Gym showers

How come gyms all seem to have private showers now (doors, curtains)? I actually know of one gym that recently remodeled and removed the group showers and put in partitions 😢

Love the group showers like back in HS where there was one big room with a bunch of shower heads. My favorite were the ones with a pole with 4-5 shower heads coming out of it. Great male bonding experience and made it easy to sneak a peek at the other guys.

Back when I was in high school (68-71) up until my senior year, we used to take swimming class in the nude... Weird but true, then they decided that we should wear swimming suits for my senior year. Of course you NEVER looked at another guy's parts back then, least you be labeled as a queer.....

Long long time ago

Elaine

We had one huge gym shower in high school. It must have had about 10 shower heads on each side, it was long and wide, terrazzo floors and yellow tile walls. It was a new gym and state of the art, the shower was really cool. It was the kind of open shower that gave me a hardon just thinking about it.

We had a 6 year high school, 7th - 12th. We started gym in 7th grade. I was gay, had no idea. I remember well worried about getting a hardon in the shower, never did, a couple of guys did. Ha, I still remember what many of the guys dicks looked like. I was not conspicuous, but how can you help not noticing them when you have about 20 guys at once in the shower and then the next bunch. The gym teachers also made sure everyone took a shower.

Ha, I would have liked to have dropped my soap several times! LOL! I've always has a fantasy about getting gang banged, not rough, but in a pleasant way. Holding my ankles, spread, a few hot cute guys fucking me in the shower, one after another!

How come gyms all seem to have private showers now (doors, curtains)? I actually know of one gym that recently remodeled and removed the group showers and put in partitions 😢

Love the group showers like back in HS where there was one big room with a bunch of shower heads. My favorite were the ones with a pole with 4-5 shower heads coming out of it. Great male bonding experience and made it easy to sneak a peek at the other guys.

The United States has been the victim of a moral pendulum for most of its existence. Right now, the pendulum is swinging towards the puritanical philosophy of our roots. This can be seen in the censorship of the media, the forced modesty of medical care and social aspects such as gym showers.

When I was young, I was too modest to enjoy social nudity. Now that I'm accepting of my body, many of the opportunities for social nudity dried up. I want the communal showers either the rows of shower heads along the wall or the showers on a central pedestal. My gym has shower stalls with 2 curtains, one for the wet area and a second for the area to towel off. Unnecessary.

Never had a problem with showers in HS ... unless you consider there was only about five minutes to shower, dry, get dressed and get to the next class ... this is from a person who loves long, hot showers ... at home, I usually ranthe water heater tank out of hot water ... my sister hated me.

We had large open shower rooms in both junior high and high school. It was always exciting to see what guys were in my gym class every year so I could look forward to seeing some new penises. I can still remember in great detail what many of them looked like.

We started showering for gym in 8th grade on through high school. Big open room with nozzles on the wall. College dorm had stalls, but showers at the college gym had the poles with nozzles radiating out, Current gym has stalls. I still play rec league ice hockey and they all have open gang showers in the lockerooms. 😃

We began dressing for gym class in 8th grade and the showers began at the same time. Open showers and shower heads along one wall. You got a towel when you came out of the showers. I was surprised to see most of the guys looked just like me. I have no idea what I had expected.

At a job I had a few years back, I would bicycle into work daily and would take a shower in the locker rooms attached to the company gym. There were a few stalls there and there were several open showers along the one wall. The stalls were usually occupied but the open showers were almost always free. So I usually ended up using the open showers, once in a while I'd see someone else, usually older using the open showers as well. Of course at that point, I didn't really care who saw me naked, I just wanted out of nasty sweaty bicycling shorts 😜

Occasionally, I'd get a dirty look from someone when I'd walk naked from the lockers to the showers, but its a freaking locker room people, you're going to see naked people. I wasn't about to get my clean towel are sweaty and dirty before I got in the shower to cover myself with.

I was a puny 7th grader at my first communal shower experience. I was white, under 5 ft. tall, around 100 lbs. and just a bit of a mushroom for a dick. Well, some of these guys were black & mexican and had flunked a grade or two. I saw man-sized cocks in that shower room and wondered if i'd ever catch up. Haven't passed them all but i did catch up eventually to most.

We had open showers in middle school and high school. I didn't think it was a big deal. Swimming in the nude (indoor pool) was common in the '70s and '80s. The gym I belong to has open showers and nobody seems to care one way or another. There is also a steam room in the locker room, where everyone sits around naked. Again, no big deal in my opinion.

