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170 - Get Naked

170 - Get Naked

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 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."
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