(Men, the body, and the vanishing room)
I remember standing in front of my locker at the gym, the floor tile cold against my bare feet. The guy next to me drops his towel. He’s got a bit of a gut and a patch of gray chest hair. I don’t mean to look. It happens in a split second. I track his shoulders, his chest, the way his arms hang. I don’t even look at his face. Then I grab my shirt, spin around, and pretend I was just checking the time. I couldn’t tell you whether I was comparing or admiring. Probably both. At sixty, I’ve been noticing moments like that for most of my life, partly because I’ve never felt fully at ease in these rooms myself, and partly because I want to understand the men I think of as my brothers. Being gay gave me my own reasons to watch closely, but what I keep seeing is how much all of us share.
That half-second glance should have a name. Call it the flick. Not a stare, not an obvious look away, just a quick look that takes him in and then pretends it didn’t. Most guys do it. Almost nobody talks about it. For me, as a gay man, there was an extra layer: the worry that a glance would be read as a come-on, or worse, a threat. I learned to police my own eyes in locker rooms long before I learned to relax in them. But I’ve come to think every man in there is policing his eyes for some reason, whether out of fear of being caught comparing, judged, or just seen looking.
That flick does more work than it looks. In that half-second you privately measured yourself against him: height, build, weight, grooming, and, let’s be honest, the thing you don’t say out loud. Then you looked away like it was nothing. It was nothing. That glance says a lot about how rarely men get to simply be seen, and how that chance has been quietly shrinking.
Here’s what I think is underneath it. Many men grow up treating their own body as equipment, something to use, optimize, rank, and deploy, not as a self they actually live inside. And that works fine, mostly. There’s always a task. There’s always a role. There’s always something to prove. You’re the guy lifting the thing, or running the lap, or holding the door. Nudity breaks that. Standing there with nothing to operate, no ball to catch, no weight to move, no job, the instrument goes quiet, and only the person underneath remains. For men who’ve spent their lives being the instrument, that’s the disorienting part. Not being naked. Being legible: fully readable, with nothing to hide behind.
And that exposure is where the anxiety lives, because a lot of it is specific and rarely said aloud. Height you can dress around. Muscle you can build or hide. But one measurement won’t change with clothes, posture, or a good joke, and it only reveals itself in exactly these rooms. Naked among other men, you have every variable on display, including the one you can’t control. Some men find that completely fine. Others find it unbearable. Most are somewhere in the middle and never mention it. The cruel part is that the other guys mostly don’t care. But “they don’t care” doesn’t help, because the judge isn’t them. The judge is you.
Nobody sat down and decided men should be awkward about this. There’s no memo. My sense is that it piled up: a little from religion, a little from the buildings we shower in, a little from the phone in every pocket, and a lot from how boys get raised. None of it was designed. It accumulated.
The religious piece is the oldest. The idea that the body is faintly suspect, something to cover and discipline, runs a long way back, and by the Victorian era doctors like John Harvey Kellogg were calling masturbation a disease. If you grew up in Britain or America, some of that locker-room discomfort was handed to you before you ever walked in. It isn’t universal, though. In Japan, men soak together in the onsen without a second thought. Across the Muslim world, the hammam kept men bathing together for centuries, modesty rules and all. Same bodies, different rooms, different comfort.
Belief needs a building to live in, and ours kept adding walls. Look at how showers have changed, from open bays to partitions to curtains to full stalls, and it’s hard not to see the male body being slowly re-walled. The open bay says nudity is the default. The half-partition says you may shield your middle. The curtain says it’s embarrassing and can be concealed. The full stall says showering is a private act that happens to occur in public. A wall is a decision; a curtain is an apology; a stall is a retreat. Each step had real reasons, like privacy, comfort, and safety. But each step also made nudity more optional, and optional things tend to get skipped. It becomes a loop: men who never use open showers never get used to them, so they want more stalls. If you’ve ever waited for a stall rather than use the open shower, you’ve felt that loop from the inside. If you’re under thirty, you may never have showered in an open bay. The building changed first. The men changed after, inside the new walls.
Not that the open bay made anyone relaxed. In college, the showers were open bays with no curtains. I tried to act natural, humming under my breath, but every time I turned around, I saw the guy across from me trying just as hard. We both stared at the opposite wall, avoiding each other’s eyes even though only an arm’s length of steam separated us. I felt like we were taking a silent test we both knew we were failing.
Walls at least stay in the room. The phone comes in with us. For most of human history, being seen was temporary: you were looked at, and then it was over, the image living only in imperfect, forgiving memory. The phone broke that. Now the body is archived: captured, stored, re-viewable, compared against a global, lit, edited standard. Exposure used to fade; now it files. The camera also doesn’t flick away politely the way a person does. It stares, and the stare becomes permanent. And the phone is a shield as well as a recorder, giving a naked man a legitimate reason to look away. I can’t think of a better picture of this era than a room of naked men, each on his phone: bodies present, attention absent.
