[QUOTE=DMark]
…Boys all swam in the nude! Yep - four years of swimming classes and four years of nude swimming. The first couple of classes were a bit intimidating, but after awhile, you didn’t care. My cousin still works at the high school and said it is still the school policy…
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Really? It’s still policy? I asked the same question in GQ, but didn’t get a real answer. I assume this is in the US.
[QUOTE=DMark]
Girls had an odd, one-size-fits-all suit that they wore and then threw in with towels at the end of swimming class.
Boys all swam in the nude! Yep - four years of swimming classes and four years of nude swimming. The first couple of classes were a bit intimidating, but after awhile, you didn’t care. My cousin still works at the high school and said it is still the school policy.
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I, too, find it incredible that that would still be polcy today! Anyways, what was the rationale for having the girls using bathing suits but the guys swimming nude? Why not everyone either swims nude, or in suits?? What in the world is the point in swimming nude in the first place – saves money?
I dunno, I’m 33 and I’ve always been a modest guy. I belong to two gyms. One is at work, it’s typically pretty empty when I go and I’ll occassionally take a shower there as it’s private and has its own stalls. The other gym is Lifetime Fitness. I sweat a lot more at Lifetime but they don’t have private anything there, so I just slip my sweats on afterwards and shower at home. My partner on the other hand wanders around naked and has no qualms about nudity whatsoever and he’s 37.
[QUOTE=Rodgers01]
I, too, find it incredible that that would still be polcy today! Anyways, what was the rationale for having the girls using bathing suits but the guys swimming nude? Why not everyone either swims nude, or in suits?? What in the world is the point in swimming nude in the first place – saves money?
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Yep, still policy.
The rationale was because of the small locker rooms, they couldn’t assign everyone permanent lockers - so there was no place to put wet bathing suits. And the one size fits all for guys was more problematic, as they would constantly be stretched out and would fall off most guys when they dove in or tried to swim fast, even if they tied the waist strings tight, so why even bother.
Supposedly, the girl’s suits held up better because they were one piece and had the straps going over the shoulders, although I remember some girls complaining they were either too tight or too loose, but for the most part, their suits at least stayed on when they dove or swam fast.
My mother went to the same high school and it was even policy back then as well. To be honest, it got to be no big deal other than if you were unfortunate enough to have swimming first period of the day. Do you have any idea how cold that water was at 8:00 AM on a January morning in Illinois? The pool was “heated”, but trust me, it was anything but warm. After that first plunge, every guy pretty much looked the same.
I wish I didn’t have to encounter naked men in the locker room . . . I don’t consider myself to be homophobic, I just prefer not to have some guy’s junk in my face.
Plus, I’ve seen some blatant weird naked guy behavior (guys blowdrying their pubes, etc) that weided me out and makes me uncomforatble in the lock room.
[QUOTE=Rodgers01]
If I can expostulate for a minute, I think there’s another, larger reason at work here: a lot of younger people have never had to share much, period. In the past couple decades, birth rates have fallen, and average size of houses has grown larger. My impression is that in the “old days” you’d often have pretty big families (3+ kids) living in small-ish houses: everyone would have to share one bathroom, a couple siblings might have to share a bedroom, everyone would have to fight over one TV and wait their turn to use one telephone. People were, in general, bumping into one another a lot more. Nowadays, you have much smaller families living in much bigger houses. Most kids have never had to share a bedroom. Many of them have their own TV, and even their own private bathroom. Virtually all of them seem to have their own phones. I’ve read a couple articles where colleges are rushing to build individual dorm rooms, because incoming students don’t want to have roommates – they’ve never had to live in close quarters with anyone, and they don’t want to. (My first roommate in college fit this profile – he very clearly had never had to adjust to living with someone else before.) I’d guess somewhere in that transition it became unthinkable to have open showers.
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Good point. When I was growing up, I shared a room with my brother until we were split up by college. When my sister went away to college (she’s the oldest), we still shared a room…too used to it to care, I guess. Only one bathroom, too, so dad/son/son in there shaving/showering/taking a leak all at once was common too.
Along the same lines, I read somewhere that since many kids are used to eating alone in their rooms some have trouble eating in a group setting when going away to college. :eek: Now that’s strange.
You call a man’s proudest possession “junk”? Shame on you.
[QUOTE=Walloon]
Forget about “required”, weren’t you stinky and sweaty after gym class? Didn’t you want to shower off after all that?
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Right, after spending 35 minutes lackadaisically playing a sport I had absolutely no interest in, I reeked.
For me, it’s only an issue if the guys are unfamiliar to me. If it’s faces that I’ve seen at the gym for years, it doesn’t really bother me. But if it’s a stranger, I’m more modest.
And I agree that it sucks to have some old guy’s equipment jiggling next to my ear while I’m putting on my socks.
I took PE every year probably from grades 7-12 in 1983-1989 and never once saw anyone use the showers- I’m not even sure if they worked.
I personally don’t like being naked in the gym locker room any longer than needed because I feel fat. Being in there with all those guys that have been working out for years and whose bodies actually look really good makes me very self-conscious. Maybe if I keep at it and actually feel like I look half-way decent will change that.
[QUOTE=Hypno-Toad]
For me, it’s only an issue if the guys are unfamiliar to me. If it’s faces that I’ve seen at the gym for years, it doesn’t really bother me. But if it’s a stranger, I’m more modest.
