non-straight person. Likely several times, and presumably without incident. The baseline prevalence of queerness in the world is simply not that low.
You are taking a small part of the German population and arguing because this small population is comfortable in such a situation everyone has to be forced into these situations. This is obviously a terrible argument.
No, most Germans find this disgusting and would never want to participate in this. Most Germans want to change in segregated rooms.
>Don’t project your own hangups onto the rest of the world.
You are projecting the sexual hangups of some Germans on to the rest of the world.
Remember, it was illegal to be gay in a lot of western countries. So, 'dont ask, dont tell' was the safe and legal norm. So it wasn't ever a concern to even be discussed.
> As soon as there are homosexuals or people who want to be perceived as the opposite gender involved, the social contract which made casual nudity work ceased to function.
Doesn’t make sense. The Weimar republic is an obvious counterexample.
It's really frustrating. So many women are getting abused in dorms now and nobody can talk about it; a friend of mine complained that a man was hanging out in the women's bathroom for hours on end on friday/saturday nights and the RA threatened to write her up. Rape/abuse rates are around 300x higher (depending on the numbers you use) for trans/non-binary people than women yet nobody cares, and just trying to do high-quality research on the subject can get tenured professors fired. It's frustrating because it's this enormous problem and we can't even have good research on the topic done, let alone address the crime numbers which have come out we can all see.
> So many women are getting abused in dorms now and nobody can talk about it;
I don't believe that there's a widespread issue of people stopping other people from talking about people being abused. You're doing it right now and nobody stopped you. Other examples of it successfully happening abound.
> a friend of mine complained that a man was hanging out in the women's bathroom for hours on end on friday/saturday nights and the RA threatened to write her up.
This is not an example of somebody who was prevented from talking about being abused. I'm honestly not sure what to make of it. If the place had segregated bathrooms why were men in there at all? Literally anyone regularly hanging around in a shared bathroom for hours on end is a bit rude, but it's hard to understand why an RA would have threatened to write up your friend. Write her up for what exactly?
> Rape/abuse rates are around 300x higher (depending on the numbers you use) for trans/non-binary people than women yet nobody cares
Ignoring the fact that many trans/non-binary people are also women, I don't believe that nobody cares. Don't you? I also know that research is still being done on the subject. Schools can be weird though, so I'd be interested in examples of tenured professors who were fired for trying to research the subject if you have any.
Then don't look? We're all monkeys who are naked under all these clothes. Just focus on yourself and do your business and maybe do a little personal work if you're traumatized by exposed body parts.
Have you? As in, ever considered how that doesn't actually matter? That the bad thing does not imply or justify this response?
Their victimhood, whatever form it happened to take, is not everyone else's problem such that a shared space has to cater to their problem.
How brutal and uncaring right? I think this kind of argument comes from a position of equating this consideration with wheel chair ramps and navigation aids for the blind, which are good and proper things. But this is not like that.
Anyone can have a psychological problem with literally anything. For everyone that was harmed by sex, someone else was harmed by cars or simple non sex violence or not harmed by anyone at all but they simply have a problem of their own like autism etc. I was beat up and made to feel powerless a couple times as a kid. Therefor gyms should not allow there to be more than one other person around me, no groups of 3 or more, way too threatening. And no one else can be larger or stronger than me. Obviously absurd. But I was actually at other people's mercy and totally powerless while other people violated my body.
But ok let's grant that sex is somehow a special problem that is worth giving special treatment even if we can't give everyone else with all the other infinite problems the same consideration, ... wait that is pretty hard to grant even just for the sake of argument just so we can move on to the next argument. It doesn't hold water and won't go away... F all the people with any other problem that just doesn't happen to stem from sex and move on ... because we're good considerate people?
Anyway the next and more important question is, ever considered that that trauma only happened in the first place because of a society that treats this topic in such a warped way? Instead of a frank, adult, conscious, lack-of-all-charge way?
No, this is just not a valid argument. And it's not from not caring about the victim. It's that it doesn't even help the victim or have anything to do with them or what happened to them or the process of dealing with it after.
