Did they make you shower totally nude after PE? Do they make your kids?

[pstokely]

In the late 90s, they only made us shower with our shirts off in middle school (7-8) and not at all in Freshman PE and I never say anyone use the showers after Freshmen PE. The schools all had communal showers.

[Kaleva]

1. Yes

[Broken_Hero]

2. Yes

I always made it a point to have my PE right before lunch, so I could wait everyone out, then take my shower alone. I did that from Junior High through High School.

As of today, they don't make my son take a shower at all, he is in the 5th grade.

[Chan790]

3. No, only after football practice on rare occasion.

The showers were there for us to use anytime we wanted but none of us ever chose to except those times when we were made to...such as the night I had to go to an awards dinner straight from practice.

[Coyotl]

4. Nobody made us do it. Everyone just did. Why wouldn't you?

I spent eight years in a boarding school. Nudity was common in the dormitory and in the locker rooms, but the sexes had segregated dorms and locker rooms.

As an adult, the segregation is over. Now, nudity is no longer a segregated thing at festivals, the hot springs, etc. Of course, that may be different with conservatives.

[pstokely]

5. No one else showered when it didn't affect their grade

and I never sweated

[Tobin S.]

10. Some people are a little more modest than that

I also remember from my school days one kid getting horribly mocked for his physical attributes when nude in the locker room. That had to be terrible for him.

[hunter]

45. That may have been a kid like me.

When I quit high school I'd never shaved, I had no reason to.

Some of the male jocks called me "queerbait."

"Get out of my way, queerbait."

I heard that a lot.

One of my high school friends was a big girl who could kick anyone's ass, so that helped. Or maybe not.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

6. Yes, especially after teachers complained that

the students were smelly after gym class.

[Incitatus]

7. No one made us and students rarely did

[fortyfeetunder]

8. back in the last century yes

I don't like the idea of not having privacy in a shower....does any PE teacher on DU have an explanation for this?

[hunter]

47. I was never a PE teacher except as a sub and I'm not that old but I think it was military.

The draft ended January 27, 1973. Before that schools were preparing kids for military service. Quite a few of my classmates had older brothers who'd been drafted and were serving in Vietnam, and many of our PE teachers, including the women, were veterans.

[pstokely]

56. Mike Judge must have had one of those ex-military gym teachers

like Buzzcut from Beavis and Butt-head. A lot of kids today have their own bathrooms at home.

[alphafemale]

9. Yes. You got to where you didn't even think about it anymore.

I don't know why there aren't at least curtain dividers though. Toilets aren't on an open floor plan.

You should shower after gym out of courtesy to anyone that has to be within three feet of you for the remainder of the though.

[Denninmi]

12. Only a couple of times at the start of PE in junior high school.

Never in high school. Which, when I think back about it, was kind of gross to be walking around all day like that. I had PE first period my sophomore year in HS, and, while it didn't amount to much in terms of any educational value or physical health benefits, we did sweat at times.

Honestly, I didn't have the best body image/self esteem back then. Weak, no muscles, awkward, completely non-athletic. So, I was self-conscious and not comfortable within my own skin. I was glad that it wasn't forced on us. I think the PE teachers were too lazy to care, and too lazy to want to do the work involved of cleanup of a messy wet locker room, I'm sure it couldn't/wouldn't all wait for the janitorial staff at the end of the day.

But, there is a flip side to this, IMHO. I was very uptight about body image, to the point that I avoided doctors for a lot of years when I had conditions that should have been treated, like extremely high blood pressure. When I was 18/19, I had a male PCP, and I hated going. I had blood pressure readings at times somewhere in the range of 210/130, and I was not overweight, so it was genetic. And, I hated going to see him because I was uncomfortable with my body image, and so about age 20, I quit going. Which, of course, meant no blood pressure pills. I also was borderline type II diabetic, even when I was carrying 155-160 lbs on my six foot frame, so I was treated for that at age 18 with oral meds. By 20, when I quit going to doctors, that was not treated for years, either. For about oh, all of my 20's and into my mid-30's. And, lo and behold, I wondered why I felt like crap a lot of the time. It shouldn't have taken a rocket scientist to figure that one out, and I knew on a fundamental level, but I couldn't get past the fear of looking like, well, a weak nerd with no muscles and out of shape. So, I suffered and let damage be done to my internal organs by blood sugar fluctuations and high blood pressure. Now paying the price for years of neglecting my health, trying to undo the damage but I will always have some problems.

