showering nude?

[channlluv]

San Diego is an ethnically-rich city, so there are all ethnicities of women in my gym. My Y has both a communal shower and separate stalls for people who want more privacy, although there's no room to change in them. You'd have to exit the shower or get your clothes all wet.

Some women are very modest and wear robes. Others walk around stark naked with maybe a wrap on their hair. It took me a little while to get used to it, but it's no biggie now. It only bothers me when someone sits bare-butt on the hot sauna seat. Ick.

I shower in the communal shower room, but I wrap a pretty sarong around myself when I go back to the lockers to get dressed, mainly because it's a big, open area between the showers and the lockers, with sinks and wall-to-wall mirrors, and an open-around-the-corner hallway to the main gym and I just feel exposed in there, and if I'm in the sauna, I'm on an extra-large spa towel with the sarong wrapped around me.

With their renovations last year, they added family changing rooms that are really nice, and thank goodness, because some of the women would bring their older, wide-eyed sons through to the pool area (which was only accessible through the locker rooms before the renovation).

One time I'd just finished showering and had wrapped myself in a sarong. There was a ten- or twelve-year-old girl from the swim team showering in the communal shower, too. As I left the shower area and turned the corner, I came face-to-face with a boy about eight-years-old. His mom, who had a toddler girl in her arms, was steering him into the shower! I stopped her and said there was a young girl in there and she gave me this "so what" look, and I said, "Look, if I were a girl her age (thinking of my daughter), I sure wouldn't want a boy his age to see me naked." And I just stood there blocking the entrance to the communal shower, towels and shampoo kit in hand, until they turned around and went to a private stall. And honestly, had they been a minute or two earlier, he could have been scarred for life seeing me naked. Geez.

Roxy