Easy there cowboy, this isn't a 'safe space' argument, this is an argument for preference. You are more than welcome to gallivant around while publicly nude, while others are more than welcome to prefer not to. That's really the crux of it.
> Maybe most men don't want to see other men naked?
Don't look then? No one is forcing you to look anywhere else than what you're doing. It always struck me as strange that people seem disgusted/disturbed/annoyed by something yet they're unable to look away and focus on their own business instead.
Tell that to old Joe Dangly-sac using the hand air dryer to blow the water off his old sagging balls.
I walked in on that the first time I ever used a public gym and that shit is seared into my memory--that was enough to turn me off of the locker room for some time and you know what, I don't miss it.
More often than not, pub[l]ic nudity is innocuous, nothing remarkable, but there will always be the outlier that spoils the rest of the bunch by doing weird shit with their genitals, be it drying them where theyre not supposed to be dried (see above), touching themselves in a sexual manner (seen it in a few different locker rooms, and of course the old naked men who are more than friendly to younger, naked men.
I for one say good riddance to the nude locker room. Fuck that shit.
I'd like to be the first one to add a comment in agreement.
Having had a high number of uncomfortable experiences in nude-allowed locker rooms, it's nice to know there are spots where I don't need to be subjected to it if I prefer not to.
As a foreign national living in US. It amazes me that public urination could land you in jail (specifically indecent exposure) however being naked in a locker room is supposed to be considered normal.
They both involve nudity in front of the opposite sex (and by extension, children of the opposite sex). I really don't want nudity to become something that's normalized in more places then it needs to be
https://archive.ph/Hu1qP
> Today, the only naked bodies that many Americans will likely ever see are their own, a partner’s, or those on a screen. Gone are our unvarnished points of physical comparison—the ordinary, unposed figures of other people. In their place, we’re left with the curated ideals of social-media posts, AI-generated advertising, and pornography. The loss may seem trivial, but it also may change how people see themselves.
I think the theme of "how we see ourselves" is the defining theme of our age. Never before have we been bombarded with so much imagery while at the same time being seeing so little of real life.
https://i.imgur.com/YuVmKkE.png
I stayed at a ryokan in Japan recently, and of course the baths and pools are 100% nude, and people strip down naked in the changing rooms to enter them. Men and women separate at all times.
It was a new experience for me but it also felt 100% natural and by the second night it was totally normal and I didn’t feel modest or anything. There was an unspoken understanding that we’re all there to just relax and recover and help our bodies feel good. Nobody made me feel weird or self conscious, nobody stared, no one made comments or really even said much of anything outside of a few funny jokes that we all laughed at that had nothing to do with the setting.
Interestingly, onsen were traditionally mixed sex until relatively recently (Meiji Restoration). As of now, mixed bathing is banned [1], though hidden in the Wikipedia notes is this:
> due to varying interpretations of terminology and local ordinances, rare instances of mixed bathing still exist at places like Tsurunoyu Onsen where the water is opaque.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onsen#Mixed_bathing
One can have a similar experience at the Wii spa in LA. It's great, and there is even food on the top floor!
For the last year and a half I've been living off grid in rural Colorado. I have a membership in the community rec center (which is very nice) and town service (also very nice) so I can use their gym, but mostly to use the shower and hot tub.
Personally, I think that being in locker rooms has been healthy- it's a good reminder that some day I am going to be super wrinkly if I live that long. It's been an interesting experiment in existing in public spaces.
If you're uncomfortable in those kinds of siutations, I wouldn't tell you what to do, but honestly "getting over" being weirded out by old naked folks is definitely a thing you might find worth while to work out.
Decades ago, University of Toronto had floors in the frosh dorms which were unisex, including the washrooms/showers. I don't recall any big protests over this - people just got used to it.
I never heard of any problems, though I doubt the University administration would have publicized any problems.
Stanford's Toyon hall had coed bathrooms and showers 20 years ago. I don't know if it still does.
