Not long ago, after a day of work, a colleague and I met for a friendly game of racquetball at our university gym. In the newly designed locker room, I began pulling off my shirt to change when he quickly stopped me: “You can’t do that here.” Undressing, it turned out, was now permitted only in small private stalls—which struck me as odd. This was a gym with a pool, where someone could go directly from a shirts-on locker room to a shirtless swim. But the logic was clear enough: The space had been redesigned as “universal,” for people of all genders. The locker room, once a place for casual and normative nudity, had quietly become a place where modesty was expected.
My Seattle gym is far from the only one to adopt the practice. Though public nakedness isn’t completely gone, many of the everyday spots where Americans once encountered unclothed bodies—locker rooms, school showers, public pools, bathhouses—have either vanished or shifted away from collective nudity. In 2017, Athletic Business, a trade publication for sports-facility design and management, reported that communal showers without curtains or dividers had virtually disappeared from new construction. This year, a different trade publication noted that one of the prevailing trends in locker-room design is privacy, a way to make “a diverse user base” feel comfortable.
It’s a striking reversal. For more than a century, the cultural norm in the United States was that nudity was acceptable—at least within same-sex environments. Over the past couple of decades or so, that idea has largely dissolved. This sort of nudity is so rarely discussed that we don’t really have vocabulary for it. The term nonsexual nudity feels inadequate, because for some, changing in a locker room could carry a charge of eroticism. Communal nudity is no better, evoking images of orgies or nudist colonies rather than once-routine forms of unclothed life. The fact that the practice never really had a name suggests how unremarkable it once was.
This decline partly reflects shifts in the culture: In a world that recognizes a wide range of gender identities and acknowledges attraction across those boundaries, the old mainstream assumption that same-sex facilities were inherently asexual—and therefore appropriate settings for nudity—no longer holds. At the same time, broader conversations about consent, sexual assault, and vulnerability, as well as the ubiquity of phone cameras, have raised questions about the discomfort or even legal liabilities that such spaces can create.
Although these changes are largely positive, they also introduce a new reality: Today, the only naked bodies that many Americans will likely ever see are their own, a partner’s, or those on a screen. Gone are our unvarnished points of physical comparison—the ordinary, unposed figures of other people. In their place, we’re left with the curated ideals of social-media posts, AI-generated advertising, and pornography. The loss may seem trivial, but it also may change how people see themselves. Without exposure to the normal variety of bodies, we may become less comfortable with our own, more likely to mistake common characteristics for flaws—and more inclined to see every bare body as an inherently sexual object, making nudity even more charged.
Some form of public nudity has been in American life since the early days of the republic. Starting in the late 18th century, young men and boys would strip down to swim in urban lakes and rivers, as the scholar Jeff Wiltse wrote in Contested Waters, a history of swimming in America. This behavior often sat on the margins of social acceptability; commentators described the bathers as lewd and unruly, flaunting their bodies and heckling passersby. Cities soon moved to curtail it. In 1786, Boston passed an ordinance forbidding swimming on the Sabbath, declaring that boys bathing on Sundays were “profaning the Lord’s day.” New York followed with an 1808 ban on daytime swimming in the East River, meant, in the moral logic of the day, to protect innocent women from the supposedly corrupting sight of men’s naked flesh.
These laws did not eliminate public nudity but rather regulated it, prescribing where, when, and around whom one could shed their clothes. They set the pattern for how nudity has been approached in the United States ever since—through a blend of legal restrictions and social norms that draw a line between nudity as nonsexual, condoned, even expected, and nudity coded as sexual and therefore forbidden except in private.
The golden age of everyday, regulated nudity arrived with the Progressive era. At the turn of the 20th century, faith in the state’s capacity to improve lives, new ideas about hygiene, and efforts to uplift the urban poor all combined to create more public spaces where nudity was considered appropriate. Whereas middle- and upper-class homes had bathtubs by the 1890s, most tenements had none. Their residents bathed infrequently, or in tubs shared by several families. Reformers seized on this as both a public-health and a moral crisis; for many Progressives, dirt itself was a sign of degeneracy. Cities started building public bathhouses, mostly formally or de facto segregated by race, and usually divided into men and women—sometimes by separate wings, sometimes by alternating days (though typically more time and space were granted to men). A bather might have a stall or a bit of elbow room, but the experience remained communal. In the Progressive imagination, then, nudity was a civic duty, a path to cleanliness, even a mark of respectability.
Naked swimming, at least for men, also became more commonplace as more bathhouses opened. For decades, they functioned as facilities both for cleaning and for leisure; bathers might bring soap into the water, rinsing off before they began to swim. Then, when indoor plumbing spread and the need for collective bathing diminished, many public baths were gradually refitted as recreational swimming pools; the line between nude bathing and swimming remained blurred. Textile technology also played a role in encouraging nude swimming. Because early bathing suits were made of fabrics that shed fibers—clogging filters and spreading debris—many facilities banned them outright. The Progressive era’s near obsession with hygiene played an important role here too. In 1926, an American Public Health Association report recommended that men swim nude so germs on their suits wouldn’t pollute the water; many pools required it.
