Do communal changing rooms bother you?

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Communual changing rooms in gyms and stores - WHY, WHY, WHY? I hate, exposing my body to a group of strangers or worse, in the case of my gym, co- workers! - does anyone else feel this way or am I just repressed????

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000

Answers

I hate them in shops, because they're always at real teeny-bopper places like TopShop, and they're full of 14 year olds with little boys' bodies, and I feel like a lumbering 25 year old whale. I resent having to put myself through that when the shop is hoping I'm going to spend money there. The clothes may be great, but if I can't have a cubicle I'm heading elsewhere.

They don't bother me in the gym though. My gym is a virtual nudist colony, with women all over the place in a state of undress. I can't quite stand there buck naked, blow-drying my hair and chatting to a friend, but I do feel OK with drying off in public. I think gyms are a bit more OK because everybody is in the same boat there. If you ever feel you've got the droopiest boobs or the biggest bum in the world you should get along to your local gym's changing room, because there'll always be another woman with more of the same. It's nice to be reminded that you're normal, and not the only lardy one in a world of perfect-looking freaks.

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000


I have long felt that communal showers in highschool gym change rooms are abhorrent. What right do we have to force children to undress and parade around naked in front of their peers and teachers? It seems to me that forcing someone to undress in front of people is a violation of their basic human rights.

In the high school I attended the male change room had a communal shower, while the female's had shower stalls. What's up with that?

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000


Getting your period is what's up with that, Dave. Ever seen Carrie? At my high school, the boys had a communal shower, and the girls had a choice of communal shower or stalls. Hardly anyone used the stalls. (Hardly anyone showered at all, for that matter.) I used the communal ones because for some reason it was MORE embarrassing to use the stalls.

Actually, I have always wondered why it's assumed that men want to stand around and watch each other pee, while girls need privacy (or as much privacy as you get in a bathroom stall) to do their business. I've known more than one guy who wouldn't use a public restroom if he could avoid it.

That said, I've never really minded communal dressing/shower areas. I haven't appeared outdoors or in public in a bathing suit in about ten years, but for some reason I have no particular problem taking off my clothes in front of total strangers.

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000


I've never changed in a communal changing room - in high school (yes, this is gross) I didn't shower after gym class. Of course, I never did work up much of a sweat in gym class, if I could help it.

What *did* scar me as far as communal things are concerned is when I was in 7th grade and during gym class they lined up all the girls in my class and weighed each and every one of us right there in the open. The nurse who was doing the weighing then yelled our weight to the gym teacher, who wrote it down. You'd better believe the fattest girl in the class was teased for years about that.

Talk about cruel.

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000


I don't mind communal changing rooms in gyms. We're all women, we all have more or less lumpy/saggy/droopy bodies, there's nothing to be ashamed of.

In high school, changing for gym class was only a worry when I was -- eek! -- on my period. I used to be deathly afraid of someone seeing the pad in my undies. I'd change my clothes in a toilet stall surreptitiously just so nobody would know.

Now, communal changing rooms in clothing stores, that's just wrong. I've never actually encountered it, but I think I'd refuse to try on clothes in such a place. I mean, come on, it's bad enough when you look in the mirror and realize that the size 12 just isn't going to cut it, that you're bulging in the wrong places and pinching in the others, and that the whole ensemble makes you look like a baby hippo. To have someone else witness this trauma? Too much.

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000



no one EVER took showers after gym class at my high school. i literally never heard that shower running.

however, i am not at all bothered by communal changing rooms, or even by communal showers. i took swimming and jujitsu lessons at the local YMCA for six or seven years when i was a kid, and i got over that anxiety pretty fast.

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000


My high school classmates were all pretty squeamish about the gym showers, and only the football players really ran around naked in the locker room. By the time I graduated college I was pretty comfortable with communal male nudity -- every gym I've ever belonged to has open locker rooms, and it's almost improper in most of them to walk to the shower with anything but a towel.

