Feeling like I don’t want to use our local swimming pool

Fully communal mixed sex showers are pretty unusual. I'm familiar with changing areas that are mixed sex but not open communal showers in a mixed sex environment. I can't imagine many women who'd be comfortable with that. And what about if you take young children with you to the pool?

The pool I take my children to has mixed sex changing rooms but the showers and changing room cubicles are all private with doors you can lock. That's totally fine with me. Having communal showers with not even a curtain you can pull across for privacy sounds awful to me.

Actually I haven't made it clear, it was communal showers but you got dressed in cubicles. I suppose as we were on holiday it was very convenient for us as a family to shower and dress together.

Not sure I would like fully communal showering. Our local pool has communal changing area with a mixture of single cubicles, cubicles with change table and a couple of family cubicles but, with the exception of three showers that are only really used to rinse on the way into/out of the pool, the showers are all also in individual cubicles. So far I haven't found it intimidating and like the family aspect when we swim as a family.

Effectively, there are underwater cameras that monitor swimmers.

Useful for prosecuting sexual assaults, “heavy petters” and pool wankers as well as finding drowning swimmers quickly, I’d imagine. Creepy as fuck though, because who knows what happens to the footage once its hoovered up in the cloud.

slipper if only it was that quick and discreet. The one and only time I walked into one of these changing rooms, there were at least four men walking around stark naked, completely unconcerned, no towels or rush to cover up, one naked man was in front of a mirror doing something to his hair. It wasn't so much the fact that I would have been quickly in and out of there, it was more the fact of entering a enclosed separate space with many naked men and no way to avoid being in close proximity. I would rather have no changing rooms at all and everyone just change in the open by the side of the pool rather than a mixed changing room behind a closed door.

My local pool is like this. There are women-only sessions, that are very popular and about 80% Asian, but even these have male staff on duty and they don’t throw men out of the communal changing rooms. There is also a lot of resistance from men when they are told to leave the pool- lots of heel dragging, trying to get individual women to say they don’t mind them staying... The last time I went I arrived about 20 minutes before the start of the women’s session, and there was a group of around 15 men just standing around the edge of the pool chatting. They quite clearly didn’t have any reason to be there other than to try and intimidate staff and female customers.

When we go on holiday to caravan parks the swimming pool always has this arrangement. Surely it's the same as being in or round the pool with your cossie on? I wash my hair and then my body with my cossie on, quick swish round my bum, no one sees anything surely?

Washing is a very intimate activity, isn't it? Think about the artists who painted women (usually) bathing - it's not the fact that they are nude that makes you feel like you are interrupting, it's because washing is personal

Ours has a row of 5 showers along the wall and another 5 with cubicles.
It's the same setup as center parcs etc which I've never seen anyone complain.
I've never had a proper shower in a pool, just wash my hair and hope the suds was any chlorine away.

I use showers at the pool for a rinse and wash property when I get home, I've never seen anyone wash their genitals they are too public.

Our local pool is like this. The changing rooms are called a changing village. Some cubicles are family ones, some for two people, some for single. Some have showers inside. No way of knowing from the outset which are which. Only learning by opening doors lets you know.

When I take dc it’s children swim lessons, but the public swim is before. I’ve seen all sorts, and it annoys me that we have to put up with men undesssing and only separated by a cubicle wall.

I can see for families it’s good, but I think some should be female only spaces.

I'm not so keen either after reading this in the paper recently:

www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/news/yorkshire-man-jailed-for-filming-teen-girls-as-they-got-undressed-in-changing-rooms-and-bathrooms-1-9451644

I hate this too. I feel like I’m on show when I’m lathering myself up and rinsing off, especially when it come to washing hair and legs. It makes me feel so uncomfortable.

I wish council run gyms would go back to sex segregated changing, with a third space (large cubicles) for family changing.

A friend lives in a city where they've installed this anti-drowning system in her local swimming pool but it's not been made live yet. Effectively, there are underwater cameras that monitor swimmers.

www.kentonline.co.uk/dover/news/cameras-at-pool-spark-concern-189780/

Her local pool has women-only sessions that are popular with women of particular cultures - and they've negotiated with the pool that the only lifeguards and attendants present during those sessions are female. Curtains are drawn round the pool during the women-only sessions to ensure that no outside eyes can see the women.

As yet - there have been no guarantees about the sex of whoever will monitor the underwater cameras (think offsite CCTV system with a direct link to alert people on site to the fact an algorithm is warning that someone might be drowning).

For reasons that are, as yet, unclear, recordings will be retained for 7 days - with no information as to who has access to them.

It's a cost-saving measure (tho' I'm not too sure of the evidence-base for this or the system). Without guarantees around the sex of the person who might view the monitors or recordings, there's a set of women whose activities in public spaces will be limited even further. I don't know what they'd do with a set-up like the one OP describes.

You must, must, must write formal letters of complaint. Informal complaints to reception aren't going to go anywhere and are easily ignored.
If they can't change newly built unisex changing rooms immediately they can at least adopt a zero tolerance policy to men wandering around naked there aka flashing.

Fairly standard for public swimming pools tbh. I know the three I have worked in all had this set up and we’re built this way in the 70s and 80s so it’s not a new thing at all.

(We live in an area where the population is 45% Asian as well, so I can't understand why the leisure centre has taken that step.)

Ours is like this but has some showers in cubicles. It has plenty of cubicles and works very well.

Our local one did this, I won't go there anymore. It was ok a few times in the summer when it was so hot it was kind of a pleasure to wear my wet swimsuit home under a dress, but no longer. The last time I went, women were changing in the ladies toilets off the main reception because the changing rooms had multiple naked men wandering around and no women at all, you couldn't get to the cubicles in the back without walking past them. And then we were told off for coming into the reception dripping with water.

I'm sure the management are happily telling all and sundry that there have been no issues at all since they went to unisex changing rooms. That's because they're not actually unisex, just monosex - male.

Most public swimming pools have communal showers, never really had an issue with it.

Could you find out if there are women-only sessions? It would be worth trying different times, you may have just got the resident super-soaper. I've been using the nearest pool for ten years and only ever seen the sudsy trunks-rummager once.

Ours has a mixture of open/shared showers plus some cubicles. It works ok, really, but prefer a proper shower at home. I have trained at a pool with the set up you describe, though, and I wasn't keen. Tbh most of my swimming is outdoors so I generally get changed under a huge coat behind my car, and if there are men in the group they're people I know well (plus, too busy freezing their whatsits off for anything else). You get used to being lake-whiffy and washing at home!

It sounds awful....

But now I think about it all the swimming locally have communal showers (even before family changing) I doubt anyone is looking at you as much as you think.

I don‘t mind the mixed changing room with cubicles at our pool, however, I very much appreciate that the showers are sex segregated. (Having a son, I can see that this might be helpful as an additional option, but no sex segregated showers at all sounds weird. Never seen that and I have come across a number of public pools. Heck I‘m even fine with using the mixed Sauna, towel only. But showers? Nah.)

My 5 local pools all have this (bar the ones in schools that sometimes open to the public out of hours). It means I only go swimming when I can go home and shower afterwards. It is especially annoying because chlorine forms a chemical bond with the skin and requires proper washing off, not just a cursory rinse. But am I going to stand there using my hands to wash soap all over my body in front of males? Hmmm. This is even before you think of how much of your skin is covered by your swimming costume and is not going to be properly rid of the chlorine.