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Naked locker rooms were well on the decline (at least for youth) in the '90s. I attended a martial arts gym with adults and kids, where men would regularly walk out of the shower naked and change all while holding conversations with each other.
I learned the hard way at band camp in high school that such casual nudity among a single-gender was socially unacceptable among my own generation, and after the first day changed my clothes under my towel like everybody else.
It is, I think, indicative of a broader trend. When you drive past the National Cemetery on Wilshire Blvd in Westwood, there is a large statue of a naked woman (personifying victory or the glory to be accorded the fallen?). I believe it was placed there shortly after World War I. I can't imagine a similar statue would be erected today.
San Francisco just put up a nude woman statue this year:
https://sfstandard.com/2025/09/30/embaracadero-naked-lady-st...
But temporary and not publicly funded.
CGP Grey did a video on US State flags and added a mosaic to the Virginia flag, making a comment about demonetization. It, having the Seal of Virginia on it, contains a personifcation of virtue with a single breast exposed.
Apparently a Texas school district banned the Virginia flag for the same reason.
In Seattle I believe this is being done to make it less controversial about which locker room trans people use… there’s one.
> Compounding these issues is the omnipresence of cameras and social media, which has made privacy more precarious.
Buried in an article about shifts in attitudes towards nudity and porn is the actual cause. As a child of the 70s I've never given nudity in the locker rooms a second thought but now, no thank you. For my daughter? Out of the question.
I'll bring up the third rail. I am, despite all my ultra-liberal blue sensibilities, uncomfortable with individuals with XY chromosomes in my locker room. I can put in a bunch of qualifiers - if they're on hormones, if they're post op, if there's really no physical difference then I'm not concerned but there is no guarantee of course. If I look over at the locker next to me and see a penis, I'm out.
> the prevailing trends in locker-room design is privacy, a way to make “a diverse user base” feel comfortable.
One thing that annoys me about this article is the subtle stab at woke / gender identity as a reason for this change. Both Germany and Sweden has a much higher percentage of transgender people compared to the US, and neither have these kinds of locker rooms.
Living in Germany where all-gender nude changing rooms, nude all-gender saunas and nude beaches are very normal and very much not sexualised, it is striking how different the underlying culture is here - Germans find nudity practical and sanitary, and at the same time they very much insist that you wear special bathing shoes.
Anyone know which Seattle gym the author visited with an all-gender locker room?
The article mentions "university gym" - a quick web search with the name of the largest university in Seattle, University of Washington, reveals:
https://www.washington.edu/ima/locker-rooms-and-pool-nominat...
Thanks that rings a bell. I remember reading complaints about how the change reduced the overall shower capacity and led to longer shower waits during peak hours.
Upending convention for one identity category while reinforcing body-shaming is privileging selective discrimination and inconsistent. Oops! Perhaps not forcing or shaming/guilt-tripping people into hiding themselves in changing stalls would be the moral thing to do and those who are offended can close their eyes or look elsewhere. I'd be cool if those stalls were entirely optional. I'm ambivalent about gendering or ungendering changing/shower rooms and WC's, but the user group of the space have to agree on a convention, hopefully one that doesn't double-down on another form of social bullshit while only addressing (no half-pun intended) one dimension.
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In many European countries, it's not at all controversial to have nude mixed-gender saunas (and concerns about homosexuals recede once it's possible to be ogled heterosexually in such spaces).
You need to understand that straight women don't fear gay women the way straight men fear gay men. Additionally, concerns might recede for men, but I wouldn't think for women. Straight men ogle them more than gay women ogle them. Very different situation.
This is highly cultural. And I'd be surprised if, in the US, men "fear" gay men the way you're making out. But as OP clearly stated, there are countries where mixed sex naked saunas/spas are a thing and ogling or other kinds of harassment are not a big issue.
I didn't state the degree. I just mean straight men oppose gay men more than straight women oppose gay women.
Oppose and fear are not synonymous.
In this situation, straight mens' fear is specifically from their insecurity about their own masculinity.
