I didn’t know zombies could swim, naked or clothed.
Apparently spam can bring the dead back to life.
Before someone reports this as a zombie, I will note that zombie threads are permitted in GQ as long is new information is being provided. I’m going to leave this open for now.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Apparently this neo-prudishness is not limited to America.
Time magazine: In France, a New Generation of Women Says Non to Nude Sunbathing
I was a high school freshman in 1962, all boys Catholic school. Nude swimming, at least as far as Phys Ed clsses were concerned, was the norn.
It was not my preference as it slowed me down. 
My father taught high school in Chicago in the 60s and I know at his school the boys swam naked. That was 1969. I know by the time he died in 1976 it had been stopped by I am not sure exactly when.
But it was easier to steer, right? 
[quote=“keno, post:19, topic:379807”]
/q Did anyone else have the same experience at the Y when they were kids? QUOTE]
My older brother and I swam nude at the YMCA with lots of other boys somewhere in the Baltimore area in the late 50’s and possibly early 60’s. I have no idea of the actual reasoning behind it. It was supposed to be good for us.
I think now that because at that time every male was going to end up in the military, they were trying to get us used to male nudity.
[quote=“T.Slothrop, post:27, topic:379807”]
Yes I was a Member in the Late 50’s for two years. Dad even cam the the Father and son swims they had twice a year. All of Us were Nude the older ones as well as the younger ones as I was about 7 to 8 I think. I think the ages were about 6 to 16 are possably older. We were told it was for health purpose. to see if we had skin problems. that others could catch. The doors were locked so no one could get in are out when we were nude. The Girls swam at other times and Yes the doors were locked also. I was not shoure how the girls swam. I was told both ways as it was inside.
Naked zombies! Run!
I have mentioned in previous posts that during all of my high school years, at a public high school in Illinois, the boys swam nude and the girls had a “one-size-fits-all” suit for each girl that the classes would share. People today rarely believe me.
Back then, the rationale was that the locker room was too small and there was no place to put wet swim suits.
At any rate, we considered it “normal” - with lots of odd stories though. I do remember when the school class bells went out of whack and we were in the pool when the girls swim class opened the door and started to enter the pool area. Needless to say, screams and chaos ensued.
The worst was when you had swimming class first period - about 8:00 AM - in January, in Illinois. Trust me when I say the water was a tad nippy.
I spoke with my cousin who still lives in that town and he said they only changed the nude swimming rule in the mid to late 80’s.
From a relative in the school system, there was also the reason that teenage boys would just toss their wet bathing suit into their locker, and leave it there until they wore it again on next weeks swim. The resulting growth of mold & bacteria on it would get washed off into the pool, with bad effects on the pool filtering system (to say nothing of the health effects of that in the water).
I have a notion that swimming itself was long considered an all-male activity that required no clothing. In other words, there a period during which “swimming” and “skinny dipping” were essentially the same thing.
The small-locker-room hypothesis didn’t apply in our case. The school had just added a new gym and pool for the boys, each with its totally adequate locker room with showers. We swam naked, then took a mandatory shower. Showers were also mandatory after gym class.
The girls wore generic suits and caps, and were stuck swimming in the horrible crumbling, moldy pool from 1929. We shared the old pool at the beginning of my sophomore year, before the new one was completed. It was awful.
They have separate swim times for men and women Monday thru Friday. Its the only YMCA I know of that offers this now. I wish all the YMCAs would do this. Most of the JCCs offer separate Male swimming also. I remember many years ago, when I was 15 years old, swimming in the YMCA pool. I noticed an Old man (Probably 55 or so), his Balls were hanging down low, about 7 inches, and i looked at my own, which were not visible, because they had retracted into my body. And as if he read my mind, he said “the cold water makes them pull up”. I said, why do yours hang down so low? He said “they hang down lower the older you get.”-- Words of wisdom you hear at the YMCA.
Without the YMCA, kids nowadays have to learn that kind of thing on the street.
My father taught at a high school in the late 60s and early 70s and males swam nude. Females did not. By the time I got to high school in the late 70s, that was no longer done.
I do recall our gym coaches MADE US take showers.
You had to go in, you got 2 minutes, and you’d better be wet when you came out or he’d send you back in, and you’d be late to your next class and he’d not give you an excuse note
And it was really bad as it was the late 70s and everyone had long(ish) hair so you were walking around with a wet head for the next two classes
Um, it was never practised in public places in West-Germany** in the last 50 years! In the 50s and 60s, people were far too prudish. Another factor might be that not many schools had their own swimming pool, instead, the class went to the public swimming pool and used their lockers. So leaving wet swimsuits in the locker was not an option, instead the mothers would unpack and wash the swimsuit in the afternoon after the kid came home from school.
I still remember up to the 80s that women and men had to wear bathing caps in the pool, so that hair wouldn’t clog the filters (since during the Hippie aera, men had long hair, too, so instead of arguing “How long is too long?” everbody had to wear a cap.) Then the filters became better, and the pool attendants got tired of arguing with all the people with short hairs, so they dropped the rule.
The only places for naked swimming would be the FKK* beaches and FKK parts of the summer open-air public swimming pools (they are visually seperated from the rest by a wooden barrier; inside, people can be nude, outside, they are clothed.
*Freikörperkulture = free body culture, a “nature is beautiful and so is the human body” movement from the beginning of the 20th century. And no, it’s not alluring as it sounds, because it’s old people with a skin like leather, sagging stuff who walk around naked that can quickly kill an appetite.
** East Germany tried to be less prudish, since as good communists they had to be atheists and not get hung up on burgeouis standards; in practise, they seemed to stay with the learned prudish behaviour until the new generation two decades later. I don’t know if they bathed in the nude, though.
Do you have a link to this YMCA? I’m very surprised that there’s a Y that still does this. I know there are still a handful of private athletic clubs with suits-optional swimming.
I recall swimming at YMCA day camp in Toronto involved hiking to some building where the rquirement was nude swimming. The excuse at the time was “clog the filters with lint” which seemed BS since every major public pool in the city was co-ed (and of course NOT nude).
Many years later I could speculate on adult motivations for that. But don’t forget North America was the source of many weird and bizarre hangups about the human body, considering that both Corn Flakes and circumcision were made popular in North America as preventatives for masturbation…
the men’s athletic facility at the University of Toronto used to be exclusively male and with nude swimming (so I hear, never actually used the pool). Somewhere in the 70’s women’s rights asserted itself and the pool became coed and suits required.
There was a quaint follow-up where the assertive women’s movement then had a male swimmer (faculty? Don’t recall?) banned because he would sink to the bottom of the pool with swim goggles on and “watch the female swimmers”. Probably these were the same girls who used to complain about being bothered with “Mommy! He’s looking at me funny!”
Exactly this. I went to the Boy’s club in the late 60’s/early 70’s and they made it clear that nude swimming was perfectly fine for the reasons above. Frankly, they made the point a little too often for my young taste. Only ever saw it a couple of times though.
I did stand in line nude for physicals for middle/high school sports. Seems odd now and I would have questions if they expected my boys to stand around in gym naked today. I think we were dealing with old WWII army doctors back in the 60s.