Would you be comfortable sharing a dressing room with a gay person??

[Enginerd]

@Anaamika

I would be a little uncomfortable sharing locker rooms with men all the time, though, unless a lot of men (not all) were trained to behave a little better. I highly doubt anyone will be looking at me, but I’m sure the attractive women wouldn’t like it one bit. You might as well just call it the Boner Room in that case!

If there were some grand fiat and all of a sudden all locker rooms were made coed, chaos would ensue and “the boner room” would be a kind way to describe it. If we didn’t spend the first 20 years of our lives developing the exclusive association between nudity and sex, it would be completely different. I’ll quote a post I made in a thread about NBA player Jason Collins coming out here, since I think it’s pretty relevant.

@Enginerd

Nudity is only as sexualized as we make it. For most straight Americans, nudity and sexuality are linked because we segregate genders in almost every setting that involves nudity except sexual settings. Gay Americans, though, grow up in that same context, so same-sex nudity is associated with locker rooms as much as with sex. For a gay man, especially an athlete, showering in a group setting with other men doesn’t have to be anything more than a shower, because it’s something he’s done for years.

Locker rooms are public spaces, and sex is pretty much a private activity. Gay and straight men share locker rooms all the time, whether or not the straight guys know it, without issues. There’s no reason this couldn’t work for everyone, except for the question of how to start it. I mean, my high school theater had coed dressing rooms. If there’s a group of people less prepared to maturely handle semi-public nudity than high school students, I don’t know who it would be. If high school students (seriously, high school!) can make that work without problems, I’d say anybody can.

I don’t think Anaamika’s lower age limit of 25 is the answer, though, because I think the associations between sex and nudity are pretty well set by then - we’d have to start with younger kids and do it as a generational shift. But because we so strongly associate nudity with sex, and because we are so paranoid about sex and minors, it’ll be a long time before we try it.