There are a few ymca around here that still have the open showers. I can totally know what you mean by the sneak peeks. I enjoy walking around nude catching a hardon and letting it just go and not hide it. Even the ones with curtains they aren't that thick most are flimsy and hang open. So you can put on a show or even share a mutual rub out.

Making me want to go hit up the gym now.!!!

I started out going to the YMCA back when I was about 5 or 6 years old for swimming lessons. We had to change in and out of swim trunks in the locker room and showers just like everyone else. The showers were all a big open room between the pool area and the locker room. At that age my dad was in charge of taking me in to change. After a few weeks I did it by myself. Everyone got to see my little Vienna sausage. It never seemed to bother me even then.

In junior high and high school I always played sports, usually at least three different ones during the year. At both schools the showers and locker rooms were all open. At away games or swim meets every high school visitors’ locker room was the same open design, you shower with 50 of your closest friends. I don’t know what the big deal is; no one ever seemed to care. As long as you were ok with what you had down there it was actually kind of fun, towel snapping and all. Fortunately by that time my little Vienna sausage became a nice big kielbasa.

The showers in my college dorm were a big open room with a bunch of shower heads. Before you got to the showers there were a couple of troughs to piss into. You just stood there in the morning talking to the guy across from you about a Calculus test and both pissing into what looked like a long narrow bath tub. Most of the guys went over to the sinks after a shower and shaved standing there naked; I still get out of the shower and shave naked even years later.

I think there is a lot of political correctness involved in the private shower issue. You don’t want the fat kid with a tiny dick to have his feelings hurt. The problem is now half the high schools don’t even require PE classes and have cut some of the sports teams. That just means that we have even more fat kids now to feel bad about themselves. If those guys worked out they would have a better body image. Jds4med has a point that it is also likely fueled by puritanical ideas that the naked body is bad. I bet those Puritans all had small dicks, which would explain a lot.

One of the brand new gyms here in our town opted for open showers, in one room. Their other locations tend to have the same style. But one of their locations that was built in the mid 90's has stalled showers.

The Y I go to has one big open shower area. It was probably built around 10+ years ago.

I remember from middle school thru college all had nice big open shower rooms, but now everything seems to have private stalls...talk about taking time and reversing it to puritan times!

HS and college had big open shower rooms with shower heads around the walls.

Sadly I've never found the same in the gyms I've been a member of since. I have 2 gym memberships now and at one gym they even have cubicles with an outer door, then a changing/drying area with bench then a shower behind a curtain.

There are plenty of showers so a lot of members dress behind the door to their stall after showering, only emerging into the locker room when dressed/ mostly dressed 😢

Middle school and high school both had showers that were a single room with 6 shower heads on each wall. No doors or curtains and their were liquid soap dispensers on the walls, too. Same thing in college and nobody thought differently about anything either. When I went to basic training, it was the same thing, but there we didn't even have dividers between toilets.

Not all hope is lost! The University gym that I am a member of has a huge open showerroom. 40 showerheads. And it gets busy during peak times, or when a class lets out.

When I was in college (about 20 years ago) the gym locker room had basically two long walls of showers (the inner wall was broken up by the openings to the showers but the outer wall was solid showers). Back then it seemed like just the guys who'd been swimming used the showers (you could basically swim laps for unit of P.E. credit). Now I go to my local Y's. The one I usually go to has one wall of stalls with curtains (that only some of the guys close) and the other wall is open showers. The Y I sometimes go to has a similar setup except no curtains. Not uncommon to be showering directly across from someone else.

I went to catholic grade school and high school. In grade school we had no gym ! In high school we had two gyms, One for girls and another in the far end of the building for the boys. Never the two shall meet!!! We had locker rooms but no showers.

A

My high school and college gym showers were open. I do remember showering after taking a swimming test in college and seeing the other guys walk around naked without any concerns. This was in the middle 70s. We had shower stalls in our dorm bathroom but they had no curtains so everybody pretty much knew what everybody looked like naked. I will say you could not help but notice who had the larger penises even though we never talked about it.

I think today society has gotten more and more private and less open about nudity and that is why private gym showers are now closed off into stalls with shower curtains. If you want to be seen in these showers you can be, but on the other hand most seem to cover up with their towels before and after leaving the showers.

