I guess this is a question for our American Dopers (which admittedly is most of you), but in a few threads I’ve seen it mentioned that people didn’t shower after gym (or PE) and thus didn’t see the “private parts” of the same sex.
What?
Admittedly, I only remember my school experiences from (stereotypecailly liberated and sexually free ) Sweden, but you always took a naked shower after PE all throughout your schooling (and I don’t recall any long-johns showing off or anyone else doing anything special apart from showering and geting dressed).
And the same goes for whenever I go to the public pool here in Iceland*.
I mean, why wouldn’t you wash your “private parts” after a work out (which is what PE/gym supposedly is)?
*there even is a sign that says: wash you head, armpits and privates before going into the pool
Nope, granted my High School might have, I always took PE as a summer course to make room for my favored electives during the year so I didn’t have any other classes to go to. In middle school there was a shower, and some people did, but we usually didn’t have enough time to do it.
ETA: Male (don’t know if the females did in their locker room), 19, in Arizona.
Showering after PE class was required when I was in school, but the teachers never cared enough to enforce it. The water would be running, and often we’d go in one side of the shower room, stick our hand into the water as we passed by and out the other, and that was our “shower.”
Showers were available but I don’t know of any girls who used them. We were way too private and also to be blunt the PE classes didn’t exactly get us all sweaty anyway. No pools at my schools. This was true from junior high on (so age 12 through 18).
most of my high school years [9-12] I took sports as my athletics and they were all afterschool so I tended to get in the car and get home - I commuted from about 30 miles away and i didnt want to keep my mom waiting [then I had a car and was emancipated and I had a job to get to working in a machine shop so clean didnt matter as I showered when I got home] Middle school my gym class was last period in the day, so I left right after, i tended to stay in my gym clothes and put on a tracj suit if it was cold. Elementary school - hard to work up a sweat as a young girl in teh late 60s early 70s … nothing particularly strenuous ever happened.
I went to a small Catholic school that had no shower facilities. After “gym class”, you changed and went back to your regular classes all sweaty and funky smelling (unless you were the lucky ones that had gym the last period of the day).
Well, to be frank, sometimes we didn’t have time either. But then just *all *of us showed up late to show that something was wrong with the scheduling.
(and no, I was not a jock in HS or any school)
Come on! They still did it when my li’l bro graduated from HS last spring… admittedly in Sweden
We had shower stalls, but they were open at both ends. No one used them. Of course, the one year we had PE daily (freshman) we also had PE last period, so people showered when they got home.
When we were younger than that, people didn’t get as sweaty a you do once you’re in the full swing of puberty. You changed into different clothes for PE anyway, so almost no one smelled after PE. None of the elementary schools I went to even had showers, just middle and high school.
Never did when I was in Jr. High or High School. Our schools had the facilities, but our P.E. classes never gave enough time to shower afterward. Even if it had, there was an unwritten rule that only a total freak would get naked in the locker room. :rolleyes: The average American, in my experience, is much too uptight about nudity.
No. I want to know how you could possibly have the time to shower, anyway. PE class was 45 minutes long. It took about five minutes to get dressed, another couple to call roll, another fifteen to run around the school (well, we had to do this at my high school), and then you barely had time to play a bit of football or basketball before being sent back to change into regular clothes for your next class. How could we squeeze a shower into that?
Plus, then we’d be all soaking at school. Wouldn’t that be weird?
Most of my high school classmates showered regularly (at home) and used deodorant, so I don’t recall extreme funkiness to be a widespread problem.
Never. A. Getting naked at school would be weird (though I heard that a few of the girls showered occasionally), and B. We never really exerted ourselves enough to get really sweaty.
No time. All class periods in high school were 42 minutes. Given ten minutes to change (five before, five after), and anywhere from five to ten minutes to take roll and get to wherever you were going (the track, for instance, was a good two blocks from the school), and there just wasn’t time.
I’m not sure if there even were any showers to use. There were two gyms at the school. I don’t remember if one had a shower room or not. The other did, but it was full of auditorium seating (like, wall-to-wall, stacked to the ceiling full).
Unless it was extremely hot out gym generally did not involve actual sweating or physical exertion. Some of our activities were things like table tennis, archery, walking, and “pretend to play golf but actually we’re on the practice softball field and don’t have enough clubs to go around so just kind of stand around.”
) Sweden, but you always took a naked shower after PE all throughout your schooling (and I don’t recall any long-johns showing off or anyone else doing anything special apart from showering and geting dressed).