You see, locker rooms have always been divided into two sections: males vs females. This worked in a traditional world because it guaranteed you won't have to walk around naked in front of random strangers who could potentially have sexual interest in your body.
Enter the age of open homosexuality, and that intricate balance is disturbed. If the latest figures are to be trusted, at least one of those ten men sharing the gym locker room with me is going to be checking out my naked butt. Call me backwards, but that is well beyond my naked-butt-checkout-risk threshold. I'm just not comfortable with those odds! To make this point clearer to female readers: Ladies imagine how uncomfortable you'd feel changing if one in 10 people in your locker room was a man.
On the face of it, it would appear you could solve this problem by basing the locker room dichotomy on sexual interest rather than gender. But once you give that a moment's thought, you'll realize it wouldn't work. This would place gay men along with straight women in one section (because they're both into men), but gay men ARE men and so they probably won't be comfortable naked around women who might find them sexually attractive. It's quite the dilemma.
Besides, from a pure game theory perspective, a situation where gay men landed the same locker room as straight women, every straight man's best play would be to pretend to be gay, just to get in. So that the women's locker room would be full of straight men, while all the gay men would pretend to be straight just to land the men's locker room. It would quickly get out of hand.
In fact, the only proper solution would be to split the lockers into four different sections, by gender as well as by orientation. This of course comes with its own overhead in cost and logistics. Just imagine the effort needed to come up with intuitive logos to place on the doors! I mean, It took us decades to figure out the man/woman bathroom logos just right!
And if you think those are the biggest challenges, think again. I mean, haven't we all forgotten something?
That's right, bisexuals...
Bisexuals just don't fit anywhere in a locker room. I mean, you can't even have one separate section for them, because every one of them is attracted to everyone else! They are the enriched plutonium of society: put a critical mass of them within any social mass and you'll get a big boom.
In fact, the only way to deal with bisexuals would be to deny them entry to any zone that exhibits naked human bodies. But denying them entry based on sexual orientation would violate their rights, which leads to the central conjecture of this article:
The only way to run a sexually-benign locker room in the presence of GLBT would be to provide every single person with their own little private section. This of course would be the end of the establishment of the American locker room as we know it.
It is therefore unavoidable from the perspective of this author that the modern trend of sexual freedom is going to clash with the timeless tradition that is the American locker room. Which of those two titans will prevail only time can tell. I only pray that we all be spared the horrors of the ensuing battle.
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