I have come to realize, after oh, so many years, nobody really gives a rat's ass about what you look like nude or otherwise, as an adult, except really, for yourself. The first time I had a physical with my current PCP, a woman, I was a little uptight about it, especially the "turn your head and cough" part that guys get, but you know, she's a professional, and God knows, she's probably seen guys worse looking and in far worse shape than I am. Doesn't bother me now, male or female, doctors don't care, and believe me, I've had enough medical conditions that every part of my anatomy has been poked, prodded, and inspected. You get over it.

If you can't make peace with your own body image, you will have problems in life. If you can, things like taking a shower in a gym locker room really won't bother you. That kind of peace with yourself won't come easily, not at a young age, and especially for any teenager who is in any way "different" from the standard of perfection, either scrawny, too tall, too short, not muscular, not athletic, overweight.

I guess what I would say to the OP, or anyone with kids of the age to be in this situation, is to think about the big, long term picture. Yes, it may be uncomfortable and embarrassing short term, but long term if you can get over that, it will make you less inclined to feel bad about yourself because of body image.

[Honeycombe8]

13. We didn't have to shower at all. Maybe it was a girl thing.

I don't think our junior high school even had showers. I was in high school in the late 60's, a modest time. I don't recall anyone showering, but have a vague recollection of the showers running, so I think they were fairly private stalls with curtains. Like in a gym nowadays.

I would never shower nude in a public area. I think it's disgusting when others do. I really don't wanna see that sort of thing. I come from a modest home...mainly female....I never did walk around nude or in my undies, and neither did my sisters.

[pipi_k]

18. I came from

a modest home as well.

I think I was in my late 30s the first time I was exposed to a locker room full of women running around in the altogether.

A couple of friends belonged to a community center, and my boyfriend at that time and I would meet them there for a few games of racquetball, after which we hit the showers.

I can't say I was disgusted, but I was highly embarrassed by the total abandon with which some of those women ran around sans clothing. Or even a towel, which they, FGS, could have wrapped around their waists, at the very least.

Some sort of concession toward the modesty of others...

[Honeycombe8]

51. Maybe "disgust" was too strong a word.

But sometimes, when I've run across it, I've felt some of the women were being ...what's the word when you intentionally expose yourself? An exhibitionist? No reason not to tie a towel around yourself.

I was exposed to that when I was a child, at the public swimming pool. I really don't think my sisters and I should've been exposed to totally nude grown women....bad when they're strangers, even worse when we knew them!

But then that paled in comparison to the thought of everyone peeing in the public pool. Yuk. I wouldn't go to a public pool now. When I was a kid....in those days, public pools were common. Most people didn't have pools in their backyards, even if they were wealthy.

[silentwarrior]

14. Yes, high school.

During the mid to late 70s in my school, we were forced and watched
by the PE teachers to shower. If they felt we had not showered long enough,
we would be sent back in.

[Sheldon Cooper]

44. My experience as well, same time frame, too.

Communal showers after every class, full nudity, watched by the gym teachers. My kids (30 years later) didn't have to shower at all.

[orleans]

53. same here. n/t

[Gidney N Cloyd]

15. Yep. Jr Hi and Hi in the early 70's for me.

And our showers were these winding tunnels with the water shooting out from pipes running along the sides. Some of the PE teachers were real sadists (why is that?) and played with the hot-cold valves from the control room while we ran through. If you didn't have any natural issues with nudity before that, you had plenty afterward. Today, when I work out, I do it at the end of the work day (at our fitness ctr at the college where I work) so I can dress in my office and skip the showers & locker room scene.

I haven't actually seen the college locker room since they last rehabbed it but it used to have a communal shower. Between that and the fact that the basketball team and their girlfriends were using the employee locker room as their clubhouse, it just seemed best to steer clear.

[pipi_k]

16. I can't say

we were actually forced to.

The girls locker room had shower stalls and we would walk back and forth covered by towels.

As long as we looked a bit damp, say on our arms, the gym teacher(s) pretty much let things slide.

We girls could get by without a shower at all by using the code word "excused" as we walked back into the locker room from gym. That meant we were having our periods...probably a time when we could have used a shower the most, but whatever. We got out of the entire thing for a week.

Oh, and if we had been forced to shower any other way, my dad would have been at the school raising holy hell. He was a modest man, and also sensitive to the modesty issues of his young daughters.

[silentwarrior]

17. We had some weird

PE teachers and we all knew they would be getting off on watching us girls.
We all tried the "just getting a bit damp on our arms bit", but when you have
the teachers constantly looking up and down your body, it freaked us out.

Looking back, we had many teachers in that school who were a bit dodgy and
by todays standards, they might have been, or should have been arrested for
gross misconduct of their positions in the school.

But hey, it was in the 70s and no one gave a shit then.

