What The Locker Room Knew
There is a generation of men who grew up using locker rooms in a particular way—entering, undressing without ceremony, showering communally, dressing again and leaving—who now report that younger men do not do this.
The younger men dress and undress in the individual cubicles that have become standard in newer facilities, or they enter the shower already wearing their trunks, or they arrange themselves so that the minimum of skin is visible for the minimum of time. A practice that was once unremarkable has become, within a generation, something that requires privacy.
I notice this not as a lament—people are entitled to manage their bodies as they choose—but as an observation about what changed, and what the change reveals. The locker room was one of the last remaining institutional spaces in Anglophone culture where the unclothed male body was ordinarily present without the presence requiring justification. The changing room after sport, the communal shower after training: these were zones where the usual regulatory anxiety seemed to suspend itself, where men could be physically present without their presence requiring a frame. The frame was provided by the activity—we are here because we played sport, we are showering because we played sport—and within that frame, the body was simply the body.
What is being installed in place of that frame is a different one: the modesty stall, the individual cubicle, the private space within the communal space. The name “modesty stall” is itself worth attending to. Modesty is the word the tradition reached for when it wanted to describe the appropriate management of the body’s visibility. The modesty stall brings the tradition’s vocabulary into the sports facility. The locker room had managed, for several decades, to keep that vocabulary out. The stall reinstates it.
I want to think about why the locker room achieved what it achieved, because it is not obvious. The Anglophone tradition was not friendly to the unclothed male body in public space. The Victorian regulation, the obscenity law, the painted underpants in the naturist magazine, Captain Wallis calling nudism “from the pit”—none of this suggests a culture in which the communal shower after football would be unremarkable. And yet it was, for several generations, unremarkable. Something about the sporting context allowed the body to be present in a way that the broader culture was simultaneously trying to prevent.
I begin to wonder whether what the locker room offered was exactly what I identified in an earlier essay about the gymnasium: a context so clearly defined, so bounded by a specific activity, that the body within it was understood to belong to that context rather than to the threatening wider space of public exposure. The naked man in the locker room was not making a statement about the body’s freedom. He was not joining a movement or challenging an institution. He was just getting changed after the game, and the game provided the frame, and the frame made the nakedness unremarkable because it was incidental to a purpose that everyone understood. The purpose made the body safe. And within that safety, something happened that the regulatory tradition had been trying to prevent: the male body became ordinary.
Men who grew up in that locker room culture seem, in my observation, to carry their bodies somewhat differently from men who did not. I noticed this without knowing precisely what I was noticing until I had seen enough examples for the pattern to become clear. The men who had been physically present with other male bodies in unremarkable, non-sexual contexts—changing rooms, communal showers, the school swimming pool—had a different relationship to being in a room with another person without their clothes. Not uniformly, and not dramatically. But there was a quality, in some of those men, of the body being simply there, as a matter of fact, that other men had not arrived at. The body had been ordinary before. In the right conditions, it could be ordinary again.
The distinction the brief draws between how male and female nudity was regulated is one I find genuinely useful, because it names something I had noticed without quite having the historical framework to account for it. The female body in this tradition was sexualised—framed as inherently provocative, requiring coverage to protect male sensibilities from the disturbance of encountering it. Male public nakedness acquired an association with impropriety, indecency and, under some circumstances, criminal suspicion—treated as inherently improper, requiring coverage to maintain public order. These are different regulatory logics producing different experiences.
The woman who internalises the sexualised framework is taught that her body is powerful and dangerous and that its power must be managed for the protection of others. There is something, however distorted, that acknowledges the body’s significance. The man who internalises the criminalised framework is taught that his body is inappropriate—not powerful, not dangerous exactly, but simply out of order in public space, incompatible with decorum, requiring management as a matter of propriety rather than as a matter of the body’s own significance. He is not taught that his body is too much. He is taught that his body, unclothed, is simply wrong.
