I think the conclusion is right -- get over it -- but I think the following is a bad argument:
It is a particularly noxious expression of male privilege for a straight man to insist that he not be an object of desire while he sees no problem with passively enjoying a cheerleader's acrobatics or a female colleague's flattering blouse.
Women get single-sex locker rooms, in which they can assume that there aren't any men watching them while naked. A desire for privacy from people who might be sexually interested (or even sexually evaluating) when one is not dressed for public appearance isn't obviously wrongful. To put it another way, a straight man who enjoys looking at women in public but is uncomfortable with gay men in the shower with him is, I think, unreasonable, but he's not being inconsistent. To be inconsistent he'd have to be upset about gay men being able to look at him on the street.
(The argument for getting over it that I can see is that there's no other obvious way to organize locker rooms, and there is not, as far as I'm aware, any kind of common problem with gay men harassing straight men in locker rooms. If it's not about harassment, then I don't think there's much problem requiring people to give up a little modesty.)
I attended a debate between Charles Moskos (sociologist and author of Don't Ask, Don't Tell) and Sam Todes (gay philosopher, veteran, decent guy extraordinaire) on gays in the military, and Todes made precisely this point. Straight guys construct a lot of their identity around checking women out, but the prospect of being checked out is too horrible to contemplate.
(In actual fact, guys don't seem to care very much: Sam's teammates seem cool with it, and the military hasn't collapsed.)
(Both those guys are dead now. Life, man.)
I hear that even straight men sometimes glance inquiringly at the assorted equipage in locker rooms.
That's the thing. Guys check each other out all the time; it's really the role-reversal of being appraised as a sexual object that (in theory) freaks people out.
Regarding 1, how many straight men, or straight men who would be wigged out about changing in the same locker room as gay men, regard that locker room as a place where they can change safe from the peeping eyes of straight women? None? I think the answer is close to none, and that there is indeed something objectionable about a demand not to be subjected to the admiring gaze of one particular class of person.
I hear that old men sometimes continuously flaunt their assorted equipage in locker rooms.
7: with shocked delight, as I understand it.
This really depends on the showers. Do they have curtains or is it all starship trooper style.
True. For years the party line has been "oh, we don't look at you guys!" It's interesting and weird to watch this dissolving into "we do, but it's not a big deal." I think another point that should be made in the article* is that looking is an awfully low level offense that, in the given context, is vanishingly unlikely to lead to any actual, active advance.
And if they really don't want to be looked at, they can do what I did at camp and shower in their goddamn swim trunks. They'll look as stupid as I did, but nobody will see them nekked.
*and may be! Did I click through? No!
Women get single-sex locker rooms, in which they can assume that there aren't any men watching them while naked. A desire for privacy from people who might be sexually interested (or even sexually evaluating) when one is not dressed for public appearance isn't obviously wrongful.
Did I read this wrong or did lesbians just vanish from this discussion?
Not a straight man myself, but really? to 6. If we can include in the class of straight men teenage boys, wouldn't you think there would be at least some who would object to getting naked in front of an unselected group of women? I mean, not the firmly self-confident Unfogged commenters, but I thought that was the kind of experience that people sometimes found embarrassing or even (perhaps not physically) threatening.
Well, they certainly aren't using the blow dryer.
13: They did, they did, and I thought about while drafting the comment and then didn't have a neat way of addressing lesbians and forgot about it. I think the lesbians in locker-rooms issue has been dealt with by what I was suggesting was the real reasonableness issue for gay and straight men -- if no one's actually hassling anyone, then there's no need to worry all that much about modesty.
That's fair. I don't know why I was feeling picky about it.
15: You're right to be suspicious LB; in junior high the custom was for 90% of the class to not shower at the end of PE because guys looking was bad enough--girls and women would have been mortifying.
wouldn't you think there would be at least some who would object to getting naked in front of an unselected group of women?
I would be reluctant to change my clothes in front of a randomly selected group of women, but not because I thought they'd be ogling me with desire.
We never had a choice. And the drain was slow. And there was always some guy who just pissed on the shower floor. And that guy is now a mortician.
I thought something like 15 would come up, and the word in 19, "mortifying", is right. Mortification-inducing looking isn't what's at issue.
22: Who's to say that it isn't at issue at all?
For me, at least, the school locker room anxiety was development-related*. I'm not sure having girls around would've made a difference with that.
Heh, forgot to include the footnote about how I wish I had realized earlier the futility of waiting to grow hair on my chest.
Good god, imagine all the tiny little erections in a coed junior high locker room. How do gay kids manage?
