I’m putting this in IMHO since opinions are what are really wanted.
At my gym, we have separate male and female locker rooms. There is a daycare as well which many members use. Ocassionally, some of the kids in the daycare have to go to the bathroom which are located, of course, in the locker rooms. I remember a couple of times when I and other grown men were changing into and out of gym clothes, another patron would walk his kid past us to the bathroom. So the kid basically has to see nude and semi-nude grown men.
My question is: how is this different than some pervert in the park flashing the kids? A six year old boy who sees a grown mans dick in the park is a victim of a sex crime but the kid who sees three naked guys putting on clothes while talking about how bad traffic is getting is somehow OK.
To me, the difference is that the park flasher is intentionally creating a sexual situation and the locker room guys are not. But if all that happens is that the kid sees a willy, how is it functionally and legally different? Is the parent who took the kid into the locker room breaking the law by exposing the boy to nudity? Are the guys changing clothes legally liable for perversion?
I suppose if I had to give a rough answer that probably won’t stand up to scrutiny, it’s not the seeing, it’s the showing. With the flasher in the park, the guy is deliberately trying to get the child’s attention with his nudity, giving the impression that nudity or sexuality is something confrontational and aggressive. In the gym, the kid happens to see adults going about their business, with the implied message that there are situations where nudity is normal, casual and inoffensive.
Actually a pretty good question because I have been in this situation myself. My son was in a soccer league at a local YMCA when he was about five years old. Although we are pretty open, I remember bringing him to change in the locker room and there were a few men showering and changing in the open. At the same time, there were little kids running in and out of the locker room without parental supervision right past these naked guys.
Once again, I hide very little from my son, so I played it off as though it was nothing. Of course, he goes with how I act so it was nothing to him. I am sure that if some guy in the park flashed his dick at my son, he would just realize this was a ‘bad man’ who was doing something very wrong.
I do not believe there are any laws being broken by allowing kids to see naked adults, as long it would be in a setting where nudity is allowed and children are also allowed, perhaps even a nudist colony, not that I am comparing the two.
I doubt anyone naked in a locker room/changing room would in any way be liable for being naked in such area, as this was the intended purpose.
Now if he were in the shower jerking off looking through a peep hole to the womens showers (a la Porkys), that would be a different story.
Except that a guy stopped his car on the road to take an emergency whiz, a family drove by and saw his wee-wee, and as I recall, the guy was arrested as a sex offender, required to register, etc. I don’t have a cite, but I think it may have been discussed around here somewhere. This was obviously not the same as Mr. Creepy in the park, but carried the same penalty. I would like to know how they got away with that if “intent” is the operative phrase.
In my state, the law says that being naked around a child is illegal if it is done “with intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person.” Indecent exposure in general also requires that the person is “reckless about whether another is present who will be offended or alarmed.”
I think Sublight gave a good description of the functional differences between the two scenarios.
Personally, I think that if we weren’t quite so prudish about nudity, it would do everyone a world of good. The crime of exposing someone to something visual, or of viewing something oneself, has always seemed a bit ridiculous to me, and the heavy implications thereof have seemed manufactured.
My mom would take me into the women’s locker room at the local athletic center when I was
2-3-4 years old. Bad idea for a precocious toddler (re: the first memory thread where mine was
at 10 months) as I still clearly remember seeing bushes and boobs. Don’t think it scarred me
for life tho. :eek:
I agree with what everyone is saying, and I don’t personally have a problem with the situation. I do think that it’s poor planning on the part of the daycare however, as I can see an overprotective parent freaking out and calling the cops, suing, etc. They don’t need the hassle - they should spend the money to put in a separate bathroom.
You think this is a rough answer, but IMO this is exactly right. I don’t see what’s wrong with teaching kids that nudity is perfectly OK under the right circumstances. We build up way too much about a few patches of skin and then there’s all these complexes. Trust me I know, I used to have one.
What about parents who take their opposite-sex child into a lockerroom with them, and then complain about people exposing themselves? A few years ago I saw some guy do that at a water park. The men’s changing consisted of benchs in front of rental lockers, lavatory fixtures (urinals, sinks, and a few toilet stalls) and a small open shower. He brought his 5/6 year old daughter in and got very upset that other men and boys (including me) were “exposing themselves” to his little girl. On my way out of the park I saw him talking to a manager complaining about “perverts”.
