A primer on locker room etiquette for older men

By
Trevor Macomber
– November 21, 2011

Anyone who’s ever had the pleasure of changing clothes in a shower- and/or sauna- and/or steamroom-equipped gym lockerroom featuring ”men of a certain age” (no, not you, Mr. Romano) knows that male nudity is not a particularly taboo concept to these individuals. And that’s fine: I respect their (and, for that matter, your) right to feel absolutely no shame about their naked bodies, especially in the context of a gym locker room when said nakedness is an appropriate prerequisite to multiple activities. However, I think we can all agree that there are various unwritten rules of deportment involved in changing in a locker room when full nudity is required. Yet, for whatever reason, the more time that gravity has had to ravage these mens’ bodies, the more likely they are to be on display at any given moment.

To be clear, I’m not singling out older people for dressing or undressing more slowly than their younger brethren. That’s to be expected. What I’m talking about is the age-related tendency to add or remove clothing in a completely illogical order while randomly engaging in nudity-extending activities during the changing process. Everybody knows that the number one rule of underwear etiquette in a locker room setting is L.O.F.O. — as in Last Off, First On. In practice, this means that, if you need to shower, your underwear should be the very last piece of clothing you remove before wrapping a towel around your waste and schlepping off to the stalls. Then, upon your return, your underwear should be the very first piece of clothing you put on before proceeding with the rest of your outfit. It’s excruciatingly straightforward and no more difficult than any other changing order (and, indeed, simpler/more useful than many — unless you’re Quail Man, of course). Yet for some reason, this stunnginly logical progression becomes an irreconciliable calculus for many gents in their sixth decade and beyond.

Forthwith: a non-inclusive list of the offenses my eyeballs have been subject to in just a few short months at my new gym:

  • The most common: Countless men who, having just returned from the sauna or showers, proceed to put on both a fresh undershirt and then a fresh buttondown — which they must then laboriously button up – before finally stepping into the predictable pair of tighty-whities.
  • The most easily avoided: Guys who walk dripping from the showers in order to vigorously towel themselves off in the changing area before getting dressed — inevitably in the manner described above.
  • The most disconcerting: Gym buddies engaging one another in extended conversations halfway through the changing process, resulting in – since apparently neither man is capable of multitasking to the extent required to slide on a pair of Dockers while discussing his wife’s latest foible – dual displays of wrinkled trouser schnauzer for far longer than even remotely necessary.
  • The most unsanitary: The few fellows who deem it necessary to sit down to doff or don certain items of clothing – but only after removing their underwear. Less “junk in the trunk” than “stench on the bench.” (Taint on the paint? P.U. on the pew?)
  • The most inexplicable: A man who, having stripped down to nothing but his flip flops, decides that this would be the best time to engage in a vigorous bout of stretching from various angles — presumably because his workout clothes are much too restrictive to be donned before engaging in such preventitive exercise.

Look, guys, I get it: you’re old, you’ve survived this long, let’s see if the rest of us can. But on behalf of those of us who still possess retinas that need to last at least another half-century, can we please adopt a slightly more modest set of behaviors in the locker room? (A new code of “compartment comportment,” if you will.) I know I can work harder to look somewhere else, but goddamnit, there are a lot of reflective surfaces in there! (And yes, I realize that by a cruel trick of nature, the people least likely to come across this article in their everyday lives are those most in need of its advice, so feel free to print this out in large text and mail to your fathers/grandfathers as appropriate. I’m sure they’d be thrilled to hear from you, you ungrateful git.)