Okay, throwing out something hostile to straight men (really, only to straight men who object to gay men in showers, which there really don't seem to be all that many of. The other players aren't making a fuss, this is a reporter trying to report on the possibility that someone's bothered by it. But under the assumption that there still are straight men who have an issue here, let me badmouth them.)
Is the issue a belief that men's sexuality includes a right? an uncontrollable need? to express sexual evaluations of anyone desirable in sight? Start with a man who catcalls/visibly leers at/otherwise hassles desirable women, and defends or at least internally explains his behavior by thinking that that's just how men are -- the need to express that kind of thing is sort of irrepressible. And this doesn't seem to me to be an implausible mental state for that kind of guy. If he thinks that's a general truth about Men (as opposed to Women, who aren't like that), then he would reasonably (or, consistently. This straw-jerk I'm setting up isn't exactly reasonable) also think that a gay man in a locker room would have an irrepressible urge to leer/harass, and would therefore think that gay men in the locker room would make it an unpleasant place.
This guy I'm hypothesizing is a jerk, and I don't think he's terribly common. But if there's someone still objecting to showering with gay men, what I've laid out seems like it might be the sort of thing they might be thinking.
There are suppressed premises there. This person might also think that being leered or catcalled at is actually complimentary; after all, it's an expression of a positive evaluation (so why are you getting so upset, laydeez?)—in which case, why would his being leered at make the locker room unpleasant?
So really you need someone who thinks something like:
(a) men irrepressibly leer and catcall and whatnot;
(b) gay men, being men, also leer and catcall;
(c) and they would do so in the locker room; and
(d) it is unpleasant to being on the receiving end of such behavior; someone who is leered at or catcalled can with justice object to it.
Of course if you really think (d) you ought to evaluate your commitment to (a) and wonder if you might be able to leer and catcall a little less, maybe.
I'm now imagining a field of little erections, like wildflowers or stalks of wheat, waving in a soft breeze.
I'm vain and insecure, but personally I've been pretty psyched and flattered when gay dudes have hit on me/checked me out. Except I guess for super old dudes at the Korean spa or whatever who clearly would be into anyone under 50, that just feels creepy and gross.
Just for Eggplant I have made some of them glossy and purplish, with thick heads.
It requires an assumption that being leered/etc. at would be unpleasant to Straw-Jerk, certainly. But I think the nearest real world approximations to Straw-Jerk would be ready to agree that women would find his presence in a communal shower with them unpleasant or threatening. He might not care how they felt, but he'd acknowledge that they wouldn't want him there.
36 in response to 29, and crossed with 30. To 30.last -- well, sure. That's why I'm calling this guy Straw-Jerk rather than Hypothetical Reasonable Justified Man.
I confess I'm not really sure what 28 and 36 are building toward, especially in light of 1.
28 and 36 aren't part of an argument consistent with 1 -- I'm changing my mind over the course of the thread.
1 came from a thought that I'd actually find a coed shower a serious adjustment -- I'd manage, but I wouldn't be delighted, and I wouldn't think a woman who seriously objected was unreasonable. Which left me thinking that objecting to a sexualized gaze in the shower wasn't prima facie unreasonable.
But then Smearcase brought up lesbians, and really I haven't got a problem with lesbians in the locker room at all and I'd think anyone who did was incredibly unreasonable. Which left me thinking that I was actually thinking it was reasonable to object to a sexualized gaze from men, specifically. Grasping desperately from something to justify that position that would leave me thinking of myself as inconsistent or sexist, I figured that the real issue at stake was the socialization of some men to believe that they were entitled to have terrible manners about expressing sexual desire (and presumably the belief of those same men that gay men generally would also have terrible manners in that regard). Which led me to 28 and 36.
All of that may be inconsistent or incoherent, but I'm running out the door now.
S/b "neither inconsistent nor sexist".
I think Rob HC has a well-phrased bit on keeping it to yourself when you're attracted to someone in a context where they're expecting professionality. I think the locker room is similar - lesbians don't make me uncomfortable in the locker room because on the whole, I assume they'll keep it professional. I'd be annoyed if a group of teenage girls were making judgmental comments about anyone's body (aside from the rudeness) because it would violate the fig leaf of professionality, even if attraction wasn't really a part of it.
If there was a place in enlightened topless Finland where I trusted a social norm that guys were going to keep it professional, I could probably shower in coed showers without much trouble.
Isn't there a similar code of conduct in nudist colonies? It's not always hard. (ZING.)
Isn't there a similar code of conduct in nudist colonies?
She asks, faux-innocently. Spill, Noodie Bootie.
Reed had (has?) coed showers. They were curtained. I'm pretty sure that a) people were generally chill about it and b) a lot of sex happened in them.
