Quote:
Originally Posted by pike
Increasing personal privacy has been a long term trend; it didn't start when we were young.
My father was the youngest of a large family & had much older siblings. We would sometimes visit the farm of his oldest sibling who had a lot of children but never made it into the modern age in the bathroom department. They had an outhouse...a 3 seat outhouse!
Now taking a crap right next to 2 other people would really freak me out but it was something that people back then were used to.
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Nope. It takes a bit more to freak me out than taking a dump with two other dudes.
Actually, I used to live in a studio apartment all by myself in my freshman year. Dudes would come to party now and then, and have a sleepover, too. No one ever locked the bathroom for obvious reasons (I only had one of those...). So, on a busy morning one dude was showering, another dude was shaving, and pretty often, a third dude came in to piss or take a dump. At times, a fourth one came in and waited for his turn to do whatever. Sure, all kinds of well-meaning if rather frivolous banter ensued.
True, we were all peers; most of us had had sex with each other, which all made it much easier not to freak out, but no one was really any shy at all.
You were 18-19-20. You saw yourself as an adult. You had seen your buddies naked like a million times, and you did not think there was anything to hide from them any longer.
We left 'being shy' to like 12 year old boys. Showing shyness meant you were immature, in our time and day, that is...
Besides, showering together, using the bathroom together, keeping no doors locked in the apartment were all strong bonding rituals for most of us.
Even my str8 friends came to ask to wear one of my shirts for a particular date, and I'd wear some of theirs on some days.
We'd often drink from a same bottle, puff away from the same cig, or light up a cig for a buddy, str8 or gay alike.
Generally, a grown up male (that's how we liked to see ourselves in those days
), was supposed to stop short of sweating the small stuff. Sure, to some extent, this was a pose, too.
But shyness among other men, naked or not was out of the window for good. This did not necessarily make us better men. But it sure did make our lives less complicated.
KD