What freaks me out is the continual threat of unisex bathrooms (Beth, I almost said co-ed in a non-ironic way). Ally MacBeal worries me most for the reasone that I'm afraid it might make the idea seem more acceptable to people. I can't imagine trying to, shall we say, deal with gas in a forum where my female coworkers could hear it. Don't know why that freaks me out so much, but I'd rather be dragged behind a train from Tucson to Boston, naked, in a rain storm. Anyone else?

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000


Tom I completely agree - It's bad enough in same sex loos. The other day i was washing my hands in the ladies loo at work when a collegue walked into a cubicle, shut the door, sat down and passed gas really loudly . This was followed by a little mortified 'oh!' - needless to say I couldn't get out of there fast enough - I didn't want to add to her embarrasment by being there. I know it's natural and all but I ,myself, strategically plan these things so that theres no one about when i do anything more complicated than a wee!! : )

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000

I, frankly, would rather share a washroom with females, given a choice, so unisex doesn't bother me at all. In fact, we have a unisex washroom here at work! We're so progressive.


re: "i literally never heard that shower running."

We were forced to take showers (or be given a failing grade).

Of course the females weren't required to shower...


I've never felt truly comfortable in communal change rooms. I tell myself it's silly, but I just do not feel comfortable.

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000


Tom: that's okay, I don't mind if you say "co-ed" to mean "used by both men and women." I do mind if you say "co-ed" to mean "hot little female student whose presence on this campus is still so remarkable that she gets her own special designation, and boy are we glad to have her here at this fine institution so we can leer at her."

I know, I know, these rules are hard to remember. I'm such a bitch.

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000



Now the "co-ed" prohibition makes sense! You know, I don't even carry the secondary "woman student" meaning in my head. I was wondering why the word was verboten. But ever since they nearly fired that federal official for saying "niggardly," (a word which (a) shares its descent from a Norse root meaning scanty or sparse with the more familiar and less controversial "knickers," (b)survives in a usable form in the related "niggling," and (c) has no offensive history whatsoever) I have been very willing to strike words from my active vocabulary without a fight. Soon I will have to speak entirely in literary references, which suits me just fine.

BTW, ever notice how few literary references there are to going to the bathroom? Except for the Bible, an alien could read the whole canon of Western Lit. up to Kerouac and not get even a hint about human excetory functions. Whew. Pulled that post back into line with the thread at the last moment.

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000


k for anyone who seen any of my other postings you'll remember that I live in good old Catholic Ireland. I went to a all girls grammar and communal changing rooms were the norm, but most of us managed to learn how to get in and out of clothes while remaining pretty much covered. As for the showers - never. They were installed to meet standards and the only time they were on was if it was some unfortunates birthday and she got pushed in fully clothed. Now, as for shop changing rooms - *sudder* . I heard topshop mentioned earlier, I have been known to queue for 15mins rather than try on something on front of people. And I always hate the 15 / 16 yr old girls that come in in their wonderbras and g-strings and run around the room half naked and giggle about how some unbelievably skimpy lyrca skirt makes their bony butt look big.

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000

I can live with communal dressing rooms most of the time. I'm not hugely thrilled about showing off myself to the rest of the crowd, but is everyone else REALLY sitting around scrutenizing (I know, spelled wrong, screw it!) your body, or are they busy checking their own most of the time? Then again I did dance for a lot of years and due to lack of time to get to or lack of room in the dressing room, I've seen a lot of girls just stripping down to _nothing_ but a pair of tights in the hallway at performances.

I did, however, mind when having my period and still using pads. I never want people to know when I'm actually on it (to the point of wearing white on day 2), and having to be SEEN with that pad down the drawers and leaks...ack!!!!

I'm also against co-ed restrooms for that very reason. I hate having anyone around (hearing my ripping open the package, taking three times as long to get out as usual, etc) when I'm on the rag, but people who don't even share in the experience? Get the hell out of here while I change this thing, I don't wanna hear your comments about it.

