Back again!
Jesus Christ. Only with more resurrections.
May no longer be of interest, but I went to high school '57-'61 (south suburbs of Chicago). We swam nude but the worst part of it was taking attendance. The school had stencilled numbers on the wall roughly 1 1/2 feet apart. To aid the PE teachers in quickly assessing who was absent, we had to line up with our hands covering our class number. The teacher could then easily see which numbers were uncovered. But while that was going on, we were all lined up front to back, trying our best to be as small as we possibly could be. Touching the other guys would have been icky. But, I’m proud (?) to say that in those days, homophobia was essentially something we didn’t worry about. We called guys fruits and fags and homos, and queers, but they were just names…like most others. Today, as everything is so overly and overtly sexualized, I imagine kids would freak out having to do what we did.
[A Tumblr devoted to pictorial evidence,](http:// boysswimnude.tumblr. com/) including photos from old college yearbooks.
Since that link is very NSFW, it violates the two clicks rule, so I’ve broken it.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
The link is here:
We used to use a couple of local YMCA facilities, for a few years ending around 1968, and I can’t remember anyone ever swimming nude. You couldn’t use your own suit though; you had to wear one of theirs which was handed out to you when you got your towel. It was basically like a black speedo though pissibly with a bit more coverage. It wasn’t what we’d normally have chosen to wear but nobody really cared or complained, either.
The YMCAs mentioned were in Beverly Hills and Hollywood. I wonder if, in those days, the culture of the heartland featured a more innocent view of nudity than was found in the major metro areas?
At religious schools, they want young boys to be naked.
…
And there is speculation as to why heavily religious men would want to see young boys naked?
Moderator Note
s0meguy, religious jabs are not permitted in GQ. No warning issued, but don’t do this again.
In any case, to the best of my knowledge religious schools did not in general conduct swimming classes in the nude. The places where naked swimming was permitted that are being discussed here are not religious schools.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
The fifth post in this thread talks about how their Catholic school did this.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=7951563&postcount=5
I am not making a jab at an ideology. I am talking about rampant sexual abuse by religious men, that is relevant to the thread topic.
Well, to be fair I would have to point out that posts #5 and #24 did explicitly discuss a religious schools, so it is incorrect to broadly claim that the schools being discussed here were not religious.
Naked zombies never die again …
Moderator Note
No, it’s not relevant to the thread topic, which is about nude swimming. If you want to make the case that religious schools deliberately had nude swimming for the purpose of fostering sexual abuse, start a new thread in Great Debates, and you can provide your evidence for that contention there. Otherwise drop the subject. Further remarks along these lines may be subject to a warning.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I overlooked those. However, that doesn’t indicate that nude swimming was more prevalent at religious schools than in secular venues.
Reading this thread (and glancing at some of the photos in Posts #101/102) is almost like learning about an alternate universe for me. I was an adolescent in the 1980s, and I can’t imagine swimming in public in the nude (much less standing on a pool deck naked and receiving a swimming medal). This sounds like one of those nightmares where you imagine yourself naked in the classroom.
I was even on a swim team in high school. Again, I would never dream of leaving the locker room without a swimsuit. Granted, it was a Speedo racing suit, but we usually wore two suits (one over the other) for practices. (You wore a single suit in team colors for swim meets.)
The only thing that was at all remotely similar was the fact that we took showers (in the boy’s locker room) in the nude. In fact, the older boys would mock you if you took a shower still wearing your swim suit. (You also had to take pains to avoid looking at anyone else’s junk, or you would be harassed mercilessly and be accused of being gay.)
This actually appalls my teenage son today. He wouldn’t dream of taking a shower in a public locker room in the nude.
Here’s a weird question. If naked swimming was mandatory for men of all ages up until the 1970’s, how prevalent would penis size shaming have been back then if everything was out in the open? From my quick research, thanks to internet porn as well as the barrage of penis enlargement ads currently around 25% of men are ashamed of their penis size, compared to 18% in 2008 and probably even less as you went back in time.
However using movies as a barometer, penis shaming has been around for as long as movies have allowed it. All sorts of crazy 80’s sex comedies had a scene where men are either showering naked together or skinny-dipping, and there’s always a joke where one man gets the short end of the stick so to speak. But I’ve seen some early 70’s movies back when nude swimming was still apparently happening that also had this so I wonder if it happened in real life back then.
In my personal experience, everyone studiously avoided looking at anyone else’s equipment. Certainly no one would have ever remarked on it. That would have been utterly unthinkable. Noticing someone else’s endowment would have led to the assumption that you were gay.
Sex comedies are rarely a good guide to what actually happened in real life.
Did anyone notice the co-ed picture? Either that was Photoshopped, or some people have excellent self-control.
I had to swim nude my freshman year–1978. My sophomore year the swim classes went co-ed and we wore suits.
My daughter was a lifeguard at the Y a couple of years ago and an old guy actually tried to swim nude. He honestly didn’t think he was doing anything wrong–even with an 18 year old female lifeguard saying “NO! Sir, you need clothes!”
Which photo are you talking about? In the link posted above, in any scene with co-ed swimming the men and boys are nude but the women are wearing suits, usually one-piece. In my experience, most men don’t go around with constant erections at the beach.
As I mentioned above, when I was in college in the 1970s it was common for there to be co-ed skinny-dipping at swimming spots on and near campus. I never noticed any guy in a state of arousal. And being a horny twenty-year-old myself, I had some apprehensions about inadvertently embarrassing myself but never actually had a problem.
Surely it occurs, but most men don’t get instant erections merely being in the presence of women. It’s probably even less likely when they are nude and the women are wearing suits.
Recalling the prevalence of unheated pools, I imagine there must have been a definite – er-- damping effect on a guy’s equipment. Like many, though, I’m still scratching my head in puzzlement. I’m well into the same age range as many here who recount nude swimming at schools and other similar settings, but it was never routinely practiced at any of my schools, or the Ys I went to as a kid. What’s more, not even once did I ever hear of an older person trying to swim nude, as one who didn’t get the memo.