Bring Back Boring Nudity
A case for group showers, nude locker rooms and the freedom to learn about pubic hair trends from something other than porn
Yesterday I found myself waiting in line for a private stall in the women's change room at Canada's Wonderland. Not for a toilet. To put on a swimsuit.
One by one, women disappeared into tiny cubicles and emerged thirty seconds later in bathing suits, as though we'd collectively agreed to pretend our bodies didn't exist.
When I was growing up (here I go sounding like I'm ancient) there were no stalls. You changed in the open, next to strangers, next to your mom, next to your friend's mom. You saw old bodies and young bodies, pregnant bodies and scarred bodies, athletic bodies and soft bodies. It wasn't glamorous, and it certainly wasn't sexy. It was simply one of those ordinary public rituals that quietly taught you what adulthood looked like.
Somewhere along the way, we've decided even this tiny act of vulnerability is too much. We've built walls around every uncomfortable part of being human; physical walls in change rooms, digital walls through our phones, emotional walls that let us curate exactly who sees us and when.
People blame our disconnection on screens, and sure, of course, obviously. But it runs deeper than that. We've quietly reorganized modern life around the idea that every experience is better if nobody else has to witness it. We mistake privacy for dignity and comfort for progress.
I remember being eight years old in an after-school swim class, absolutely mortified by the women's locker room. To my child's eyes it was full of floppy, hairy old ladies wandering around completely naked without a trace of self-consciousness. They'd walk from the shower to the mirror with their entire ass out, blow-drying their hair and chatting about dinner as though none of this were remarkable.
Meanwhile, I was in the corner attempting the impossible: removing a wet swimsuit and putting on underwear without exposing a single square inch of skin. The towel was somehow wrapped around me, held up by my teeth, one elbow, and a prayer.
I wanted to crawl out of my own skin.
But the woman walking to the shower nude, grabbing her towel on the way, continuing her private conversation over the pounding sound of multiple loud showers… nobody praised her courage. Nobody called it body positivity. The rest of us simply learned that bodies could look like that, and life went on.
This is actual locker room talk. The inoffensive, completely boring locker room talk where women discuss their mahjong plans and if book club is happening tonight or tomorrow night and who's bringing salads. Not the kind where men dissect women's bodies and worse. The other kind. The kind where nobody's body is the subject of the conversation at all.
Looking back, that's an extraordinary thing for a child to learn.
Locker rooms were one of the few places where the female body existed outside of performance. You weren't seeing bodies selling leggings or protein powder. You weren't seeing filtered bodies or sexualized bodies. You were seeing ordinary bodies that had lived.
Bodies wrinkle. Bodies sag. Bodies scar. Bodies grow hair. Bodies age.
And once you've seen fifty ordinary women wrestling themselves into damp one-piece swimsuits, the female body becomes dramatically less mysterious.
A few months ago, I took my daughter to a public pool in Los Angeles. Like every pool, there was a sign asking swimmers to shower before getting in.
Right beside it was another sign:
NO NUDE SHOWERING.
I laughed. And then I fumed.
No nude showering. In a women's shower. Inside a women's locker room. What the actual fuck.
Maybe there are liability reasons (like what? I don't know). Maybe someone complained. But the sign felt symbolic. We've become so uncomfortable with discomfort that we've started eliminating perfectly ordinary experiences simply because they involve vulnerability (or something else entirely).
I'm now roughly the age those "old ladies" were.
I'm the woman with the post-pregnancy body. The surgical scars. The evidence of a life that's been lived. And the truth is, I now walk with that same carefree abandon. I can point to the exact women who taught me how.
It wasn't confidence. It was freedom.
Their bodies weren't projects. They weren't brands. They weren't sex objects.
They were simply theirs.
And I think younger kids deserve to witness that. They deserve to see grown women with beautifully imperfect, capable bodies walking to the hairdryer ass-out & pubes in every different form for no other reason than because it's profoundly ordinary.
Maybe this isn't really about group showers? One
Maybe it's about the disappearance of ordinary, shared vulnerability. We've become so good at protecting ourselves from discomfort that we've accidentally started protecting ourselves from one another.
I think we've lost more than we realize.
From my messy, beautiful, nude body to yours,
Ingrid