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."
If you would like to contact us, our email address is: podcast@awes.com