-- Anonymous, April 12, 2000


I don't mind communal showers and locker rooms in gyms. I don't walk through the locker room nekkid, but changing clothes when other women are around doesn't bother me. I had communal showers/locker rooms all through high school and college.

But co-ed bathrooms?!? At the OFFICE?!? I don't care what "Ally McBeal" shows us on Monday nights. I do NOT want my male co-workers listening in on me when I'm changing my tampon. (A "one-person-at-a- time" bathroom used by males and females - like on airplanes - doesn't bother me, though. As long as there's a good lock.)

-- Anonymous, April 12, 2000

I nearly had hysterics when I had to use communal showers in junior high. But everything is horrible at that age, anyway.

Now at age 45 I don't care at all. I sometimes wonder if I'm offending women at the gym at work when I stand naked in front of hte mirror to comb my hair, while some of them always go around wrapped in towels. It's just faster for me to not bother.

I feel slightly shy at the work gym because I have a tattoo on my back and now women who shower at the same time I do know about it - otherwise, I wouldn't particularly announce it.

-- Anonymous, April 12, 2000



I used to hate changing for gym class in middle school. It was this weird and awkward ritual. All of us girls would somehow manage to put out gym t-shits on top of our regular shirts, and pull the regular shirt out of the neck (or sleeve) once the gym shirt was in place. Then, because the gym shirts were down to our knees, we'd yank off our pants and slide the shorts on without exposing a thing. And, natually, we would go through this routine in thirty seconds flat, without ever looking one another in the face. A few girls snuck off to the bathroom stalls to change, and we always sneered at them. As if we were so much better. hah.

And no showering. It just wasn't required, either in middle or high school. In fact, the stalls were used as storage space for extra desks and water coolers. hmm.

The girls who play sports in high school loosen up a lot, I've noticed. We have no problem walking around the locker room in underwear or whatever. To be honest, I feel totally comfortable being half-naked in front of people now. Well, girls, anyway. I'll change in front of close male friends, but I dunno about relative strangers.

(My, my, how liberated I've become since leaving Catholic school in sixth grade.)

Next year will be interested. At some colleges, not only are the floors coed, but the *bathrooms* are, as well. Going to the bathroom and showering with both sexes might be a little weird.

I wonder if that will increase sexual activity because of the intimacy, or if constantly viewing each others' bathroom habits will turn us off completely.

Maybe some things *are* best left behind closed doors.

(flightless)

-- Anonymous, April 12, 2000


I always felt wierd about changing in my locker room in middle school and high school, but that's because I Was the scrawny nerdy kid that got beat up all the time. No one ever use dthe showers either, although the girls always got let out of class ten minutes early so they could do their hair.

FUnny thing is, at the same time I was in a professional theater company and we just used one big room for changing, both men and women, and no one cared. I mean, some folks may have gone down to the bathrooms or something to change for all I know, but I didn't, and I can rember standing next to Hillary Justice and Tom Scott getting changed.

As far as coed bathrooms go, I am all for them. I've always thought we have too many artifical male/female distinctions. I have to use women's bathrooms all the time anyway because I was dating a woman at an all- girl's school. The thing that bothered me about that was that I would have to knock on teh door and ask for permission to enter the bathroom, which was just humiliating.

-- Anonymous, April 12, 2000


Whatever hangups I once had are long gone. When I was in middle school, I hating the idea of sharing a bathroom with the other girls, let alone boys, and showering with others was out of the question. At some point though, I started going to the gym, swimming regularly (and in a competition suit, there's just not much mystery), and have never looked back. There was only so much embarrassment I could feel before I realized I was being silly.

I used coed bathrooms in college, so yeah, I showered in the same room where men were using the toilet and vice versa, changed my tampon while guys were brushing their teeth, and all the rest. People on my floor weren't embarrassed about it, nor were they jumping each others' bones like crazed weasels (in fact, I don't think there was any intra-floor dating). I prefer private changing rooms to communal ones, but I won't wait for one if the other is free. No one is looking at me anyway; they're all staring in the mirror wondering, "When did my butt get so big?"