I observed a version of this in the men who came to me. The women I knew who had had long experience of erotic work described clients who were often confused about the difference between desire and entitlement—men who had absorbed the message that female bodies were powerfully available for their response and had not adequately distinguished between the availability of the image and the availability of the person. This is the sexualised framework producing its distortions.
What I saw in the men who came to me was different. Not confusion about desire and entitlement—the men I worked with were, on the whole, quite specific about having come for a specific purpose under specific conditions, and their confusion was rarely about entitlement. It was about propriety. About whether what they were doing was appropriate. About whether the body they had brought into the room was the right kind of body to bring. The criminalised framework produced not men who felt entitled but men who felt apologetic. The propriety concern rather than the power concern. The worry not about what the body might do but about whether the body had any right to be present at all.
I notice I am making this distinction on the basis of limited and unrepresentative evidence. I worked only with men. I cannot speak to what female clients of male practitioners of comparable work experienced. I record the observation and hold it lightly.
What I can speak to more confidently is the locker room as a counter-example. The locker room worked—in the sense that it produced a zone of ordinary male nudity within a culture that was otherwise hostile to such zones—because it had the sporting frame to protect it. The institutional religion that opposed naturism could not easily oppose the changing room after a game, because the changing room was legible as instrumental: the men were naked because they were getting changed, not because they were making a claim. Captain Wallis was not going to call the Arsenal changing room “from the pit” because the Arsenal changing room was not organised nudism. It was not a movement. It was not challenging anything. It was men getting changed.
The naturist movement failed to gain the institutional acceptance that the locker room had always had, and I begin to wonder whether this is exactly because the naturist movement was a movement. It had a philosophy. It had a claim. It said: the body is good and the body should be present in this way, by choice, as an expression of a position about the body. That claim was what made it threatening. The changing room made no claim. The changing room was just where you changed. And the absence of the claim was what allowed the body to be ordinary within it.
This distinction—between the body that makes a claim and the body that simply is—seems to me to run underneath a great deal of what I have been observing across these essays. The tradition I have been tracing was comfortable with male bodies that were incidentally unclothed within contexts that gave the unclothedbess a function. The bath, the changing room, the medical examination, the life drawing class, the wrestling bout: in all of these, the body’s nakedness was subordinate to a purpose that framed and contained it. What the tradition could not accommodate was the body unclothed as a statement—as an expression of the body’s own authority over its own visibility.
The modesty stall is not, in this reading, simply an increase in individual comfort. It is a step away from the incidental male nudity that the locker room permitted and toward a new version of the old regulatory framework. The men who use the modesty stall are not—I assume—conscious of making a statement about bodily autonomy. They are simply doing what feels right to them, in the circumstances of their formation, in which the private management of the body’s visibility has become the default. But the aggregate effect of many individual choices to use the modesty stall is the gradual disappearance of the zone in which the male body was simply present without requiring justification.
The modesty stall undoubtedly has several histories. Privacy, architecture and changing expectations all played their part. What interests me is not why it appeared but what happens once it becomes ordinary.
I have been in locker rooms over the years and I have watched this change occurring in real time, across the span of my working life. The older men who changed without ceremony, who seemed simply not to notice that they were unclothed in a shared space, and the younger men who moved through the same space with a self-consciousness that was different in quality—not more modest exactly, not more embarrassed, but more aware of the body as something being managed, as something that required management. The self-awareness was not unpleasant to observe. But it was different from what had preceded it.
What the locker room at its most unremarkable offered was a body that had temporarily forgotten to be managed. Not because the men in it had resolved anything about their relationship to their own bodies, or overcome the tradition’s accumulated anxiety, or arrived at a philosophical position about bodily freedom. They had simply been playing sport, and the body was getting changed, and the changing was incidental, and in the incidentalness the body was simply there.
That seems to me to be the condition that is becoming harder to find. Not philosophical nudism, not erotic availability, not any kind of claim. Just the body, present in a space, not requiring permission for that presence, not apologising for it, not managing it against anyone else’s response.
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