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.
Is this the FOURTH zombification of this thread?
Not complaining…but that’s GOT to be some sort of record.
Now I’m wondering if zombies have to swim naked.
It’s not a lint problem they’re worried about with zombie swim…
He said that that YMCA offers separate men’s and women’s swim times but he didn’t say that they were swimsuit-optional. FYI, the website doesn’t mention it, so I doubt that it’s swimsuit-optional.
Edited to add that the website does say, “Proper swim attire is required. No basketball shorts.”
Group nude swimming in school?
Are you kidding me?
No way, never, jamás.
Well, it does have naked children!
News: it’s no longer the YMCA…
Now, more relevant to the thread, I took swim lessons at the Y in the very early 70s (about '71, or it may have even been a little earlier, but not before '68) and we boys swam nude. That was the only time I’ve ever done that in an organized manner (never in school, etc.) and I don’t know when they would’ve stopped the practice, but I do clearly remember it.
Yes, this is the way it was also in Dearborn Michigan until around 1980. All of the boys swim classes and swim teams were always nude. But not the girls. I am sure that the water quality was much better since the other requirement, besides nude swimming, was a soap shower. But I do not understand why the girls did not swim nude. Can any one answer this mystery? And then how did it become a crime now to swim nude?
I’ll say!
My high school had no swimsuits for boys back in the 1960s. Girls did.
Why? Looking back, it’s a combination of attitudes. Boys were treated like meat by the gym teachers. You were ordered around, herded like chickens, and subjected to abuse with the unspoken idea that it was to “toughen you up.”
Girls were not supposed to be toughened. I don’t know how well they were treated, but it couldn’t have been as bad because there wouldn’t have been a point to it. In addition, the general societal taboos about developing women and nudity would have trumped everything else.
At some point in between (points really, since it happened at different times everywhere) society changed attitudes. Toughening boys became abuse. Girls became less fragile creatures. An awareness - or at least public admittance - of homosexuals and pedophiles made people less willing to parade nude children around adults of either sex. From treating young people as meat - incoming Ivy Leaguers were photographed nude as test studies - we now treat young people as precious snowflakes.
We went too far in one direction before, we’re too far in the other direction now. The center never holds.
But I bet your gym coach couldn’t watch you in the shower, through a window in front of his desk (for reasons of hygiene, I’m sure).
I think the YMCA"S started the change to co ed swimming pools and gyms around 1960 and there was no nude swimming at these places. I gew up in Dearborn Michigan and all of the public and private high schools had swimming pools and required boys nude swim classes and nude swim practice in the mid 1970’s. Close to 1980 suddenly all swim classes were co ed. Nude swimming was no longer required. They say nude swimming made a big improvement in the quality of the water and required less chlorine. Another theory was that since the girls always wore swim suits, that nude swimming was supposed to be a preparation for men for the military since the draft was in effect until the early 1970’s about the time co ed swimming started to become more common. And of course the other theory was that it was a women’s rights issue, they wanted to swim at the same time as the boys (men) but did not want to swim nude, since this would be discrimination.
I swim at the ymca and lock my shit up in a locker with the key attached to a bobby pin on my swim suit.
Times have changed.
Why would they when they could stand in the big opening between the showers and the locker room and watch? Or walk through the aisles and watch? Shower time was severely limited and they wanted to make sure we got finished and into our clothes as fast as possible so they wouldn’t be responsible for making us late to the next class. They watched us every minute. Nobody at the time cared that the teachers could see us nude.
An entire class of unsupervised students presents a liablility risk that most schools would rather avoid. Both my HS and MS lockerrooms were designed to maximise the area the teacher could see from his office. In HS this was basically the entire lockerroom (they couldn’t actually see into the shower or toilet area, but could see the entrances). Elementary school basically had the same set up, but as we didn’t even have to change let alone shower those lockerrooms were basically really large restrooms. From what I heard the girls facilities were set up the exact same way, except (in HS at least) they had individiual stalls.
I fail to see how it could be considered discrimination to require both genders to swim in the nude. The reality is that men and women often had to use seperate facilities (YMCA vs YWCA), and the women’s facilities were usually inferior to the men’s. When the same facilities were used boys usually got all the best time slots. Granted very few high schools would’ve have seperate facilities, but many otherwise coed colleges did.
At my alma mater only the men had an on campus gym & pool (which was a “nude tank”; women had free use of the YWCA adjacent to campus. Apparently this all changed in the '70s around same time the dorms started going coed and the seperate Deans of Men and Women were merged into the Vice-President of Student Affairs.
Of course somehow the YWCAs have manged to remain mostly women-only while all the YMCAs have gone coed. :dubious:
Nude swimming was done at most public high schools and many colleges until the late 1970’s and it seemed to be common only for men and not for women. I do not know why there could be a movement back to nude swimming. It would not be a discrimination issue as the women claim it is if the women also swam nude at seperate times or at a seperate pool. Today in Europe there are many nudist beaches and the women are not worried about being seen nude. Most men do not have any problems with nude swimming if the situation came up.
This topic floated back up to the surface again? Wowzers.