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Heck, I'm middle aged but not quite at that age yet, and I'm pretty much 99% of the way there. The older I've gotten, the more I've realized that there's just no good reason to care about how other people perceive my body outside of a certain small subset of cases. Certainly not when they're strangers who are males in a locker room or other communal changing space. If other people dislike the sight of certain parts of my body, first of all, I empathize, but second, that's their problem, not mine. If the sight of my junk displeases them, I'm not going to lift a finger to help them solve their displeasure; I've got enough of my own to take care of, thank you.
This whole problem with being or viewing same-sex nudity in these kinds of contexts seemed pretty strange and somewhat arbitrary to me when I immigrated from Korea to America at the age of 6, and it took me some effort to adapt to it. In Korea, already by the age of 6, I was accustomed to going to public bath houses where men and boys (and, I presume women and girls as well, in their own half) of all ages would just freely walk around with everything out and minimal effort to cover anything up.
In all fairness, taking steps to mitigate the externalities of your actions is a pretty core component of being generally pro-social.
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The US used to be like this, but it changed at some point during post-WW2 America. Communal showers and pools were common. When I was young (90s and 00s), we still used communal showers, but it was a dying practice. I realized in college it was a dead practice in most other parts of the US.
My great grandpa would tell me about swimming naked with other men/boys at the YMCA in the 1920s. I'm not sure why it changed in the US, but there are a bunch of "coming of age" movies made in the 70s and 80s with teens becoming adults who have anxiety about the dreaded communal showers in high schools.
Nude swimming disappeared because swimsuit technology improved; communal showers i’m pretty sure went out of style due to increasing wealth making individual stalls more affordable.
Don't think so Tim -- at my high school the girls changeroom had separate stalls, while the boys' was prison-style. (but with nicer tile-work)
Fairly sure it wouldn't have killed the school budget to build the male changeroom to the same specs -- this is just what locker rooms were supposed to be like. (for bonding or something? IDK)
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