That “Boys Locker Room” Everyone Talks About? I Never Saw It
I was scrolling TikTok after work last week, waiting for my pasta to boil, and I stumbled on one of those viral takes about the inherent toxicity of the boys locker room. You know the one: it’s a lawless pit where every guy shames every other guy for being too soft, too small, too into anything that isn’t football or lifting or girls, and everyone just goes along with it because that’s just what guys do. I paused, fork hovering over the pot, and tried to square that with the locker room I spent three years changing in for high school PE and cross country practice. It didn’t fit. Not even a little.
My old locker room was in the basement of the 100-year-old gym building. It smelled like a mix of old grape Gatorade spilled on cinder block, that weird mildew that never went away from the showers, and the cheap popcorn the concession stand stored in the closet down the hall. The lockers were all dented, most of them didn’t lock, and the one I got sophomore year had someone’s old pair of jock straps crammed in the back that I didn’t find for two weeks. I was 14, 5’4, still had crooked braces, and was so self conscious about changing in front of people I spent the first month changing in the handicap stall. No one said a word. No one banged on the door yelling for me to get out, no one teased me for hiding. Most guys didn’t even notice I was gone. Half of them were changing in stalls too, for their own weird reasons.
First week of freshman football camp, I forgot my deodorant. I was panicking, because I’d already sweated through my shirt and I was convinced everyone would smell me and talk about it for the rest of the year. This senior, Jake, who was starting middle linebacker, the guy all the underclassmen were scared of, saw me digging through my bag and just tossed me his extra stick of that shitty Original Old Spice. Didn’t even stop talking to his friend about the party he was going to that weekend. Just nodded at me and that was it. I still think about that sometimes. No big speech, no heroic moment, just a guy who didn’t want a freshman to spend all practice embarrassed.
Sophomore year, I ate a bad pop tart before practice, ran three miles, and ended up barfing right by the water fountain by the lockers. I was so humiliated I just stood there, red as a tomato, with tears in my eyes because I thought for sure everyone would rag on me for the rest of the semester. Two guys on the team, one was the captain who was supposed to be this macho hardass, just grabbed a handful of paper towels from the dispenser, mopped it up before the coach even came over, handed me a cold bottle of water, and told me to go sit in the bleachers. Yeah, they joked about it for a couple weeks. “Dude, save the pop tart for after practice, yeah?” But it was never mean. It was just dumb high school guy joking, the kind that’s more about “we all did dumb embarrassing stuff” than “we’re picking on you.”
I’m not saying nothing bad ever happened there. Once, a freshman named Milo got dragged for having holes in the bottom of his sneakers—his mom couldn’t afford new ones. Some idiot junior made a big show of pointing it out during PE. Before anyone could even say anything else, two guys on the basketball team told the junior to shut the fuck up, and one of them went to his locker, grabbed an extra pair of Nikes he’d outgrown that were just sitting there, and handed them to Milo. That story never makes it into the viral takes, does it? The part where most people step in, not join in.
I think the problem is that we only ever talk about the worst moments. The one time a bunch of guys were dicks goes viral, gets shared a million times, becomes the default story for what every boys locker room is like. Movies have been pushing this for decades, right? Every 80s teen comedy has the evil jocks picking on the dork in the locker room, so we just internalize that that’s how it is. But in real life? Most guys are just tired. Most of us are just as awkward and self conscious as everyone else. No one’s standing around the locker room comparing dick sizes or looking for people to shame. We’re all just trying to change fast enough to get to lunch on time, or beat the traffic home, or cram for the math test we have next period. We’re all too busy worrying about our own embarrassing stuff to care about yours.
A couple years ago I played rec league softball here in the city. Our team got a new player, a trans guy named Sam who’d just switched leagues to play with the men’s division. We were all a little worried, honestly, that someone would be an asshole in the locker room after the game. First time we all changed together, the oldest guy on our team, Ron, a 42 year old plumber who wears a faded Steelers hat everywhere and brings a cooler of beer to every game, just walked over, clapped Sam on the shoulder, and said “Took you long enough to get out of the women’s league, kid. Good to have you.” Then handed him a beer. That was it. No big speech, no drama, no one made it weird. Just a guy treating another guy like a normal person.
I know it’s bad in some places. I have a friend who went to an all-boys prep school outside Boston who told me some horrible stories about hazing and shaming that went on there that the administration just ignored. I don’t doubt that toxic locker room culture exists in some spaces. But it’s not universal. It’s not the default that every single guy who’s ever changed after a sports practice has experienced. The monolith that people call “the boys locker room” that’s supposed to represent how all men act when they’re around other men? It’s just not real.
I commented that on a similar TikTok once, a couple months back, said that my experience was nothing like that, and got a dozen replies saying I was lying, that I was just complicit in the toxicity. Maybe I got lucky. Maybe my high school was some weird exception. But I talk to other guys my age, and almost all of them have similar stories. The quiet kindnesses, the unspoken agreements to leave each other alone, the stupid jokes that never cross into being mean. No one posts those stories, though. They’re boring. They don’t go viral. They don’t fit the narrative that we’ve all bought into about what men are like. The boys locker room everyone talks about? It’s just a story. It never existed for most of us. Just a bunch of awkward, tired guys trying to get through the day, same as everyone else.
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