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Really? I’m exactly the opposite – I don’t mind showering and changing at the gym I currently go to because I don’t know anyone at all there. I think it would be ten times worse to be naked around a bunch of guys I know – classmates or friends and the like. I don’t care if strangers see me naked, but it’s a little too intimate with people you know.
I hated PE anyway, so beginning in the 11th grade I took “managers’ class” – we were the guys who lined the fields and set out the bases–when we did anything, but before that I had four years of daily PE.
What people really hated most about the showers was simply that they were COLD–beyond that I don’t remember anyone ever being harrassed or mocked while changing or showering. One guy ran for class president on a platform of making showers optional, and suprisingly enough, he was able to put it through after he got elected.
My personal experiences, and what appears to be the general consensus in this thread, is that it is generational and based primarily on whether or not you did group showers in grade school and high school.
I had group showers that were required from about third grade and up (in the upper midwest, USA). About 1960 through 1971. So for me it is perplexing when I see extreme modesty in the gym locker room.
I was shocked when my kids were not required to shower after gym class in school. Then astounded when in high school they told me that even the football players after a game did not shower at school, but waited until they got home.
My son, who played soccer, never showered after a game. My daughter, who was on the swim team, showered after meets and practices but always with her suit on. (Hmmm. I never thought to ask about the level of modesty exhibited when she and her teammates put on their swimsuits.)
[QUOTE=Algernon]
My daughter, who was on the swim team, showered after meets and practices but always with her suit on. (Hmmm. I never thought to ask about the level of modesty exhibited when she and her teammates put on their swimsuits.)
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If she did what I did (took gym in high school in 1989 and 1993, but I think I may have been a little ahead of my time on this issue), she would have changed from her clothes to her swimsuit (or vice versa) as quickly as possible, ideally in a closed bathroom stall. If there wasn’t a bathroom stall available, I would change in front of my locker, as quickly as possible, keeping my eyes strictly on my locker, and not talking to anyone or making eye contact until I was decent. It was kind of like guys at urinals, AIUI (I don’t speak from personal experience about guys at urinals, but my understanding is that the Guy Code requires you to keep your eyes forward at all times and not speak to others)
When I took water aerobics at the Y, I did pretty much the same thing. I didn’t shower there- you can get foot fungus from public showers unless you wear flip-flops, and I had quite enough of wearing flip-flops in the shower when I lived in the dorms in college, thankyouverymuch.
There were showers in our gym locker room, but I never saw anyone use them.
I shared a bathroom with my sister when I was growing up, though we had more than one bathroom in the house. I never, ever, went in there when she was in there, and she did the same. If you really needed something from in the bathroom and someone else was in there, you knocked and asked them to hand it out to you. They did so while keeping the door such that you didn’t see anything except their arm and maybe their head.
[QUOTE=Rodgers01]
Really? I’m exactly the opposite – I don’t mind showering and changing at the gym I currently go to because I don’t know anyone at all there. I think it would be ten times worse to be naked around a bunch of guys I know – classmates or friends and the like. I don’t care if strangers see me naked, but it’s a little too intimate with people you know.
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It’s because I have things to talk about with familiar people. I don’t mix well with strangers and so there’s an uncomfortable silence that the nudity seems to exacerbate. And I don’t like the thought of exacerbating in public.
Actually, the only times I’ve seen a guy really embarrassed in the locker room are those occassions when I’ve wlked in on them and caught them in the middle of posing for the mirrors.
I know I am dating myself, I graduated in’58. We not only took showers after gym we swam naked as well at the local “YMCA” then I went into the USAF during the entrance physical you lined up naked for your “Turn your head and cough”
I sit in my easy chair now and watch the HS’ers run across the street and the guys have more cloths on then the gals do. As a sufferer of SSA it’s disappointing, even though young trim bodies of both sexes look great. I think it’s more fear of the “HOMO” label that forces guys to wear longer and longer and longer shorts, when practicality suggests shorter shorts would be more desirable. Or are today’s teens afraid the male equipment is going to fall out the leg opening and somehow show, or are today’s teens more endowed then those of previous generations.
Personally I think the shorts on the market today look ridicules, you might as well have long pants on when the “Shorts” are below the knee.
I think this is a lot of it; there seemed to be a real divide when I was in high school and college about roommate nudity, and the divide seemed to break down to whether you’d grown up in a small house and/or had a large family, both of which tend to quash any precious notions of privacy that you might have. Guys from larger families and/or small houses tended to not have nudity taboos, while the guys from houses where everyone had their own bathrooms tended to have the taboos.
Plus, there was a certain peer-pressure component as well- if you had been in Boy Scouts and/or played organized sports like football, you were much more likely to have had to do communal showers, and were somewhat immune to it.
I mean, we never had communal showers in gym class in high school or college, but we did in Boy Scout camp, and at football practice in high school. Plus, I grew up in a 950 sq foot house (1.5 bath) as part of a family of four- I have a brother.
So I’m pretty much in the let it all hang out camp, but my good friend didn’t grow up in such a small house, and never had communal showers, so he’s much more bashful about nudity than I am.
I have always found this level of obsession with “stinky and sweaty” to be utterly bizarre. OF COURSE we get sweaty at times. Get over it.