Stall Doors and Dead Traditions: The War Over America's Last Open Locker Rooms
There's a fight happening in the blueprints of nearly every new gym and student recreation center in America, and most guys don't notice it until they're standing in a towel, dripping, looking for a place to put their underwear.
It's the shower stall question. And it's splitting generations down the middle.
The Blueprints Don't Lie
Ask any commercial architect who specializes in fitness facilities and they'll tell you the same thing: the open gang shower is functionally extinct in new construction. Privacy stalls — individual, curtained or doored — are the default spec now. Universities from Ohio to Oregon have redesigned rec centers around them. National gym chains quietly made the switch years ago.
The reasons cited are practical. Fewer complaints. Easier ADA compliance. Better hygiene optics post-pandemic. But underneath the spec sheets is something messier: an entire generation of young men who grew up without communal nude space and see no reason to start now.
"I've had clients in their twenties describe the open shower as, quote, 'a nightmare from an old movie,'" one Denver-based architect told us. "Meanwhile, a 58-year-old board member is telling me the stalls are 'coddling.' Same meeting. Same room."
The Case for the Stall
Let's be honest about the pro-privacy side, because it's not just shyness. Plenty of guys have real histories with body image, religious upbringing, or just plain trauma that make undressing in front of strangers genuinely unpleasant. Forcing that on someone as a rite of passage is a weird hill to die on.
There's also the practical reality that modern gym-goers are there at 6 a.m. before work. Nobody wants to do a full lather-and-rinse in front of their coworkers. Privacy stalls fit the way people actually live now — rushed, self-conscious, phone-adjacent.
One gym owner in Austin put it bluntly: "I added stalls and my membership complaints dropped to zero. I didn't lose a single member. Turns out nobody was coming for the communal experience."
The Case for the Open Room
But here's where the older crowd — and frankly, a lot of us at this podcast — push back.
The communal locker room was one of the last places American men saw real, unfiltered bodies. Not Instagram bodies. Not gym-ad bodies. Dads with C-section scars and bad knees, 70-year-old swimmers, college freshmen who hadn't grown into their frames yet. You learned, mostly by accident, that every body is a little bit wrong and that's fine.
We covered the quiet death of the locker room before, and the data since has only gotten starker: young men report higher body dissatisfaction than any prior generation, and they've also never seen another man naked. Those two facts aren't unrelated. When your only reference points are filtered and edited, your own body becomes a failure by comparison.
"The open shower was accidental exposure therapy," says a longtime member of a Chicago YMCA, one of the last holdouts with a fully communal setup. "Guys my age got desensitized. These kids are marinating in comparison and calling it privacy."
What We're Actually Arguing About
Strip away the plumbing and this is a fight about shame. One side says shame is innate and architecture should accommodate it. The other says shame is learned and architecture should help unlearn it.
Both have a point, which is why neither is winning.
The realistic future is probably a hybrid: stalls as standard, with a few open showers preserved in universities, YMCAs, and swim facilities where communal space still has an athletic function. Europe, unsurprisingly, already does this without drama.
What we'd hate to see is the stall become total. Because the guys who never see another real body don't get more comfortable — they get more anxious. And we've spent five seasons of this show talking to men about exactly that anxiety.
The towel dance was never really about the towel. If we build a world where no man ever has to be seen, we shouldn't be surprised when being seen feels unbearable.