Practice hardens you to anything, as far I can tell. It took me four years of regular public speaking before I stopped puking, but now I don't even get sweaty palms. It took much less time for me to stop caring about being naked or nearly so in front of other people. Most people are far more worried about what I'm thinking than how I look. To the extent I notice anything anymore, I'm always reminded of how many different types of bodies there are in the world.

I think that times are changing though. When I carry my friends' three year old, and he's uncomfortable, he'll say loudly, "You have to hold me differently, you're hurting my penis!" And he has bathroom buddies of both sexes (they go to the bathroom in pairs for some reason). I can't imagine he's going to feel uncomfortable in a communal shower in high school.

-- Anonymous, April 12, 2000


i've never had to use them, but the thought of coed restrooms doesn't really bother me. the efficiency appeals to me, i guess. then again, i have no shame when it comes to necessary noisy bodily functions in public restrooms, so i guess i'm just a freak.

-- Anonymous, April 12, 2000

At the gym -- I don't care about the communal changing. We're all there to work out and sweat so it doesn't really bother me. I don't remember who said it before, but I would not change in a store where I had to stand around with a bunch of twinks. I can barely stand hearing them talk in the next dressing room. Ugh.

Unisex bathrooms --I tend to think it's a little on the weird side. I tend to think we don't really need share EVERYTHING with the people we work with. When my brother was a freshman in college several years ago at a small private college -- his DORM had unisex bathrooms and showers. I thought that was completely ridiculous. I thought it was silly to go ahead and make an already sexually charged situation more so. I thought that was weird. Guess I do have some victorian ideas. heh

-- Anonymous, April 13, 2000


Kind of related ... does anybody else get really pissed off at changing room cubicles without mirrors, forcing you to parade into the shop to check yourself out? If I'm trying to decide whether my bum looks big in a pair of trousers I'd really rather not do it in front of an audience.

-- Anonymous, April 13, 2000

We had co-ed bathrooms in the dorm because it was a co-ed floor (the first time the school had done that! big social experiment of 1973!) It was okay, but there were stalls and the showers had curtains. I was and am very shy about bathroom things in general and it's no easier for me to function with a woman is there than a man. I wouldn't like co-ed bathrooms at work, but then I sometimes go out of my way to use a single bathroom down on another floor, because I hate using the communal ladies' room here.

-- Anonymous, April 13, 2000

where are these colleges with coed bathrooms?

-- Anonymous, July 04, 2001

I'm very against communal changing rooms. Even if nobody is checking me out, in my mind they are and they're snickering at my style and my body. Every time.

My mom is a fan of the buy-and-try-on-at-home (with its corollary, take-back-if-it-doesn't-fit) method.

As for co-ed bathrooms and showers in a college situation, I couldn't. I mean, I'm really not all about being naked and in a small enclosed space into which it's perfectly appropriate and not out of the ordinary for men to walk. That's paranoid of me, but I can't help it.

Co-ed toilets, pih. I don't have a problem with that. I mean, it'd be weird sometimes, but I imagine I'd get used to it. And I've used men's rooms before, when visiting friends in boys' dorms.

-- Anonymous, July 04, 2001


You really do get used to the coed bathroom thing in college. The first time I came out of the shower with a towel on and ran into my male resident advisor (who was terribly cute) I think I swallowed hard, but it got so you didn't notice it anymore. There were several shower stalls with doors or curtains, several bathroom stalls, and usually a stall with a tub in it too. No one hung out in the bathrooms - most people did hairdrying etc in their own rooms - and the only sexual kind of thing that went on was couples taking baths or showers together, but as far as I can remember it wasn't ever couples who lived on the same floor.