The linked article about how there's political empowerment in gay men and straight women making a show of ogling World Cup players seems much more Slatey:
unapologetic leering is also an announcement: Hey, we belong in the sports bar as much as straight men do, and we don't have to parrot typical bro behavior in order to claim a barstool. "Women who love soccer are so often asked by male fans to 'prove' that they belong," Jezebel's Erin Gloria Ryan wrote as the World Cup kicked off this summer. Some even feel pressured to downplay "their female-ness in contexts when it could be used against them," leaving the skirts and mascara at home. Calling out the sport's hotties is a way for fans to telegraph their rightful place in the fandom. And if straight men are forced to wade through a few slideshows of extremely attractive men when they're searching for the score? Everyone wins.
30(d) seems a bit incomplete. It's not always just unpleasant. The male, hetero leering is often frankly, and intentionally, threatening. So, Mr. Heterosexual Straw-Man* would maybe not object to then same-sex leer unless he felt physically threatened by the leerer. In other words, to object to the leer, he'd has to admit to himself that he might be physically overpowered by a gay man.
* Mr. Straw and his partner Miss Man were very disappointed in how their boy turned out.
39: 1 came from a thought that I'd actually find a coed shower a serious adjustment -- I'd manage, but I wouldn't be delighted, and I wouldn't think a woman who seriously objected was unreasonable. Which left me thinking that objecting to a sexualized gaze in the shower wasn't prima facie unreasonable.
In my experience, it's not a generically sexualized gaze that's the problem for many heterosexual men, it's a gaze from gay men, which might mean that the gazee is gay!
Every man I've talked to about this who expresses discomfort with being hit upon or even appreciated by gay men confesses that it's the butt-sex, between men, that disturbs them greatly. They explain, sometimes shamefacedly, that it's a visceral repudiation they have.
I think that this is beginning to change.
Women's locker rooms are more likely to have individual stalls. Boys and men often have big rooms with showers all around.
I'm pretty prudish and generally not comfortable being naked around people I don't know. At beaches there was usually a private changing stall, and I'm usually pretty quick to cover myself up in an open locker room. It's not because I think that lesbians are checking me out. I just don't like feeling exposed. (I'm sure that this is pathological.)
I don't think that I wold have made it to adulthood as a man. (Autocorrect decided to fill in maladroit when I was writing " made it". That seems like it would be a brilliant unconscious statement if autocorrect possessed consciousness.
I have never checked out anyone in a locker room, though I'm not exactly Sporty Spice and so it's more about the combination of not checking people out overmuch and not spending much time in locker rooms. (And the time I do spend in locker rooms is mostly spent saying, "No, HERE are your socks!" and "That's why I told you to use the bathroom BEFORE putting on your bathing suit!" and nothing more fun than that anyway.)
I remember being struck by ogged's comments about eyeing the residents who stayed with his wife and him and who did yoga in sports bras or whatever and had a similar conversation with a neighbor recently. When I was that age and even to some extent now since I went out in my pajamas and no bra just this morning, I sort of figured that oh well, I have a body and guys just have to deal with it. But now I feel a little guilty for times I apparently inspired impure thoughts while at the same time not feeling slut-shamed about it. I don't know if I can make this make sense, but it feels in some way connected to the locker room issue.
If you've already got your bathing suit on, just wait until you are in the pool.
46: I've always assumed that this sort if visceral reaction is predicated on some level of attraction that freaks people out.
49: They used to make us shower before goign in the pool. In that situation I showered ater putting on the bathingsuit, because it's so much more comfortable putting on a bathing suit when both the suit and the wearer are dry.
Can't remember ever being bothered by communal showering, or locker rooms. Must have been oblivious.
Ever see Europa, Europa? There the boy, a Jew on the run gets adopted by a German officer and sent to a Nazi military school for boys. All sorts of fears, first of having his circumcision give him away in the showers--it turns out they're so prudish they shower in trunks, so no problem, and later of being attracted to and found attractive in turn by a girl, herself thoroughly race-mad. Anticipating sex with her, he tries to see if he can stretch his skin into a simulacrum of uncircumcised appearance.
This seems to be a totally different issue not addressed by the article. With locker rooms, we're talking about two scenarios: 1) team/club changing room, and 2) gym changing room. With (1), the changing room is an extension of the workplace and standards of professionalism workplace harassment laws apply. It seems totally reasonable and expected that a gay teammate would and could refrain from openly oggling his teammates, just as I don't expect to be openly objectified by my male colleagues while in a seminar or cowriting a paper.