[pipi_k]

19. Ewwww

That looking you all up and down would have freaked me out as well!!!!

I feel fortunate to have had gym teachers who were less sadistic than that

[silentwarrior]

24. Yes it does sound Ewwww

and it was! I wished I had of told my mother at the time.

The braver girls in my class just used to hurl verbal abuse at the PE
teachers. I was too scared

[LWolf]

30. I had great teachers in the 70s.

I never had a PE teacher that I worried about.

Of course, the girls' PE teacher was a woman. Maybe that made a difference.

The only bad teacher I ever had was a high school geometry teacher.

[Digit]

20. Female, and yes

I went to high school in the 60's and yes, they made us shower together.

My daughter is grown so I don't know if she had to do the same.
I did notice that there was a general lack of PE in the curriculum when she attended school.
It may be because we are now living further south or maybe it was just the times.

[loli phabay]

21. we had the open plan showers with a drain in the middle

And shower heads mounted all along the walls.

[femmocrat]

38. That's how ours was too.

We had to shower or lose points.

[MiddleFingerMom]

22. k

[Iggo]

23. Me? Yes. Kids? No.

EDIT: male, 51, went to jr high and high school all in the 70s, and yes it was required, and yes we were punished if we didn't shower, and yes sometimes kids were thrown into the shower for trying to refuse, though that was rare.

[Bucky]

25. Showering with your clothes on seems counterproductive

Yes, they made us shower after gym in Jr. High. But back in the 70s all nudity hadn't be sexualized (and all sexuality hadn't been commercialized and pornographied).

[bigwillq]

26. No

We didn't have to shower after PE at any of the schools I went to.

[Still Blue in PDX]

27. Showering with your clothes on?

That seems odd.

We were required to shower in our nudies, which was one of the reasons (extreme awkwardness both socially and physically being the other) that I used various excuses to get out of PE during the year it was required. I don't know if I got D's instead of F's because the teacher took mercy on me or just wanted to get rid of me.

[likesmountains 52]

28. Yes, in the late 60's. We had to check out with the gym teacher and tell her if we had "sponged" or

showered. "Sponge" was just wiping clean if you had your period. We all usually just "sponged" because we didn't want to wreck our hairdos.

[LWolf]

29. Yes. nt

[Jamaal510]

31. No.

And even when I was on the baseball team a few years ago, they never made us shower. I'm not complaining, though!

[hunter]

32. Some of us used to streak around the campus naked after PE.

The 'seventies were an odd time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaking

And yes, some of the school staff were creepy old men (old being a relative term...) but not PE teachers so far as I know.

Showering nude was required. If you refused you simply flunked PE. PE was required. You could only get out of it if you had a note from your doctor.

When I started college casual nudity was still common and women would occasionally show up in the men's shower and vice-versa. But there was a double standard. Any woman could enter the men's showers, but women were extremely selective about the men who entered their showers. When I graduated nine years later (long story...) this simply didn't happen.

My kids weren't required to shower after PE in middle or high school. Most kids chose not to shower.

[Enrique]

33. we had to walk once around the pool naked before showering

no one ever thought about it at the time, but looking back I can't figure out what the purpose of it was, and everyone I tell it to says it's weird and I kind of agree.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

34. Yup, elementary school through high school

we had to take all our clothes off and shower after PE. I can only speak for the guys from personal experience, but a girl in 7th grade told me they did the same (which then drove me crazy thinking about it). This was in the 60s and at several schools around the country (my dad was in the Air Force and frequently transferred).

[kwassa]

35. Yes, it was the norm at the time.

We all showered nude in a large open room with shower heads coming off the walls. I remember doing this all the way back in elementary; I was drying off from such a shower when I heard that President Kennedy had been shot.

I don't know why nude showering has changed; this was before and during what became known as the sexual revolution of the sixties.

I am surprised by the prudishness expressed in thread. In the old days, men would go swimming nude at the YMCA, because it sex segregated. Nobody thought anything about it.

[kurtzapril4]

43. Some call it prudishness...

I call it modesty. I feel that my body is mine, it's private, and not for public display unless I choose to do so. Not everybody enjoys parading around naked in front of their classmates.

I think it's cruel to force kids/teens to bathe in front of their peers. It opens up allllllllll sorts of opportunities for bullying.

[kwassa]

50. Being a child of the '60s ...

and high school age at the time, I went to Woodstock in '69, where the only way to bathe was in a pond with several hundred other people. Almost all were naked.

Later, in the '80s, I belonged to a clothing-optional resort in Topanga Canyon. More naked people, of all possible ages and physical conditions.