Would you say the same thing about women’s fear of being ogled in an enclosed space while naked?
Ogling for women carries with it the implied risk of rape due to natural differences in physical strength, and women experience rape at a much greater rate than men, so that threat would have higher salience than any equivalent gender-based insecurity.
Not everybody is comfortable being naked in front of others generally, and that's okay, but straight men who genuinely fear the possibility of simply being visible to gay men need therapy. The assumption that everybody is just going to be ogling everyone else just doesn't hold up to reality where there's a very long history of people being naked in locker rooms, showers, bath houses, beaches, saunas, etc. while still being polite and respectful of each other. That isn't to say that rude people have never existed, but that is far from the norm and nothing to be fearful of.
I agree, and I didn't mean to imply they fear the sight.
Some gay men pursue straight men and it's obviously wrong.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "pursue". If a person knows that somebody is not attracted to their sex and that person still asks them out or hits on them that's just plain rude. I 100% agree that's wrong. Nobody likes that.
Asking out someone before you know how they feel about you (and the rest of your sex) is perfectly normal and sometimes that's going to result in a gay man asking out a straight man and that's okay too as long as that person backs off after getting a polite decline. I personally think it'd still be weird/rude to do that to a stranger while one or both of you are naked, but it probably does happen in places where people are more comfortable in that setting.
It has taken a turn back in the last couple of years, now in Finland even university students go to sauna in swimsuits.
Why?
AFAIK Finland always had more separated sauna culture. They have so many saunas that you specifically pick when you want to go to mixed sauna.
In Germany or parts of eastern europe saunas are popular but there are not that many of them so they end up mixed gender. Also everybody is going to saunas in Finland where as in Germany its much more thing for "fans" or "experienced" sauna goers that maybe accept it as part of the whole thing.
It's pretty common in Australia for people to strip and change at beaches in the carparks .. usually with, say, a car door open so they're partially hidden, often with a bit of towel wrap as a nod toward "decency" - but it's accepted that the easiest way to change from wet to dry clothes is via bit of interstitial nudity.
Depends on beaches, the larger big city beaches often have changing rooms, it's more smaller suburban beaches, country and remote (but popular) beaches.
Friends might arrive together, change together as they talk, go to beach, return, change again, leave - lot's of solo people do it - the only thing that'd be odd would be somebody wandering about clearing having a perve.
This is a bad example. Nude mixed gender saunas self select for a specific part of the population, which is not made uncomfortable by being stared at by people sexually attracted to them.
I would never visit auch a place and neither would large part of the population in these European countries. To be honest I find these places disgusting. And yes I am from a part of Europe where they exist.
The idea that just because nude saunas exists, everyone who wants to go swimming has to be subject to those conditions is ridiculous.
You might want to talk to a psychologist about this. Fine to not want to go to one, of course. But finding them _disgusting_ is weird.
What isn't disgusting about it? It is just some variation of human sexual deviancy, not far removed from swinger clubs.
I don't understand what you imagine to happen in saunas. They are places where you relax yourself or with a couple of friends, you're not there as a showpiece for others nor do you ogle at the fellow saunagoers.
Edit: I saw your other comments, we have no common ground so let's not continue this discussion.
Well, first of all, nothing disgusting about swingers clubs; wouldn’t be my cup of tea personally, but provided they’re consenting adults there’s nothing wrong with it.
But also, like, mixed saunas, generally, aren’t sexual at all. The mere presence of naked people does not imply sex.
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German saunas are nude and all-genders and no one minds. So please kindly don't blame the prudes' harmfulness on queers. We can handle our and each other's naked bodies fine, thank you.
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Why would you say this when you clearly have no experience yourself about it? Why lie so brazenly about things you clearly don't know?
I am a German. I know more about the sexual norms in my country than you.