But the camera cuts both ways. The same technology that made men more guarded also gave them new ways to gather. Webcams turned the bedroom into a kind of locker room with the door left open. Video-chat rooms, cam sites, and online groups now let men masturbate together, live, from across town or across the world. For some, it’s the first time they’ve done anything like it, and it happens at the safest possible distance: no shared space, no chance of running into the other guy at work, and an exit that’s one click away. It keeps the old rooms’ easy exit and makes it even easier. What it can’t offer is presence. You’re seen, but through a lens, framed and lit, often with your face out of the shot. It’s a new version of the flick: a glance that can be paused, cropped, and, if someone hits record, kept.
And now AI can smooth and enlarge a body in seconds, so the standard men measure themselves against isn’t just edited anymore; it’s invented. I honestly don’t know yet whether it pushes men further apart or gives some of them a way in. Probably both. Either way, the room keeps getting more virtual.
Underneath it all is how we raise boys, which brings me back to the instrument. I was raised that way too, and so was nearly every man I know. A boy taught to treat his body as equipment never gets practice simply living in it, so every other pressure finds him already exposed. Stack it up, and you get a man primed to feel watched, given every chance to hide, reminded daily of an impossible standard, and trained to treat his own body as a tool. No villain. Just quiet pressures, all leaning the same way.
What strikes me is that the private version is the new one. We assume private showers, solo release, and everyone slightly awkward is how it’s always been. It isn’t. For most of history, men were naked around each other because that’s how the building worked: barracks, dorms, boarding schools, the gym. Some of what happened in those rooms went further, and most of it was never written down. When it does show up on paper, it’s in odd places. In the 1730s, a Scottish club, the Beggar’s Benison, reportedly had new members masturbate in front of the others. In 1948, Kinsey reported that more than a third of men had had at least one sexual experience with another man. And in the eighties, the years I came of age, AIDS made group masturbation one of the few safe ways left to be together, and gay men started clubs around it. Then porn made release private, a screen replaced the friend, and the shared version drifted to the margins, just as webcams started building a long-distance one.
Still, some men go looking for that shared version, not just the nudity but the release too. I want to be plain about that, because it’s where seeing and being seen go farthest. Nobody hands two men a rulebook, yet they improvise something elegant. It works as a ladder. At the bottom, just being in the same space, naked, at the same time, no acknowledgment needed. Then both doing your own thing, each pretending not to notice. Then the flick: you’ve registered him, he’s registered you. Then a glance held, a nod, a half-word. Then coordination. Then, maybe, touch. What makes it work is the low floor: you can retreat at any rung, and it’s fine; you can finish and leave, and it’s fine, and because the cost of misreading is trivial, men can approach real intimacy without ever having to name it.
Men like me built many of these spaces, often out of necessity, but they’ve never belonged to just one kind of man. What interests me most is that, inside them, the labels tend to fall away. None of it necessarily requires attraction, or romance, or roles, only proximity and willingness. Nobody’s checking what kind of man you are. You’re just a man among men, and that’s part of why it lets men get close without having to work out what it says about them.
You can see the strain in the language men use to manage it. “No homo” is the insurance policy, a disclaimer against an accusation nobody actually made, but it can backfire: if the moment were truly neutral, you wouldn’t need to label it. It isn’t useless, though. It buys permission: a man can hug his friend, tell him he loves him, and never have to settle what it means. Still, every “no homo” draws a line down the middle of the room, and I’ve stood on the other side. I’d rather we didn’t need the line at all. “Straight but not narrow” takes a different approach. It keeps the label but licenses the behavior, and unlike “no homo,” it doesn’t deny the charge; it just declines to be narrow about it. Men who use it often take part fully while still calling themselves straight, with no sense of crisis. Behavior and labels just don’t always match.
Under the labels, we’re all men, with the same bodies and the same rooms. And plenty of men simply don’t want any of this, which is fine too. Not wanting it isn’t the same as hiding from it.
Sometimes there are no words at all. I went to a sauna once with a straight friend, a guy who knew I was gay. We sat on opposite benches. The silence wasn’t empty; it was heavy with the fact that we were naked. He crossed his legs, adjusting himself. I crossed mine. Neither of us looked at the other. We just sat there, letting the heat do the talking, terrified that if we made eye contact, we’d have to acknowledge what was happening: two friends, naked, a few feet apart, with nothing to do but be seen. I’ve thought about that afternoon a lot since. I don’t think either of us was nervous about the other. We were nervous about the same thing.
So men keep going back to the locker room, the sauna, the club, the hotel meetup, the video call, and I keep wondering why. Even when sex is part of it, I don’t think it’s mainly about sex. It’s about something they rarely get anywhere else: being seen without performing. Outside these rooms, a man is his function: the job, the role, the competence, the joke. In these rooms, the function goes away, and he’s just present, and he survives. My guess is that’s the real draw. Not arousal so much as the experience of being seen, unguarded, not doing anything, and being fine. Maybe that’s what the flick was all along: not just measuring, but the closest most of us get to asking to be seen. It might even explain the towel-snap: a nervous joke to cover the fact that two men are briefly, actually present with each other, with no cover at all.
The room never disappeared. Men just learned to walk through it in a towel. Take the towel away, and there’s nothing to hide behind. There’s also nothing to prove.
***
The conversation doesn’t have to end here.
Next time you’re in a locker room, who’s doing the judging: the other guys, or you? A few of us are already comparing notes in Are you comfortable being naked around other men?, and you’re welcome to add yours.
