The Communal Showers of a College Football Team

During a water break in my first college football practice, a thought comes over me: after this is over, how do we shower? I remember how the privacy of my high school’s individual showers made me feel safe, but here, how the shower heads line the walls, encircle a wide open tile floor, and wait silently for a hundred grown men to flow in. There are no curtains, just empty, shiny, vulnerable space. 

As practice comes to a close, I’m anxious as men I barely know started undressing, venturing quickly into the shower. Jerseys and shorts are dropping to the locker room floor, and bodies which I only slightly recognize are now nude. These bodies are unabashed. While they’ve been seen by each other, mine is a stranger. I awkwardly wait and watch to figure out what to do. 

I see that football is a hypermasculine space: hypermasculine in that it’s not innately manly, but in that society’s notions of what a man should be play out at heightened levels. My sociology class has taught me much about sex and gender, how gender has been socially constructed, how it’s produced unequal power dynamics, how we reify the norms and roles as natural, and how we, as actors in a sort of play—or players in a sport—do gender. And in this sport, we’re all playing scared. 

Some of my teammates are more reserved than others; they sit on the benches of their lockers in towels, waiting until the showers are less crowded to wash up. But others absolutely love showing their naked bodies. These men walk proudly past me, strutting around the locker room with towels draped over their shoulders instead of around their waists. They jut their pelvises outward, flaunting their penises. I haven’t even stripped my shorts yet. 

Undressing in front of others, I find, is a vulnerable act. After the helmet and pads come off, our clothes—our remaining protective gear—are all that’s left to hide us from a world we only let see so much of us. Nude beach goers will say they feel awkward but free. My teammates don’t feel awkward, which I marvel at, but they also don’t seem free. As the hot steam of unashamed liberty rises, its homophobia makes my glasses cloudy. The air is filled by raw masculinity, the essence of a hundred manufactured boyhoods. But there is none of the vulnerability that nudity usually produces. Maybe my teammates are compensating for their loss of control—something I haven’t yet learned to cope with. Without clothes, we all find ourselves searching for something to put on. 

Like my teammates, I don’t feel free as I’m undressing. Not as I’m walking with my towel to the communal shower. Not as I slip my towel from my waist and drape it over the showerhead. I feel vulnerable, incredibly seen, incredibly scrutinized. I’m scared, fearful as much as they are that my unhidden self will become a common, naked fact. My heart’s pounding at my exposure, and although I shouldn’t, I fear violence: the seminal aspect of football—a man’s game. My teammates get to don homophobia as a set of invisible clothes, protection against what football cannot be. But I shower quickly, trying to both hide my frontside and shield my backside. 

In football, masculinity is manifested, morphed, and weaponized to win games. To combat the lingering threat that queerness poses to this sport’s identity, the culture reinforces the manly tradition of heterosexuality. But for all those involved, this is a trap. My teammates choke themselves in the confines of gender, harshly yelling gay jokes, and leveling gay accusations like a witch hunt. Naked men are stomping and slushing over wet white tiles, and the word “faggot” pierces through the heavy air. 

Blame won’t fix this culture. I could call my teammates victims just as much as bigots, and point a finger at society, an awfully large source of constant blame. I hear some men slapping each other's butts, others joking about dropping the soap. I turn the water off, watch it slip from my hair and flow down my naked body. I grab my towel and wrap up my waist, then head towards my locker with fixed eyes at the floor beneath my feet.

While many of my teammates—in no rush to slip into sweatpants and sweatshirts—linger naked in the locker room, I hurry to get dressed in my collared shirt and pants. I like my clothes. I’m proud of them, and I hide in them. Perhaps I should be more free. But I'd only be if football signed a collective contract with tolerance. Till then, I’ll covet my own fearful privacy, even as I’m curious to see the vulnerable bodies showering next to me. That’s unfair though. I should accept my teammates, and in their vulnerability, accept that they are all imperfectly human.

Still, I catch myself with wandering eyes, judging a shower room full of strangers by what I hear and what I see. I realize that these bodies are human, and they only slightly differ in color and size and shape. Some bodies are big and stout to block rushers and protect a quarterback. These lineman hurl hilarious insults aimed at each other's bodies across the tile floor. The big men in football love to call each other fat; sometimes the little receivers—with bodies small enough to weave and quick enough to score—will use that word when insulting them too. When they do it, it’s harder to laugh. Some linemen find it funny, others will frown and have nothing to say back. While some bodies are thin to leverage the motion of a throw or leg swing, I also see beer bellies and blubber. One sculpted specimen has an eight-pack. Others have warts and red spots, splotches and stretch marks. Some guys have hairy chests, others are trimmed from head to toe. Some use four-in-one soap; the rest of us have class. Butts are muscular and flubbery and everywhere in between. Careful to not look for too long, I glance at flaccid penises, which surprisingly don’t vary much at all. They’re small, shriveled up organs that make life happen—if the purpose of life is to urinate and reproduce. They’re mostly circumcised, and they’re all pretty much just blobs of flesh and nerves. Here in the showers, there isn’t much to them. In this context, they seem like vulnerable objects rather than sleeping giants, dangerous weapons, or scandalous perversions. We all have them, and more importantly, we’re all just people: vulnerable human bodies gilded in sweatshirts and sweatpants, designer clothes and jewelry. 

I struggle not to psychoanalyze my teammates, to pick apart their bigotry and wonder why they call each other fat, dark, and gay—why they can never be vulnerable, and why I can’t either. Maybe it has something to do with my racial otherness, walk-on otherness, or dietary otherness. Maybe it’s in how my body jolts every time I hear the word “fag,” and my brain feels numb from too much thinking. No matter what reasons I cite, they’re all connected. What really stops me from being me is fear, and the same is true for my teammates. We’re all fearful, so fearful that we constrict and contort ourselves into football’s invincible manhood—then wonder why we put up defenses and put on clothes to hide ourselves and cover our nakedness.