FKK is something which is always associated with the boomer generation, which got their sexual norms from the American hippie culture. The whole thing is part of the "Sexboomer" phenomenon, which most of the younger generation see as extremely disgusting and creepy behavior. If you find younger people there (young meaning younger than 60) they are almost always lower class people, who like to indulge in these sexual fantasies, because they have nothing else going on in their life. If you are part of the Bürgertum, roughly "middle-class", and under 40, you want nothing to do with this. Attending is something you would keep secret and admitting it would be extremely shameful and you would get ridiculed for it.
Please stop telling me what the sexual norms in my country are. In so many replies have I seen lies about this, which totally disregard how sexuality is viewed and lived out.
What nationality you have really doesn't matter much when you don't seem to leave your house to actually be in society and see how other people around you act and feel.
I'm not sure why you're sitting on so much inwards frustration and anger, but I'm guessing getting out and talking with other people (not through a screen) could help you a lot to get better at this.
But I am full time employed, active in multiple sport groups, have social hobbies and do volunteer activities. I am anything but a recluse.
If you would ask any person around me, none of them would describe me as "frustrated" or "full of anger".
That you can not imagine people like me, shows to me that you are contained inside a social circle, with where homogeneous opinions.
Just FYI, comments like yours are likely against HN guidelines.
> If you would ask any person around me, none of them would describe me as "frustrated" or "full of anger".
Give them this URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=constantcrying and then after they've read through what you've been commenting here on HN, ask them again, and I'm very sure you'll get a very different answers.
> That you can not imagine people like me
I can very much, types like yours exists everywhere :)
> Just FYI, comments like yours are likely against HN guidelines.
They might, yes. But I only care about you, and want you to get better, and I'm trying to help you ask the questions you should be asking yourself.
I was accused of lying about how common my opinions are. Now you are agreeing pretty much explicitly that people like me exist "everywhere".
This was exactly my point. People like me are "everywhere". I do not understand what point you are arguing here.
People who appear angry when they're behind psedonyms on the internet and seemingly never go outside exists everywhere.
People who are afraid of nudity are a very small minority, and to again answer the question you should be asking yourself: you probably should talk with a psychiatrist or psychologist about that and your anger, because it seems to affect you in your daily life, since you're walking around being "disgusted" by very natural things.
>you probably should talk with a psychiatrist or psychologist about that and your anger, because it seems to affect you in your daily life, since you're walking around being "disgusted" by very natural things.
"Dear shrink, I am totally happy with my life. I suffer from no mental problems, I have healthy relationships, am productive and fulfilled at work and outside of it. I have absolutely no reason to be here, except some guy on the Internet told me to, because I don't want to be stared at by homosexuals when going swimming."
That's a great first start! Try to be less passive aggressive once you meet them, otherwise you'll come off the same as you come off here on HN, and I'm sure they can find the root cause of your homophobia. I don't envy you, must be taxing to live with such condition. Hope you end up getting the help you need!
I like who I am and I have no desire to change.
>and I'm sure they can find the root cause of your homophobia
Sure. I already have. It is homosexuals. Maybe you should go see a psychiatrist about your homophilia, so he can help cure you of your deviancy.
This is such a modern, Puritanical take on nudity. Casual nudity exists everywhere in the world except where it is explicitly repressed. The relationship between sex and nudity is strengthened by prohibitions against nudity.
It’s just so wildly vainglorious and egocentric to think that you WILL be the object of sexual interest of other people in any given situation.
Besides, if this is how you think about yourself and the world around you, then you really have nothing to worry about on the “people finding you attractive in any way” front.
> Nobody wants to change in a locker where they might be stared at as objects of sexual interest. I would not want to be nude in a changing room with homosexual men or women.
That sounds like a you problem.
Plenty of people around the world getting in the nuddy just fine, not thinking about such thing, not nearly as repressed as your post or tone.
> I would not want to be nude in a changing room with homosexual men or women.
The worst part for you is that whenever you are in public, anyone can look at you with sexual interest at any moment, because humans are humans. It might be a better idea to focus on what makes you so uncomfortable with this nudity and sex thing, instead on focusing on what other people are doing as you cannot control their thoughts and feelings.
Mixed nude saunas and resorts are normal in the Netherlands. I got used to it after a few hours.