I've heard many people who have done this say the same thing; after the first ten minutes, you've seen everything you are going to see, and being nude among others seems like the most natural thing in the world. The other benefit is that there is no one out there with a perfect body, and one becomes much more accepting of the vast variety of physical types that exist in this universe. It wipes out the false sense of body perfection promoted in mass media, that virtually no one has.

Of course, no one who hasn't experienced this before believes it for one second. It is the truth, though. Nudity is no big deal after a very short period of time.

[In_The_Wind]

36. Yes

[Mr.Bill]

37. Yes, from 7th through 12th grade

It was the law in California at the time (late 60s) that four years of PE were required to graduate from high school. Only needed two years of Math and two years of science, though. Talk about messed up priorities.

[pstokely]

46. Only needed a year of PE, and three years of Math and Science in Missouri ten years ago

Most of the PE offerings were just team sports classes taught by the coaches, don't know what they offer now. How much PE is required in your state and what is offered in your local schools?

[Mr.Bill]

48. Well, since my grandchildren are in their 20s

I'm afraid I don't know the answer to your question.

[LP2K12]

39. Well...

Nobody made us do it. We had individual shower stalls with curtains. I showered daily after PE. Never had a problem.

[sakabatou]

40. Nope.

[surrealAmerican]

41. Not only didn't they "make us" shower ...

... they didn't allow us to shower. There were showers in the locker room. We were not allowed to use them, not that we would have showered if they had let us: we were barely given enough time to change clothes.

[Matariki]

60. self delete.

posted in the wrong place.

[Quantess]

42. Yes. And the water was cold.

It was a communal shower room, literally nowhere to hide. The junior high PE teachers kept a checklist of who showered and who didn't, and if you skipped a shower, you got your name written on the "Stinky" board.

Nobody paid attention in high school, though.

[Luciferous]

49. Nobody made us shower.

My daughter is in 8th grade, and they don't have to shower after PE either. We had separate showers, and so does my daughter's school.

[revolution breeze]

52. In high school, if you were in band

it counted as a PE grade, as well as an Arts grade. Band was always last period and since we had mandatory after school practice twice a week, we just went home afterward. Oldest dughter was a cheerleader with first period PE and they had separate shower stalls and were encouraged to shower (they also had before school practice). Middle daughter had ROTC instead of PE, so no shower.

[LTG]

54. Both Jr and Sr High

In Jr and Sr high showers were required at the end of every gym class. Big communal showers, everybody nude. That was between '65 and '71.

By the time my children attended the same schools, showers were no longer required. A lot of them no longer worked and there wasn't any hot water anymore.

As a football coach, my players only showered after a really muddy practice. Some would come in completely covered in mud. They would start off the shower in their complete uniform, including helmets, rinsing off the mud. They would then peel a layer at a time until they finished showering in just their underwear.

Other than that, deodorant and cologne are the post gym "showers" of today.

[pstokely]

55. Axe body spray is today's high school shower

http://www.middletownpress.com/articles/2012/05/11/news/doc4fac20367822c851505985.txt

[doc03]

57. Yea and our gym teacher Mr. Sandusky stood at

the shower door to make sure we did.

[alarimer]

58. That would have killed me

I hate public nudity (mine and everyone else's). You can call me a prude if you wish. But I hate being undressed in front of strangers.

[Matariki]

59. You showered in your clothes? Did you walk around w/ wet pants the rest of the day?

That said, I remember having to stand naked in a line and have our names checked off by the PE instructor before being given a towel.

Definitely creepy.

[Matariki]

61. We had to stand in line naked to have the gym teacher check off our names

before they handed us a towel. You could get detention for not showering.

Definitely creepy.

[doc03]

62. You had a Mr. Sandusky as your gym teacher too. You know I

was so naive when I was a teenager I didn't know about that kind of thing.

[Matariki]

66. A Ms. Sandusky. Two of them actually.

There were rumors about them and relationships with students that would have landed them in BIG trouble these days. We're talking junior high school here -13 and 14 year olds.

[dr.strangelove]

63. We never were forced to shower after PE, but I did

I showered after football, so I never thought it was a big deal. Plus, I am sureI would have smelled ripe if I did not shower. We had communal showers.

[RebelOne]

64. No. There were no showers available when I was in junior high (now known.

as middle school). That was a long, long time ago.

[nadine_mn]

65. Yes - I graduated in 90

I hated it... all open showers and I was (still am) a big girl and those little white towels never covered me. I hated hated hated gym class because of it.

[dmoore]

67. yes I always showered and swam naked in junior and high schools, also the Y

I went to school in the 60's - had nude swimming classes and of course communal showering after gym. Loved going to the Y and swimming naked was fun. The practice continues today in many Men only health clubs.