Hygiene is important, being social is important — so what could be a better idea than showering with a pal?
Long before plumbing existed, people used public natural showers — waterfalls. If bathing in a river anyway, and there was a waterfall available, you’d be foolish not to use the added pressure and enjoyment that a bit of gravity could bring.
In Ancient Egypt, rich people began doing a low-tech version of showering indoors, which involved having servants bring jugs in to wash them with. For a lot of history, showering with company has taken place in the gray area between privacy and exhibition that is being washed by servants — while to modern eyes being scrubbed down by several members of staff seems fairly social, in a society where “the help” are seen as, pretty much, part of the furniture, it was possible to feel modest and shy while someone else cleaned you.
In Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece, the creation of plumbing and aqueducts led to bathhouses becoming popular, both in the interests of hygiene and as a social activity. While baths were the main focus (it’s not just a clever name), many of them also had communal shower rooms, thought to have been used fairly similarly to modern ones — men in one room, women in another, places to hang your stuff, have fun.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, a lot of the habits they had built around hygiene were forgotten and abandoned for a while, and the shower as we know it didn’t really crop up again until Britain in the 18th century. The early models were both unheatable and used the same water again and again, so didn’t become enormously popular for home use (and don’t really scream out “the more the merrier”).
By the late 19th century, though, the importance of hygiene was becoming increasingly clear, and armies began requiring soldiers to shower on mass. Hosing yourself down inches away from your comrades in arms became commonplace, a habit that was taken up by boarding schools and became well-established enough that public bathhouses began installing communal showers as well.
Showers only started being built into homes in the US in the 1920s, and weren’t the default until the 1950s. Other countries were slower to adopt them — in 1988 only 36% of houses in Great Britain had showers, possibly due to the rainy weather making them seem less appealing.
But it seems safe to say that, once in the home, sharing showers became part of many people’s lives. John and Mimi Lobell’s famous swinging manual A Free Marriage, written in 1973, describes plenty of shared showers in pedestrian enough terms that it’s clear the swinging, not the location, is the point of the story. A meta-analysis of sex manuals described in the New York Times in 1973 described people “being strapped wrist over wrist to the shower nozzle” — it was very much established as a place for more than one person to enjoy themselves at a time.
There were more and more public communal showers too, with an explosion in gyms in the second half of the twentieth century. Also, prisons — the shared showers in women’s prisons became the setting for sequences in a lot of low-budget exploitation movies. The 1981 teen sex comedy Porky’s became a huge success largely on the basis of scenes set in the showers of a women’s locker room.
Other cinematic shared shower scenes include:
- The Specialist, in which Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone’s characters have sex in a shower while on the run.
- Midnight Express, which features some brutal shower-based violence as well as some man-on-man tenderness.
- Starship Troopers, in which the army of the future is shown to use co-ed showers together.
One early viral sensation on the internet was based around platonic shared showers — in 1999, after some colleagues claimed he only pretended to be gay to attract women, San Francisco film producer Brian Benson launched The Shower Project. In it, he took nude but non-sexual showers with 100 women in a year, sharing photos of the endeavor online (consensually).
That project is no longer on the internet, but it has spiritual successors — modern social media has spawned multiple cheerful shower-based trends, which while often solo, are done in a communal, sharing way: showering with company even when alone in the house. The subreddit r/showerbeer is an ever-growing collection of people showering with beers (it’s also not just a clever name) — some alone, some with company, some coy and family-friendly, some as NSFW as it gets. And TikTok was recently home to the “shower orange” trend — enjoying citrus fruit while washing, again sometimes with company, and with the hope of being seen by as many people as possible.
There might just be something about showering that makes people want company. Is it the feeling of being fully enveloped in warmth and wetness that feels like it needs to be a shared experience, or it is just the practical fact that most showers have, as long as you get on well, space for one more?
