Pool users asked to cover up in lockerrooms
Brossard among municipalities reminding pool users to cover up
Roland Bérard has been using Brossard’s indoor pool for 30 years.
It never occurred to the 67-yearold healing facilitator and former engineer that it was inappropriate to take all his clothes off in the locker-room to shower and change.
But the South Shore municipality informed swimmers in its November newsletter that nudity is forbidden in changing rooms.
“The city would like to remind users of the public pools that in the changing rooms, they must be clothed, covered up or use the cubicles or toilets,” aquatic supervisor Dominique Lavigne wrote in an email to Bérard after he sent a query about the new rules.
Locker-room etiquette will get even more complicated two years from now when Brossard opens a new aquatic centre with a universal changing room, rather than separate ones for men and women.
Lavigne noted that part of the reason the city has banned nudity is to get pool users accustomed to the idea that they have to cover up in the locker-room.
Universal changing rooms are a growing trend as communities seek to make recreational facilities more gender-inclusive and responsive to the needs of people with disabilities, who might need to be accompanied by a member of the opposite sex.
From the YMCA in Calgary’s Quarry Park neighbourhood to the University of Guelph, universal, gender-neutral changing rooms, with cubicles where users can change in privacy are becoming increasingly common.
The trend follows bitter legal battles in the United States over access to locker-rooms for transgender students.
But users in the habit of peeling off their clothes without a second thought complain the increase in inclusivity is coming at the cost of less individual freedom.
Bérard, who swims laps at the Antoine-Brossard pool two mornings a week, says there’s nothing shameful about the human body, and that you can’t take a proper shower unless you’re naked.
“I’m all for respect, but when I’m taking my shower I don’t want to wear my bathing suit,” he added.
In her email reply to Bérard, Lavigne explained that since parents are allowed to bring children up to the age of seven into changing rooms, there is a risk children could see naked adults of the opposite sex.
Alain Gauthier, Brossard’s director of communications, did not return calls and emails from the Montreal Gazette despite promising a response on Wednesday.
Bérard argued that rather than banning nudity, the city should let parents teach their children how to behave appropriately in a changing room.
“It seems to be fear-based,” he said of the new rules.
But signs popping up at Montreal-area pools warning users to cover up suggest there’s a generational shift in what’s considered acceptable.
CBC’s Baroness von Sketch Show skewered that difference in its sketch Locker Room, portraying women over 40 as totally comfortable with their nudity while under-40s were horrified by seeing older women parade their lessthan-perfect bodies.
In a second email to Bérard on Wednesday, Lavigne noted that Longueuil, St-Hubert and the Villeray–Saint-Michel–Parc-Extension borough have all cracked down on nudity in changing rooms.
“Morals evolve over time and the notion of modesty is evolving, too,” she wrote, adding that Brossard is seeking a legal opinion on the issue.
“Probably you and your family haven’t been ‘lucky’ enough to see it, but having used both pools regularly (evenings and weekends) and as manager of more than 100 lifeguards, I can tell you there is indeed a problem of dealing with nudity in the indoor pools,” Lavigne wrote.
In Pointe-Claire, signs warn pool users that nudity is not allowed in the family changing room, said Marie-Pier Paquette-Séguin, the city’s communications co-ordinator.
In the single-sex changing rooms, the issue is dealt with on a “case-by-case basis,” she said.
In Villeray–Saint-Michel–Parc-Extension, signs in the changing room (in French only) ask users “to be discreet when you change or take your shower” and “not to walk around in the nude.”
Audrey Villeneuve, communications officer for the north-central borough, said the policy was adopted in 2015 because adults and children both use the changing rooms and maintenance workers often have to go there.
“If people avoid walking around nude, it avoids disagreeable situations on both sides,” she said, noting that nudity is also banned at the Claude-Robillard sports centre.
While tolerance for nudity seems to be decreasing in North America — in changing rooms, anyway — that’s not the case in northern Europe, where naked swimmers rinse off in coed showers before entering the pool and nude family saunas are a perfectly acceptable activity.
Danes, who have family nudist nights and many beaches where clothing is optional, are “the most shameless people in the world,” writes British journalist Helen Russell, author of The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country.
“The result of all this embarrassment-free living? Danes have the highest level of contentment on the planet (so says the UN World Happiness Report) and don’t worry too much about what they look like,” she claimed in Britain’s Daily Telegraph.