The Stonewall riots were in 1969. At the latest since then, queer movements as political and cultural forces are a thing.
If locker room prudeness was an effect of that, it had a lag of half a century.
I think sexuality is a too complex issue to get a consensus in a handful of posts, but to me no amount of regulation, if you want, can modify personal perception, you can take places where burkas are law as an example. If you feel sexualized (we all are at some point) in a locker room you will do so in any space with extrangers. This I believe is a result of the loss of social interaction of our times.
> As soon as there are homosexuals or people who want to be perceived as the opposite gender involved
They've always been here, they've always been involved.
Europe has no problem with mixed gender nudity in many similar situations, especially communal bathing. For example, nude beaches, saunas, the century-old German FKK movement, etc. Don’t project your own hangups onto the rest of the world.
I think you're misunderstanding what he is saying. I believe he is saying other people have projected their hangups ("top down enforcement in new social norms") which has caused casual nudity cease to function.
And you're saying in Europe people haven't projected sexuality onto nudity, therefore it still works. So you guys are saying the same thing.
> As soon as there are homosexuals or people who want to be perceived as the opposite gender involved, the social contract which made casual nudity work ceased to function.
> I would not want to be nude in a changing room with homosexual men or women.
I don't think they are.
It’s funny: unless they very rarely go to a public changing room, they likely have disrobed in front of a non-straight person. Likely several times, and presumably without incident. The baseline prevalence of queerness in the world is simply not that low.
You are taking a small part of the German population and arguing because this small population is comfortable in such a situation everyone has to be forced into these situations. This is obviously a terrible argument.
No, most Germans find this disgusting and would never want to participate in this. Most Germans want to change in segregated rooms.
>Don’t project your own hangups onto the rest of the world.
You are projecting the sexual hangups of some Germans on to the rest of the world.
Where did gay men get changed before the new social norms?
Naturally, they were all straight! /sarcasm
Remember, it was illegal to be gay in a lot of western countries. So, 'dont ask, dont tell' was the safe and legal norm. So it wasn't ever a concern to even be discussed.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=fpas&q=A+map+of+the+years+when+hom...
Is a reddit-cached map of years when homosexuality was legalized for Europe. Had to use this link cause the reddit /r/europe mods censored it.
> As soon as there are homosexuals or people who want to be perceived as the opposite gender involved, the social contract which made casual nudity work ceased to function.
Doesn’t make sense. The Weimar republic is an obvious counterexample.
It's really frustrating. So many women are getting abused in dorms now and nobody can talk about it; a friend of mine complained that a man was hanging out in the women's bathroom for hours on end on friday/saturday nights and the RA threatened to write her up. Rape/abuse rates are around 300x higher (depending on the numbers you use) for trans/non-binary people than women yet nobody cares, and just trying to do high-quality research on the subject can get tenured professors fired. It's frustrating because it's this enormous problem and we can't even have good research on the topic done, let alone address the crime numbers which have come out we can all see.
> So many women are getting abused in dorms now and nobody can talk about it;
I don't believe that there's a widespread issue of people stopping other people from talking about people being abused. You're doing it right now and nobody stopped you. Other examples of it successfully happening abound.
> a friend of mine complained that a man was hanging out in the women's bathroom for hours on end on friday/saturday nights and the RA threatened to write her up.
This is not an example of somebody who was prevented from talking about being abused. I'm honestly not sure what to make of it. If the place had segregated bathrooms why were men in there at all? Literally anyone regularly hanging around in a shared bathroom for hours on end is a bit rude, but it's hard to understand why an RA would have threatened to write up your friend. Write her up for what exactly?
> Rape/abuse rates are around 300x higher (depending on the numbers you use) for trans/non-binary people than women yet nobody cares
Ignoring the fact that many trans/non-binary people are also women, I don't believe that nobody cares. Don't you? I also know that research is still being done on the subject. Schools can be weird though, so I'd be interested in examples of tenured professors who were fired for trying to research the subject if you have any.
