1990: 6--7). The two-gender exclusiveness of the shower website betrays the high
potential of the website as a sexual site, the gaze at nakedness as a sexual act and the
implicit eroticism that is encoded in this type of website. The relative adjustment of the
system where the trajectory of sexual or attractive want is allowed to expand
to either sex (as long as it is an ostensible, coherent gender) destabilizes the
non-sexuality of the site. Where blondes on a beach can no longer be under-
stood to guard against the presence of desire as homoerotic want, and where the
Possible fall of homosociality with homosexuality is increasingly charged,
the site becomes unstable, and nakedness and gazing upon it can no longer be
understood as completely non sexual forms of pleasurable task.
Nevertheless, the instability between the framework of the communal showers and
that of the sexual is generally understood by participants. Particular rituals are
in place to stop the homosociality of communal nakedness sliding into homo-
sexuality. As Janene Hancock recently points out, these rituals are practised in
the sorts of 'appropriate' conversation:
When sportsmen gather in the locker room, before or after a game, and their conversation turns
to girls, the semantics used are not always complimentary. They discuss problems for example their
sexual conquests, their art at picking-up, taking out and 'sleeping with' the girls they meet,
Too as fairly regularly-lurid details concerning their sexual exploits. . . . Locker room conversa-
tion is about making men feel positive about themselves, solidifying their maleness and
rejecting any understanding that they may belong to the marginalised maleness of gays or
poofters. http://www.berktest.org/__media__/js/netsoltrademark.php?d=nudistpic.buzz 's a form of bonding between guys, fortifying their relationship with each other
-- verbally more than physically.
Among men, statements of homophobia, dialogues about women and the
ways in which the gaze is performed as a non-sensual looking shield the
communal nakedness of guys from signifying nakedness-as-sexual. Additionally,
among girls there are special codes of behavior that cease the nakedness in
communal showers from stealing into the sexual. I am reliably told that
women in this type of website will frequently either have a dialogue that avoids drawing
attention to the common nudity as accessible to the gaze of others or, if more
comfortable, remain perfectly silent. These too are special ritualistic codes
which prevent the nakedness/gaze duality from being understood as having a
sexual element, no matter the ways in which such nakedness/gazing might
be involved in acts of policing the physical.
So what, lately, has been happening to the site of the communal shower as
a framework in which authorized nakedness is tied up with various legitimate
According to a 1996 Awesome York Times article, showering after
gym class by secondary school males is not only on the decline but has now
Although the writer speculates that
this decline intersects with issues of modesty and expectancies of body image and
tness, he also points to an erotic part:
... some health and physical education specialists claim that many students draw [from
post-exercise showering] just because of the overload of erotic images -- so many perfectly
toned bodies cannot help but leave common mortals feeling a bit insufficient. (Johnson, 1996)
Marketing, combined with the collapse of 'compulsory heterosexuality' and the
heterosexual matrix increases the concern that communal nakedness among lads will
be gazed upon in sexual or sexualized ways that have previously been shielded
participants in the showers are heterosexual and can therefore merely perform a
sexual gazing at another gender. This 'ethnic concern' is augmented farther as
the stereotype of gay men as non-sporting is increasingly discredited.
trates this recent cultural matter over shower-space nudity increasingly coupled
with sexual or erotic kinds of gazing. While depictions of nude girls in lm
have been common and cannot easily be separated from a want for lusty gazing
The Naked Subject
by a phallocentric lm sector, the portrayal of nude males in lm is by no
means recent. As http://mypageresults.com/__media__/js/netsoltrademark.php?d=nudists-young.org as the 1925 production of Ben-Hur, male frontal nudity
was shown on screen and, despite the ban on nudity through the intervention of
the Motion Picture Association of America Production Code between 1934 and
1968 (Russo, 1981: 121--2), a spate of popular lms from the 1970s onwards
depicted man nudity --
implicit eroticism that is encoded in this type of website. The relative adjustment of the
system where the trajectory of sexual or attractive want is allowed to expand
to either sex (as long as it is an ostensible, coherent gender) destabilizes the
non-sexuality of the site. Where blondes on a beach can no longer be under-
stood to guard against the presence of desire as homoerotic want, and where the
Possible fall of homosociality with homosexuality is increasingly charged,
the site becomes unstable, and nakedness and gazing upon it can no longer be
understood as completely non sexual forms of pleasurable task.
Nevertheless, the instability between the framework of the communal showers and
that of the sexual is generally understood by participants. Particular rituals are
in place to stop the homosociality of communal nakedness sliding into homo-
sexuality. As Janene Hancock recently points out, these rituals are practised in
the sorts of 'appropriate' conversation:
When sportsmen gather in the locker room, before or after a game, and their conversation turns
to girls, the semantics used are not always complimentary. They discuss problems for example their
sexual conquests, their art at picking-up, taking out and 'sleeping with' the girls they meet,
Too as fairly regularly-lurid details concerning their sexual exploits. . . . Locker room conversa-
tion is about making men feel positive about themselves, solidifying their maleness and
rejecting any understanding that they may belong to the marginalised maleness of gays or
poofters. http://www.berktest.org/__media__/js/netsoltrademark.php?d=nudistpic.buzz 's a form of bonding between guys, fortifying their relationship with each other
-- verbally more than physically.
Among men, statements of homophobia, dialogues about women and the
ways in which the gaze is performed as a non-sensual looking shield the
communal nakedness of guys from signifying nakedness-as-sexual. Additionally,
among girls there are special codes of behavior that cease the nakedness in
communal showers from stealing into the sexual. I am reliably told that
women in this type of website will frequently either have a dialogue that avoids drawing
attention to the common nudity as accessible to the gaze of others or, if more
comfortable, remain perfectly silent. These too are special ritualistic codes
which prevent the nakedness/gaze duality from being understood as having a
sexual element, no matter the ways in which such nakedness/gazing might
be involved in acts of policing the physical.
So what, lately, has been happening to the site of the communal shower as
a framework in which authorized nakedness is tied up with various legitimate
According to a 1996 Awesome York Times article, showering after
gym class by secondary school males is not only on the decline but has now
Although the writer speculates that
this decline intersects with issues of modesty and expectancies of body image and
tness, he also points to an erotic part:
... some health and physical education specialists claim that many students draw [from
post-exercise showering] just because of the overload of erotic images -- so many perfectly
toned bodies cannot help but leave common mortals feeling a bit insufficient. (Johnson, 1996)
Marketing, combined with the collapse of 'compulsory heterosexuality' and the
heterosexual matrix increases the concern that communal nakedness among lads will
be gazed upon in sexual or sexualized ways that have previously been shielded
participants in the showers are heterosexual and can therefore merely perform a
sexual gazing at another gender. This 'ethnic concern' is augmented farther as
the stereotype of gay men as non-sporting is increasingly discredited.
trates this recent cultural matter over shower-space nudity increasingly coupled
with sexual or erotic kinds of gazing. While depictions of nude girls in lm
have been common and cannot easily be separated from a want for lusty gazing
The Naked Subject
by a phallocentric lm sector, the portrayal of nude males in lm is by no
means recent. As http://mypageresults.com/__media__/js/netsoltrademark.php?d=nudists-young.org as the 1925 production of Ben-Hur, male frontal nudity
was shown on screen and, despite the ban on nudity through the intervention of
the Motion Picture Association of America Production Code between 1934 and
1968 (Russo, 1981: 121--2), a spate of popular lms from the 1970s onwards
depicted man nudity --
. The two-gender exclusiveness of the shower website betrays the high)