For women, the logic was more complicated. Expectations of sanitation competed with early-20th-century ideas about purity and propriety. Although women were supposed to shower nude before getting in the pool, they were almost never allowed to swim that way. The same APHA report recommending that men always swim nude said that women should still wear suits, albeit “of the simplest type,” underscoring that their bodies—unlike men’s—were presumed to carry a sexual charge regardless of who else was present.
Soon, though, cultural norms changed again, and nude swimming began to disappear. As municipal pools became mixed-gender in the 1920s and ’30s, swimming naked no longer fit prevailing notions of decency. Not long after, racial integration made swimming pools some of the most fiercely contested public places in America. Because pools were seen as intimate, the prospect of Black and white people sharing the water provoked intense resistance, particularly among white men who were averse to the idea of Black men interacting with white women. Bathing suits became both a technological adaptation and a way of policing the charged meanings of gender and racial mixing.
In private and high-school pools, where gender and racial separation was more common, nudity was phased out much more slowly. Backed by the APHA, which continued to recommend nude swimming until 1962, YMCA and high-school pools still kept men and boys in the nude during designated gender-specific swimming. Sometimes, family members—including girls and women—watched naked boys practice or compete in races. (Less frequently, women would strip down for swimming as well.) The tradition lingered into the ’70s and ’80s, and was slow to fade; according to a 2015 Politico report, the U.S. Senate pool remained men-only until 2008, when, as Senator Kay Hagan recalled, some of her male colleagues were still swimming nude, presumably continuing what they saw as a normal practice from their youth.
As American society has evolved, the calculation about where and how one’s body can be exposed has shifted yet again. The move toward private stalls in gyms reflects an effort to make communal spaces more comfortable for a wider range of people, while avoiding the fraught question of how to split rooms when gender boundaries are the subject of an intense culture war. It also reflects a recognition that dividing locker rooms by gender alone does not necessarily create settings free from the possibility of sexualization or discomfort. Compounding these issues is the omnipresence of cameras and social media, which has made privacy more precarious. The heightened awareness of potential abuse in schools and athletic programs has led to policy adjustments as well. What was once widely considered innocuous exposure now risks becoming a liability.
As a result, for someone growing up in the United States today, it is entirely possible that until their first sexual encounter, they will never be nude in front of anyone other than a family member or a doctor. This is happening alongside the proliferation of online pornography; according to a 2023 survey from Common Sense Media, the average age of an American’s first exposure to porn is just 12. When most of the naked bodies we encounter are filtered or airbrushed, the unedited body—and its sags or wrinkles or scars—starts to seem almost imaginary. Aging bodies in particular are seen mostly in mirrors or medical settings, potentially feeding the illusion that the human form is meant to stay young and optimized.
Of course, even when public nudity was more widely accepted, it was rarely neutral. Society might have preferred to pretend otherwise, but locker rooms and bathhouses have always carried the possibility of sexual attraction and curiosity. And the naked body has always carried social meaning beyond arousal—it has been an index of beauty, strength, gender, shame. Locker rooms and showers, where bodies were both exposed and compared, became opportunities for people to reinforce social pecking orders. Just consider the term locker-room talk, referring to vulgar conversations men might have while changing. The lack of supervision, especially in school settings, only amplified the potential for cruelty. While writing this story, I heard countless anecdotes of locker-room humiliations from friends and family—a sign of how common, and how formative, such moments can be.
Still, sometimes everyday nudity could also bring a sense of ease. I think of the elderly men—mostly Soviet émigrés—strolling around a locker room with a complete lack of modesty when I was a child. It’s not one of my fonder memories; at the time, their indifference to nakedness felt awkward and intrusive. Later, though, I realized that my discomfort said as much about me as it did about them. What I read then as shamelessness now looks more like a kind of freedom—one that comes from treating the naked body as nothing remarkable at all.
This points, perhaps, to a problem in the way Americans have been framing the naked body all along. Although the newer convention, focused on safety and consent, stamps out some prejudices, it still rests on a narrow idea: that nakedness is by definition lewd. In many countries, communal nudity persists in mixed settings precisely because the body is treated as ordinary. Saunas in Germany, for example, remain places where people of all genders sit unclothed together, apparently without major problems.
Such examples suggest that, rather than finding new ways to conceal ourselves, Americans need to reimagine the naked body—seeing it not as a provocation, but as a natural fact of human life. This cultural shift in attitudes toward nudity wouldn’t happen overnight, nor should it come at the expense of anybody’s well-being. As Americans design new shared spaces, though, we might more deliberately examine what kinds of encounters they make possible, or foreclose. Perhaps the goal is not to return to old norms of exposure, but to imagine new ones rooted in comfort and respect.
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