With (2), the people in the room are strangers and how does anyone know who is gay or not? Surreptitious checking out seems fine and might be done for any reason, e.g. curious straight men, gay men, foreigners from countries with different conceptions of privacy, etc. If the behavior is blatant enough to make a person uncomfortable, then the behavior is inappropriate anywhere. Women expect to be subtly checked out while working out in the gym, but don't expect blatant harassment, and I think locker rooms are comparable. If someone is staring at your balls and making lewd comments, you'd report it to management, much as a woman on a treadmill would if some dude were staring at her boobs and making lewd comments.
For coed locker rooms, I would be totally fine with that, but I grew up with coed nakedness among enlightened topless Scandinavians. Also, associating coed nakedness with the Lutheran church is a great way to desexify it.
associating coed nakedness with the Lutheran church is a great way to desexify it.
Who knew the Lutheran church was so sexually charged it needed to be desexified?
Sounds like someone hasn't read Luther's Table Talk.
I got a sketchy vibe from him when we reached the door and he invited me up to "look at his theses in the original."
There's a reason he ditched priestly celibacy.
"Vows are themselves a sin, so it's ok to break them. Ladeez."
Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong (sin boldly)
I remember being struck by ogged's comments about eyeing the residents
Did you at least wear a top hat and tails?!?
53 seems very sensible. I can't say the idea of being potentially ogled by gay men ever occurred to me as a thing to worry about even when I was peak being-ogled age/attractiveness. In my early 20s there was an obviously gay (but not actually 'out') guy in my karate class and it didn't occur to me, even then, that it might bother me.*
* I was much more creeped out by a woman in another martial arts class who used to stand way too close and then admonish me for being 'shy'. Twenty-one year old me was pretty damned confident around women. I wasn't shy, I was uncomfortable with inappropriate 'intimacy'.
Re: 62
Hah. It wasn't that sort of class. Very touchy feely tai-ch-y. I just stopped going.
I'm now imagining a field of little erections, like wildflowers or stalks of wheat, waving in a soft breeze.
"Consider the willies of the field..."
I wasn't shy, I was uncomfortable with inappropriate 'intimacy'.
Or, "Scottish" for short.
Heh. She was within the designated claymore-radius circle!
I think Rob HC has a well-phrased bit on keeping it to yourself when you're attracted to someone in a context where they're expecting professionality.
I had something well phrased? Do you remember what it was?
No! You're supposed to remember!
It was something along the lines that hitting on someone is fine when their expectations of the environment somehow grants consent. So it would be possible that flirting at work could possibly be okay, but it would take an awful lot of sensitivity to the specifics of the other person.
turn by a girl, herself thoroughly race-mad. Anticipating sex with her, he tries to see if he can stretch his skin into a simulacrum of uncircumcised appearance.
Doubtless it has come up in one of our endlessly delightful circumcision discussions that foreskin restoration is A Thing. So apparently you can do this. It's too bad the character didn't know a bunch of whiny gay men who toss the term "mutilation" around really casually.
Thank god the All-Amaryan Foreskin Man is here to save the day! Let's hope he can subvert the plans of that hook-nosed and long-fingernailed (??) Monster Mohel and the terrifying mutant Dr. Mutilator before it's too late! I can only assume that Aurora Ti^Hw^Hattington don't give a damn about any foreskin-lacking man, after all!
foreskin restoration is A Thing
Just snip a bit off of Iggy Pop and you're all set!
One of the links in 78 has exposed me to the neologism "intactivist".
Oh my god, 78 is, well, how did you come across that?
I prefer the more traditional "untactfulvist"
Wow, Foreskin Man has a lot more characters than last time I looked. And Monster Mohel's third in command is not unattractive.
"The Museum of Genital Integrity". I'm now picturing cautionary tales of genitals accepting bribes or cheating on the SAT.
Perhaps narrated by John Houseman in his Smith Barney shill days.
Just read the wiki on foreskin restoration. The character in the movie was on the right track, but didn't have anywhere near enough time.
Rams can shower in comfort. Michael Sam does not make final roster
Sam put together a solid preseason performance, coming up with 11 tackles and three sacks. In Thursday night's preseason finale against Miami, Sam finished his preseason work with a team-high six tackles. After the game, coach Jeff Fisher offered an endorsement of Sam's ability. "I believe he can play in this league," Fisher said,"but it's awkward in the locker room.
88: "Mike Sam cut"-- Headline in the Locker Room Observer.
Last month we took the kid to the annual Berkeley kite festival for some wide-eyed wonder and ended up stuck directly under the kite with the intactivist slogan. My kite skills are so lacking that I immediately got my string comprehensively wrapped around the intactivist kite and we ended up having to surgically separate them with a pocket knife.