I feel you. I had communal showers a couple of years and I don’t remember any specific violence, but I do remember it being uncomfortable.
I would like to look in to how communal bathing ties in to America’s nudity taboo and how it’s changed over the years. The idea is completely unthinkable now, but communal bathing has been pretty normal across cultural and across history, even non-sexual unisex communal bathing in a few places. And then in America it’s illegal to teach sex ed or show a nipple on tv.
In a less fucked up synthesis of puritan and hedonistic ideologies which are systemic to contemporary capitalism, I can see value in communal showers and the like.
However, when it’s a bunch of demanding that teenagers get naked and put up with whatever proto-fratboy rite of passage hazing shit that awaits them there, that absolutely reeks of predator culture.
Agreed. I don’t remember any time where high school showers were presented as something social, communal, soothing. Everyone knew they were embarassing and a place where bullying was particularly vicious.
Meanwhile, when I was really little my father took me to a workout club that was mostly old guys, and they’d all kind of hang out butt ass naked in the locker room, talking about whatever, completely comfortable and unbothered. It was nominally the same - communal bathing, but the absolute opposite vibe.
I’m not even sure how to get Burgerland into the latter culture instead of the former, though I know in the present that coercing teenagers into hazing rites ostensibly leading into adulthood is just a contagious form of abuse.
I feel you. I had communal showers a couple of years and I don’t remember any specific violence, but I do remember it being uncomfortable.
I would like to look in to how communal bathing ties in to America’s nudity taboo and how it’s changed over the years. The idea is completely unthinkable now, but communal bathing has been pretty normal across cultural and across history, even non-sexual unisex communal bathing in a few places. And then in America it’s illegal to teach sex ed or show a nipple on tv.
In a less fucked up synthesis of puritan and hedonistic ideologies which are systemic to contemporary capitalism, I can see value in communal showers and the like.
However, when it’s a bunch of
demanding that teenagers get naked and put up with whatever proto-fratboy rite of passage hazing shit that awaits them there, that absolutely reeks of predator culture.
Agreed. I don’t remember any time where high school showers were presented as something social, communal, soothing. Everyone knew they were embarassing and a place where bullying was particularly vicious.
Meanwhile, when I was really little my father took me to a workout club that was mostly old guys, and they’d all kind of hang out butt ass naked in the locker room, talking about whatever, completely comfortable and unbothered. It was nominally the same - communal bathing, but the absolute opposite vibe.
I’m not even sure how to get Burgerland into the latter culture instead of the former, though I know in the present that coercing teenagers into hazing rites ostensibly leading into adulthood is just a contagious form of abuse.