A “flasher” isn’t universally accepted as a very serious criminal, so there’s probably a lot of cultural influence to why we consider it so much worse than normal locker room nudity.
When my wife was going to High School in Korea, it was not all that uncommon for some pervert to walk onto the all-girl campus and flash all the students. Sometimes one would just run through the halls naked, or just walk around with his junk out, etc.
He would be chased off the campus, but the cops rarely got involved. And it was usually the same half dozen sickos doing it. The fact that they were allowed to be such habitual offenders shows the lack of any sort of concern among the administration or police.
As for the students, they would yell and scream or throw rocks at the guy. They never felt threatened (which is strange, but definitely says something there).
I can’t speak for the rest of the students, but my wife doesn’t seem too affected by any of it. Perhaps the impact such a thing has on an American child has much to do with the way the our grown-ups react to it.
At Dragoncon you find half-naked people, mostly women, walking around all the time. Mostly you see their butt. The major nudity generally doesn’t get started until after 8 pm., but in the dealer room on Friday morning I found myself walking behind a woman in a fairy outfit whose entire backside was concealed only by a 1/4" string thong.
Is she a child molester? I don’t think so. Everybody has a butt. Besides, hers looked great.
A while ago I was showering in the locker room and a dad brought in his two sons after swimming lessons or whatever. He just kind of dropped them off at the showers while he went on to prepare their clothes in the locker room. So it was nekkid me and two nekkid kids hangin’ out in the showers together. I was kind of nervous about it for about half a second until I saw how little the kids cared. They were not ashamed or bashful and as far as I could tell weren’t even aware that they were nekkid. At that moment, any of my apprehensiveness petered out - so to speak - and everything seemed normal and comfortable.
I realized that it is society that makes us aware that our weiners and other corresponding parts are bad and dirty or whatever.
As has been said, it is not the kids seeing it that is the problem. It is the pervert that wants to currupt the innocence of the children by spreading what he views (based on American society’s norms) as dirty and naughty to the clean minds of the kids.
I’d agree with that as a rough-and-ready answer. It’s the parent who is exposing the child to a known environment, it’s not the gym member who is foisting his junk on the kid.
I think it’s easy to discern the two situations by imagining a man, upon seeing the child, suddenly waving his wang at the kid. Clearly, there has been a discontinuous jump from “guy at the gym” to “perv waving his wang at a kid”. With that in mind, if merely seeing nudity is problematic, then it’s the parent, not the gym members who are at fault.
This is a common area of conversation between pagan parents, for just this reason. Some state laws are indeed written (unlike Texas, apparantly) that ANY nudity around a child is illegal. My understanding from a New York pagan lawyer is that this is the case in New York, where the largest clothing optional festival I attend is held. Technically, clothing optional festivals or nudist camps in those states should not allow children under the age of sexual consent to attend, at least within the clothing optional areas.
In reality, most do, and just tell parents that the kids have to be supervised at all times. People doing their volunteer work shift in the child care area are required to be clothed.
I have heard of cases, usually involving a custody dispute, where parents have lost custody of their children for taking them to such events, however. Didn’t a story make the news and the Pit not long ago about a woman attending a Discordian event - without her kids - and holding a dildo in a picture losing custody? I don’t remember the details.
I had a recent similar experience. My gym has separate locker rooms for kids and adults, but they closed the adult locker room for a couple weeks for renovations, and made us use the kid’s room. I used it once, but for me it was just too uncomfortable: who wants to get caught naked in the locker room as 30 kids from the Little League team mill around? I don’t know that the kids would have cared, but I didn’t like the idea, so I just drove home sweaty for those two weeks.
Is this a USA kind of thingy? We took our kids to Indonesia when they were 13 (girl child) and 15 (boy child). All of the women went topless all the time at the beach and pools (except me and girl child who wore speedos, cultural thing I guess), this included some elderly ladies walking down the road not on the beach. So one day Sindad and I are at the swim in bar and Sindaughter swims in and says “The pool is now bottomless as well as topless.” I say, “The ladies took off their bottoms?” and she calmly replied “Nope the guys took off their’s.” No biggie, she wasn’t horrified, we didn’t think “oh sexual harrassement!!”
Why is nudity such a big deal in the USA?
Why would boys in a men’s locker room be suprised to see naked men, same question with girls in a women’s locker room?
