All the amenities that my annual $240 gym fees pay for.
After 60 posts here is my anecdotal 2 cents:
Disclaimer: I think that American’s general attitude towards nudity is stupid, immature, unhealthy and counterproductive to mental health.
So, I very much enjoy experiencing a steam room and/or a sauna. I have been in spas where mixed gender nudity is the norm. I also go to my health club here in the States where the steam room and shower area is single sex.
Personally, I don’t care who sees my junk, male or female, but I am not going to parade it around. I’ll be discreet but I don’t care who sees me. I think mixed sex, non-sexual nudity is probably a healthy thing and I would never do anything to make a female in that situation feel uncomfortable.
So when I go into the shower area I wear a towel just so that I am not “parading.” I take two towels into the single sex steam room. One to sit on and one to cover my genitals. Why? Because I have had a couple of experiences where I was in a single sex steam room or sauna and some total asshole was sitting there nude with a raging boner. “Get control of yourself, you loser, or take it outside to the cold shower.”
Honestly, if I was in a mixed-gender steam room and the only people in there were males I would not bother to cover up because it feels better not to. So I can go to a more civilized environment and fell comfortable being nude along side anybody else, old, young, male, female, but here in America I am more comfortable covering myself in a singe-sex shower/steam room because there are people that are so mentally maladjusted that they can’t control themselves and don’t know how to behave. Believe me, I don’t think for a minute that those idiots with hard-ons had anything to do with me. They were just people with issues that I don’t want to deal with. So I take the two towels.
That’s got to be partly subsidized. $20 a month is dirt cheap. I suppose, however, that servicemen take care of all the duties involved and that there are no civilians.
What do you think they’re doing?
I go to a YMCA. My membership is valid at most YMCA’s across Canada. I’ve been to several and in all cases, in addition to the main communal shower there are a few stalls for those requiring more privacy. Some of those stalls are often also equipped with additional amenities for the disabled. Whereas most people change in the open by their lockers, there are also more private change stalls provided. There are many reasons why someone would prefer them:
A woman I met at the Y uses/used both the private changing and showering stalls because she’d had surgery and her fresh scars were rather alarming. She was tired of telling the “Tale of My New Knees.” A former client was also a regular wheelchair racquetball player and aikido student who used the more private facilities in gyms because he had a catheter. Explanatory note: I used to work at a place that sold convalescent supplies and surgical equipment. I was the one who handed him his new catheters, it wasn’t a bizarrely random TMI conversation. The primary YMCA facility I attend is also one of the most diverse. There are many different cultures and religions represented, some visitors were much more bashful than others about exposure.