Balls Out

Locker Room Insecurity is Destroying Western Civilization

My old man likes to wax nostalgic about his high school sports days back in the 1970’s. His favorite memory is sitting in the shower vault after a basketball game with his teammates sitting by the wall, stark naked, as one of them would pretend to have a microphone and interview them regarding the game. It was a quick celebration before heading home if it was a school night, or a party on the weekend. It gave an opportunity to cool off, process, and build rapport.

Ancients like me will likely remember the showers in High Schools as either having a row of shower spouts along the walls with no barrier between them, or the long poles in the middle, also giving no privacy. The floors would have slippery shower tiles and lines of rust running up the metal poles. The same design that used to spray cattle was considered just fine for the boys. After all, it’s not like your bodies are a mystery. No need to be shy, everyone has the same equipment. You want some privacy? Why? What’s the problem?

Get in you p****

For my old man, none of this was weird, and none of them gave it a second thought. There was a comfort in nakedness with his friends that was the same as being clothed. Male comradery and rites of passage quickly destroyed any sense of shyness, and one’s identity became simply “one of the guys”.

I attended the same High School in the 90’s, along with the same showers that now showed their age. By this time locker room culture was transforming. Most of the guys would go home to shower after home football games, with everyone meeting up later after they cleaned up. This wasn’t to say it was always successfully avoided. During away games the coaches told us they would not let us stink up the bus on the ride home and direct us to the shower. Some walked in like it was nothing, while some were deeply insecure. After a few games, everyone got used to it, though many still didn’t like it. Others started chatting it up in the shower like it was no biggie, just like during the days my old man went to school.

There were downsides too. Locker room hazing was unfortunately still a thing, and some kids were victims of vicious bullying. Without the oversight of decent adults, young boys can be incredibly cruel to the weak, and unfortunately many adult men would prefer to look the other way than deal with the issue.

Afterwards, I was blessed to go to college where the closest recreation center was a run-down dive. It gave the same run-down but functional utilitarianism and nostalgic smell of musty air and sweat that made me feel at home. To this day, even with the current fancy-pants gym with all the amenities I go to, nothing beat that feeling. They also had the old school cattle showers like my high school.

While I never played on a college team, I was a participant in the intramural Underwater Hockey club.

It’s real, and it’s awesome

It was mostly students, but there were older men in the club too, including an Eastern European who was as muscular and hairy as a brown bear constantly telling jokes that got lost in translation due to them being dependent on Russian puns. After the sessions, I saw two types form, those who just let it all hang out and made typical locker-room banter, and those who sheepishly changed out of the spotlight and left. The shift in culture was clear.

After I left college and joined a sports club in a small city, I witnessed a lot of the same dynamic. A lot of the young men would shower elsewhere, leaving the locker room as fast as possible, and the older men took their time. I played racquetball with men usually 10-20 years my senior who played in the club for a decade and had long-lasting friendships. The locker room culture was just like old times.

As I aged, I noticed the men in the locker room aged as well. When I reached my thirties, there were very few men younger than me, and most of the younger gym goers would grab their workout bags and leave without showering. As I’ve hit my forties it’s just become more pronounced.

Some, but not all of this change likely stems from younger people having less free time. Expectations of male effort into child-rearing has increased rapidly, not an entirely bad thing, but it makes less time to just shoot the breeze with your buds in the gym when your kid needs to go to a soccer meet. The older guys, on the other hand, as a comic Dmitry and Drunk Wisconsin brought to my attention…

You knew what you were getting into when you opened this.

As one gets older, free time tends to increase, and you get a mass of guys with time on their hands and less care for propriety. The old men go not give a shit. I mean, next level not giving a shit. The Oatmeal comic, if anything, understates it. They’ll sprawl out on the dry sauna like it’s nothing and have long conversations naked in the middle of the aisle. This generational clash is the result of several things. They lived in a time that was more comfortable with male nakedness and have time to relax because the kids are grown up and family obligations are less time-consuming. They’ve also built strong, long-lasting friendships, and are simply too old to care about image.

One can understand some having time constraints, but that’s not the whole picture. Why the awkwardness? Supposedly, this is the most sexually open generation that has ever existed, so what’s going on? One reasonable fear, locker room hazing, has gone largely to the wayside. One can’t argue that the disintegration of locker room culture is due to nefarious evil masterminds conniving behind closed doors. It’s yet another male space that has disintegrated in the last generation without any direct top-down pressure, along with staples like the old Elk and Moose clubs.

There have been many subtle changes in the last decades, specifically the denigration of male spaces and the push to make everything co-ed. One can’t push back against nature too much though, and most of the time groups naturally separate into male and female cliques. Co-ed groups of singles have always been chaotic, and modernity has not softened this. There’s also the rapid ascent of online competitive culture, especially among men. Where once you had a group of guys going to the gym to play basketball or hitting the tennis courts, a larger swath of adult men are opting to play deathmatch games online. The gym isn’t a place to socialize anymore, but just an avenue to get your workout in and get out.

The fathers of previous generations also did a poor job inoculating the young boys into the world of men. Many never had the chance to interact and prove themselves to strong elders, leaving them bereft of any rite of passage. Also gone is the hard farm and industrial labor of previous generations that proved oneself among the elders. While sports fill this gap to a certain extent, there is never a time when a boy feels he entered the world of men.

Then there’s the elephant in the room regarding the gay question. Gay rights took off in the 1990s, and with it the fear of appearing gay. While gays were always known to exist, they were out of sight and out of mind. You didn’t have to worry whether the guy standing in the adjacent shower wanted his dick in you, and there was no possibility that a glance at the wrong time would make someone suspicious of your sexual preferences. While nakedness with one’s male peers was once asexual, the constant presence of homosexual propaganda implicitly sexualized many male spaces to disastrous effect. Hence why the “no homo” disclaimer so common. With such externalities to ruminate over, the discomfort is no wonder.

Like countless other aspects of culture once taken for granted but now receding, there’s no easy solution to recreate the old locker room spaces. What was once in the air we breathed has been choked out. Technocratic solutions won’t fill this gap and asking your bud if he wants to lift weights, then shower off afterwards, isn’t going to go well.

But why is this important? Why should we care if guys just shower at home? It’s the same reason the descent of other male spaces is a tragedy. These sorts of “third places” that exist outside the bounds of the home and work cause all sorts of downstream effects that are conducive to a healthy society. Their decline leaves everyone knowing something is missing, but unable to pinpoint what. It also shows that some things that seem good on the surface, such as dads spending more time at home, is detrimental when there isn’t proper balance.

Finding a quick “solution” to these problems of modernity is a fool’s errand, as it’s impossible to create technocratic solutions to what was an organic way of living. Third places will not return through policy, but will stem naturally from more irrational, organic ways of being.

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