Locker Room School

Education can be everywhere we look. We are taking it in all the time. Many of these things we learn, we never share with other people. Take the things you learn in a women's locker room, for example. I go to a gym every day (with mixed feelings on so many different levels and planes). I think a place like a gym locker room is an important place for me as a young woman. At first, I felt a little uncomfortable seeing all these female strangers walking around nude in the locker room. Women from many different countries come to this locker room, and I realized that so many of them seem to feel infinitely more comfortable in their own bare skin than I do. Curiosity has since overtaken my discomfort. I now remember how much I learned about what would happen to my body as I grew up when I went into women's locker rooms at the public swimming pool with my mother when I was a little girl. I remember how I would stare, as children do, at shapes that I knew I would one day take on myself. Now I'm too culturally trained to stare, but I do learn so much from the corner of my eye. Most men probably have some fantasy idea of what a women's locker room is like, but that couldn't be further from the reality. In a women's locker room, you will see long tangles of red, blonde, and black hair in shower drains. You will see that young women with the most cookie cutter attractive bodies and faces actually have so many interesting and unique differences under their clothing. (The media would call these flaws, I call them refreshing realities.) You will also see the sacrifices of motherhood and grandmotherhood weighing on women's bodies. You will see the most interesting birthmarks. You will see bruises in the strangest places. If you are a woman, you will see everything that you have been and that you will be. You will see so many American women try to hide their own bodies behind towels, no matter what their age, shape or size. You might catch yourself doing the same, but then stop, realizing that someone might learn a little more about their own life from watching yours out of the corner of their eye.