Maybe most men don't want to see other men naked? Does this have to be any more complicated than that? It always struck me as really weird tbh.
Then don't look? We're all monkeys who are naked under all these clothes. Just focus on yourself and do your business and maybe do a little personal work if you're traumatized by exposed body parts.
"do a little personal work if you're traumatized by exposed body parts."
Ever considered that folks who maybe aren't so into it were, in fact, traumatized by someone with their exposed body parts?
Have you? As in, ever considered how that doesn't actually matter? That the bad thing does not imply or justify this response?
Their victimhood, whatever form it happened to take, is not everyone else's problem such that a shared space has to cater to their problem.
How brutal and uncaring right? I think this kind of argument comes from a position of equating this consideration with wheel chair ramps and navigation aids for the blind, which are good and proper things. But this is not like that.
Anyone can have a psychological problem with literally anything. For everyone that was harmed by sex, someone else was harmed by cars or simple non sex violence or not harmed by anyone at all but they simply have a problem of their own like autism etc. I was beat up and made to feel powerless a couple times as a kid. Therefor gyms should not allow there to be more than one other person around me, no groups of 3 or more, way too threatening. And no one else can be larger or stronger than me. Obviously absurd. But I was actually at other people's mercy and totally powerless while other people violated my body.
But ok let's grant that sex is somehow a special problem that is worth giving special treatment even if we can't give everyone else with all the other infinite problems the same consideration, ... wait that is pretty hard to grant even just for the sake of argument just so we can move on to the next argument. It doesn't hold water and won't go away... F all the people with any other problem that just doesn't happen to stem from sex and move on ... because we're good considerate people?
Anyway the next and more important question is, ever considered that that trauma only happened in the first place because of a society that treats this topic in such a warped way? Instead of a frank, adult, conscious, lack-of-all-charge way?
No, this is just not a valid argument. And it's not from not caring about the victim. It's that it doesn't even help the victim or have anything to do with them or what happened to them or the process of dealing with it after.
Easy there cowboy, this isn't a 'safe space' argument, this is an argument for preference. You are more than welcome to gallivant around while publicly nude, while others are more than welcome to prefer not to. That's really the crux of it.
Yes, pass on seeing or being seen
> Maybe most men don't want to see other men naked?
Don't look then? No one is forcing you to look anywhere else than what you're doing. It always struck me as strange that people seem disgusted/disturbed/annoyed by something yet they're unable to look away and focus on their own business instead.
Tell that to old Joe Dangly-sac using the hand air dryer to blow the water off his old sagging balls.
I walked in on that the first time I ever used a public gym and that shit is seared into my memory--that was enough to turn me off of the locker room for some time and you know what, I don't miss it.
More often than not, pub[l]ic nudity is innocuous, nothing remarkable, but there will always be the outlier that spoils the rest of the bunch by doing weird shit with their genitals, be it drying them where theyre not supposed to be dried (see above), touching themselves in a sexual manner (seen it in a few different locker rooms, and of course the old naked men who are more than friendly to younger, naked men.
I for one say good riddance to the nude locker room. Fuck that shit.
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I'd like to be the first one to add a comment in agreement.
Having had a high number of uncomfortable experiences in nude-allowed locker rooms, it's nice to know there are spots where I don't need to be subjected to it if I prefer not to.
As a foreign national living in US. It amazes me that public urination could land you in jail (specifically indecent exposure) however being naked in a locker room is supposed to be considered normal.
How is this even comparable?
In both cases other people saw you naked. That’s the point of comparison.
They both involve nudity in front of the opposite sex (and by extension, children of the opposite sex). I really don't want nudity to become something that's normalized in more places then it needs to be
I (male child) was breastfed (female mother). Still haven’t recovered from that.
I think the problem with public urination is more that you're pissing on the street than that you're naked. The nudity is, at most, a side concern.
One space is public and one is private. One space is optional/avoidable and one isn't. How could this be easier to understand?
When it specifically says it’s a public locker room how is it private? If other people can see you then is it really private?