This is episode 170 of the Baehr and Curadh Podcast. We are going to talk about being naked.
- The University of Washington’s locker rooms became gender-inclusive.
- Nudity is not permitted.
- UC Davis and some YMCA facilities are following suit.
- Some of the YMCA locker rooms are not gender-inclusive, but they still have banned nudity.
- Writer and academic Jacob Beckert wrote a piece about it in The Atlantic.
- "For more than a century," Beckert writes, "the cultural norm in the United States was that nudity was acceptable — at least within same-sex environments. Over the past couple of decades or so, that idea has largely dissolved."
- "Today, the only naked bodies that many Americans will likely ever see are their own, a partner's, or those on a screen," he writes. "Gone are our unvarnished points of physical comparison — the ordinary, unposed figures of other people."
- But is that a bad thing?
- In the past, men and boys would swim naked together, at the YMCA and in nature.
- The most salient point — about what a loss of nudity might do to body image — is also his most interesting one, and gay readers had plenty to say about it in a Reddit thread.
- "The skewed sense that you get about male anatomy if you only ever see naked bodies in porn is yet another stressor for young guys."
- Many of the gay men on the thread also talked about being terrified of public nudity in high school due to their fear of arousal.
- "I played football as a teen and we all showered after. It was embarrassing and I didn’t wanna get caught checking out my teammates, but I still did."
- Beckert wrote, "Rather than finding new ways to conceal ourselves, Americans need to reimagine the naked body — seeing it not as a natural fact of human life."