Like others here I grew up in the era of the large open group showers and required showering after PE and sports. That all started in junior high. I had brothers so it didn't bother me as much as it did kids who didn't share bedrooms or bathrooms with brothers. The PE coaches in 7th grade were adamant about all of us showering after PE class and enforced it with threats of paddling for any boy who didn't shower. A few in each actually got paddled at the beginning of the school year so the threats were effective in getting everyone stripped down and in the showers after every gym class. Those were quick showers anyway as we had maybe 5 or 6 minutes at the end of class to run to the locker room, strip down, get in the shower, get out and dry off and then get dressed. In a shower room with maybe 10 shower heads and 30 boys who needed a shower, that meant that some boys doubled up under the same shower head and others had to wait for a minute until a shower head was available. I did that for years in junior high, high school and college gyms. Same group shower rooms when I lived in the college dorm, except not as many of us using the shower at the same time. it was possible to be the only one in a big dorm shower room, if you didn't shower first thing in the morning before class. I imagine there were guys who showered late at night so they could beat off when no one was around but it was risky since the shower rooms were open and anyone walking in from the hallway could spot that. In the boys dorms, it was common for guys to walk to the shower wearing only their underpants, or nude, or a few wrapped in a towel. Nudity or near nudity was not an issue in the dorms or locker rooms in the 70s and 80s. Not sure when all that changed.

Have honestly never seen partitions or curtains in a guy's locker room shower. My country club does not have them and never saw them in college either. Is this a new modestly that we're getting?

Jds4med is spot on. There is a ridiculous puritanical trend nowadays when building workout facilities where there are separate stalls, curtains, door, etc. I recently joined a Planet Fitness where you go through an individual door to a "dressing" room, then there's also a curtain on the shower. I think it's so you can't see yourself in the mirror in the "dressing" room while you're in the shower. I'm going to complain because there's no lock on the door to the dressing room 😃 Ironically, with all of the recent hoopla about gay marriage, I believe that this locker room construction trend is homophobia-based. Anyone with me?

I imagine older facilities that haven't been renovated in a while are the ones that mainly still have those features. The high school I went to still has an open room for showers after gym. But I think most newer facilities, or recently renovated, tend to have partitions or stalls for the showers.

I mentioned in an earlier post, that society in general seems to be less comfortable with nudity than compared to earlier decades at least here in the US. The trend has been increasing over the years. In the gym I work out in, you can be very open and show yourself and a few do from time to time. But most don't electing to cover up with a towel or walking back to the shower with their gym shorts on and then putting them back on to walk back to their locker.

I would like offer one explanation. I think one reason why some are covering up is that they have been doing some manscaping or are fully shaved and are too embarrassed to show this. They have done the trimming or shaving because it is pretty common trend now but are not comfortable showing it in a locker room with strangers. This is my theory that might explain some of the really awkward gymnastics guys take to pull their under ware on while trying to keep a towel wrapped around themselves. It really gets comical sometimes.

Yes never understood this. At school the ladies showers had individual cubicles while the gents had big open plan shower room. In the event they were used interchangeably. Always hoped for the gents one so I could admire some nice ass. Was always very carefull to avoids staring at cocks though as if you were found out life would be unbearable.

In last sports club I was in I was disappointed to find individual showers but the guys just came out whipped off their towels in the middle of the locker room and proceeded to dry themselves get dressed. So there was still some fine ass and cock on view.

It sounds like UK following US though in building more and more facilities with partitions........shame

Not so long ago I worked at a coal mine we all showered together and the banter really flew around if someone spotted something different or strange. So it was that common that you wouldn't be the only one to be picked on lol

I grew up with open men's locker room showers in the Midwest. I didn't think much of the common nudity in the locker rooms as a youngster at the recreation center my family frequented. I was nerdy early in high school though, and was a little self conscious about my own body image changing and showering in PE at first. The athletic types walked around with naked bravado. Those of us with less confidence or at an earlier stage of puberty were not teased or made to feel bad by the other boys. Odd, I thought, as this could have been ripe material for juveniles to harass each other. As a matter of fact nothing was ever said about what we were seeing even though it was obvious we were all noticing each other.

Being stripped down to our birthday suits really was a great equalizer, as I recall. It seems to me a shame to remove that sense of kinship from the locker room. Making people to feel that their bodies should always be hidden doesn't seem the healthiest course to me.