Adult content ahead so I am hiding it.
I can point to two incidents in boot camp that really turned me off to men's locker rooms. There wasn't anything violent or sexual involved, but these two things really made me averse to traipsing around in my glory with other naked men. Again, it has nothing to do with me being afraid I will suddenly start being unchaste with these guys. I'm pretty confident I can keep that in check. It's just the horror of having seen one too many train-wrecks and being nervous around the tracks.
The first thing that turned me off to men's locker rooms came in the form of The Craziest M*therfsck3r I Ever Met [TCMIEM.] Seaman Recruit TCMIEM was somewhere around five feet two inches to five feet four inches tall. He was very muscular, as if he'd been into wrestling or some sport that required weightlifting; but he also had the rough hands of a working man, not that the two things are mutually exclusive. He was very blond, but bald like the rest of us recruits, and very fair skinned. He was like a tiny little Viking, even though I think his last name was Irish. I call him TCMIEM for a couple reasons. First, he could do sit-ups and push-ups for hours. Now, many of us did sit-ups and push-ups in our downtime out of sheer boredom. I figured that the drill instructor was going to force us to do some eventually [boy howdy], so I might as well train up. But this guy and his just-as-short partner in crime were hoping to become Navy SEALs, and they did metric tons of them. One day, in fact, they had a sit-up contest. The winner, who had to be carried back to his rack, did over 750 sit-ups continuously. That's reason number one.
The second reason why I call him TCMIEM was because of how he handled himself in the shower room. Most of us would shower, conduct our biological transactions, and shave with our towels around our waists, modestly covering our junk. This guy wrapped his towel around his head like a turban and let his twig-and-berries flop free. And remember how I said this guy was short? Dude was not short all over. Dude was "disproportionate" to say the least. Scary. And even up to this point in my narrative, TCMIEM has not done anything to warrant making me wary of men's locker rooms or to give him that unwieldy title. What unsettled me was this guy's habit of pointing to everyone's junk and saying, "Nice penis you've got there." I cannot begin to tell you what a massive breach of man etiquette that was, but I will try.
In men's rooms and men's locker rooms, you don't address the junk. You don't look [or make it obvious anyway], you don't point, you don't talk about it. At the urinal, you stare straight ahead and don't talk. No matter how loudly a guy is relieving himself in the next stall or how foul it smells, you don't comment on it, which makes that scene in that Austin Powers movie all the more uncomfortably hilarious. You certainly do not stand naked with a towel wrapped around your head and compliment other people's penises.
I swear, every time he did it, it made me want to whip out my communicator and have Scotty beam me back up to the Enterprise.
The other horrible event in boot camp that turned me off to men's locker rooms didn't even take place in a locker room. It took place at the pool. Near the pool, actually. It was Swim Test Day, when the drill instructors were supposed to test us on our ability to swim, which, at the end of a very bad day in the life of a seagoing vessel, is an important skill for a sailor to have. They marched us into the indoor pool area in our usual platoon-type formation. There were feet painted on the floor ahead of us in a larger, slightly more spaced out platoon-type formation, and we were told to go stand on the feet. Then we were told to disrobe and put on our swim suits.
A note on military formations. Typically, the interval between one guy and another in a normal military formation is approximately one arm's length, about a meter. The feet on which we stood were spaced about a meter and a quarter apart.
What I am trying to tell you is that there were about 50 guys trying to change out of their uniform, boots, heavy coat, and other gear [since it was winter on Lake Michigan and we were wearing nearly everything we were issued], getting buck naked in the process, and everybody was no more than four feet away from each other. Can you not appreciate the proximity? Two to four feet away from man ass, junk, naked bellies and flanks, hairy backs and butt cracks, smelly feet everywhere ... squick! Can you imagine, because not only did we have to change out of all that heavy clothing, we had to fold it and arrange it neatly into a pile in our little one meter empire of privacy. So there was squatting involved. And lots of bending over.
So cold. So very cold.
Therefore, if you find me in the locker room, and I start scurrying out nervously, don't think too much of it. It's because of the Navy. I'm thinking of applying for a disability of some sort, if only I knew what to call it.
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