As a side note, during parents, reunion, and graduation weeks parents would often stay in the dorm rooms instead of a hotel, and they never failed to label one of the bathrooms on the floor Men and the other Women. Which was really irritating if your bathroom got assigned to the opposite sex. We used to just ignore the signs.

-- Anonymous, July 05, 2001


Tom Dean

You're so wrong about a lack of references to lavatorial functions in Western literature. I think it's in Plato's 'Phaedrus' that Socrates envisages a formula which could make a person 'go to stool.' In 'Gulliver's Travels' Gulliver puts out a fire in Lilliput by urinating onto it. In Sade's 'Les Cent Vingt Jours de Sodome' there's plenty of defecating, though admittedly this is to an erotic end rather than just because they need to go. Proust, who has such a delicate sensibility, alludes to a patrician lady who has fallen on hard times and become a lavatory attendant in his 'A la Recherche de Temps Perdu.' Most famously of all, Leopold Bloom takes a no-holds- barred, in-glorious-technicolour dump in 'Ulysses.' This is actually presaged less famously in 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' when the young Stephen spies the brim of Uncle Charles's hat as he sits in the outhouse; also in 'Portrait,' if this counts, when Stephen is having a discussion on the steps of the library, somebody farts.

N S

-- Anonymous, July 23, 2001


So what's the title of your thesis?

-- Anonymous, July 23, 2001

Geez, I'm glad I didn't claim there was a lack of forcible sodomy in Western Lit.

-- Anonymous, July 23, 2001

I don't think anyone is paranoid for not wanting to share a shower room / bathroom with male students. I could barely believe that this happens. Personally I couldn't stand having a shower when I was at school. We had a PE teacher who would tap us on the shoulder, supposedly to count us, as we got into the showers. But apart from being seen (and tapped) naked, I found it embarrassing having to see other people naked. I would have one of the girls in my PE class in front of me, and I would have to see her buttocks as she scampered into the showers, then chat to her later in the day as if nothing had happened. Showing your naked body to someone is very intimate, especially for a girl, and people (including teenagers at school) should have some kind of choice about it.

Something else from my school days - I know it was a long time ago, and I know it was for my own good, but am I really the only one who felt upset about having to strip for my school medical? I felt so embarrassed standing there naked in a room with a member of staff who had all her clothes on. I felt like a model for a life class must feel. As for all the poking and prodding that went on - don't talk to me about it. I don't know how boys feel, but for a girl this kind of thing is really upsetting at that age and I think they ought to have some sort of choice in the matter.

-- Anonymous, July 25, 2001


Well, I for one, never felt all that oppressed by having to share a bathroom with male students, but hey, maybe I'm just weird.

(Psst- don't ever go to a swimming pool in Germany- your head might pop. Buttocks abound.)

-- Anonymous, July 25, 2001


it doesn't bother me. I don't mind being in a room full of half- dressed people. Actually I kinda like seeing a range of bodies and such, so I'm better with gyms, public pools, and big department stores. the topshop issue I do identify with --when there's NOT a range, when everyone but you is twelve, and you're well on the other side of puberty. that's kind of tiresome even when you're all clothed, though. really it's that the clothing in those palces is sized so weird thaht I am suddenly a large, while a pre-teen next to me is a medium or that mythical "size 0." As for co-ed, it depends on the vibe. I lived in a place that had communal, co-ed showers. And i have to say, it was hard to feel intimidated by someone when you've seen'em in the shower. usually it was morning and everyone was too bleary to focus beyond your own bits anyway. (you had the option to make them same-sex if you were uncomfortable with co-ed, and in off hours you could request privacy) When I've been in a turkish bath (all female), there was a littl eboy who was the son of one of the attendants. He would help out around the entryway (he didn't run about in the back), but i'm sure he saw his share of naked and near-naked ladies.. and I bet he had a healthier and more realistic idea of women's bodies than a boy who's only seen nudity in magazines!

-- Anonymous, July 25, 2001

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