Chicago northside suburb, '68-'72. Boys swam nude in gym class, but the swim team wore suits. Showers were mandatory before swimming (you had to be able to ‘squeak’ your hair, or you were sent back to the shower to try again) and after every gym class; the showers were a big open space with 20 or so shower heads - something like this. Girls wore suits (remarkably ugly ones, they say) for swimming, but I’ve no idea what their locker/shower rooms were like.
I think he’s referring to the nude men being surrounded by clothed women, and the fact they seem relatively calm and not actively looking at their naked bodies.
I mean if the situation was revered I wouldn’t be surprised for the men to openly gawk at the nude females.
As a woman, I was coming from the angle of the women! You think they don’t gawk?
p.s. I swam at the Y a few times as a kid, and except for Girl Scout events, they were mixed both in age and gender. We also had swimming in high school, and wore our own suits. We also tried to avoid having to take it, because the swim coach was a lesbian who liked to watch us girls change. :mad:
I’m a grower, not a show-er.
The instances I remember we all boys YMCA day camp in the early 1960’s used a private facility (Sunnyside Hospital pool?). As I mentioned many BRAINNZZ ago, the University of Toronto Hart House men’s athletic club had nude swimming (which I never saw) until sometime in the 70’s or 80’s.
I looked at the link and I am very surprised that there would be coed /male nude swimming. It seemed to me the same mindset that said “swim nude” also would not even consider male/female mixed swimming without some degree of modesty all around.
Again, I don’t know which photo you are referring to, but in most of the co-ed ones the women are either gawking openly, grinning broadly, or trying to catch a peek out of the corner of their eyes. 
In the very first pic I see both males and females nude, but it doesn’t look like a school or similar institution.
What pictures are we talking about? In the site linked to in posts #101-102, I don’t see any photos that include nude females in at least the first several dozen.
OK, it’s possible I’m mistaken, but in the second picture (at least now on my mobile), there are numerous people in a large pool who certainly don’t seem to be training for anything, and are simply standing in the water or floating on rafts. It looks like a pool that exists more for relaxation than training, and nobody really looks like they’re on the swim team. This looks like a pool that you would find at a clothing optional facility, and I’m assuming that some of the visible bathers are female, but in any case most of them are too tiny to make out any detail. A few of the nudes look vaguely like they could be curvier, suggesting female gender. The whole pic is strange; I never heard of a nudist facility where only men go.
It’s about #5 on the page now. I don’t see any figures that are clearly female, although a few at the back possibly could be. All the figures that can clearly be identified are male. There are a couple of guys on a raft in the front, and some people playing pool volleyball in the back.
As has been mentioned, facilities where males were allowed to swim nude would generally have separate hours when that took place. This doesn’t have to be a nudist facility, it could be just a photo taken during men’s hours at that pool. There might also be separate women’s hours, and co-ed hours when suits were required.
Certainly at nudist camps both sexes swim (and do everything else) in the nude. But on the site in question I only see nude males (sometimes in company with women wearing bathing suits).
Worth noting - since many posters seem to be taking these pictures seriously - that these are mostly or all fake.
Some of them are clearly recent porn pictures, but the older black and white pictures supposedly indicating nude men/boys and bathing suited women/girls are photo-shopped.
You can take those pictures and do a reverse image search, and find those same pictures with the men/boys wearing bathing suits. At least the ones I tried it with.
In sum, it’s pretty clear that men and boys would swim nude at certain times/places (most notably the mid-west) but the notion that they did this in the presence of clothed females appears to have no basis other than the imagination of CFNM fetishists.
In the Navy in the 40’s, Dad swam naked save for his belt, while working. I never heard that there was a swimming “uniform”.
During training, the men swam nude, and I think that there was absolutely zero chance that they were afraid they would leave bits of clothing wet in their lockers. However, the life guards wore silk, because, it was believed, the alternative (wool) would clog the filters.
So, there probably was a problem with the filters and the fabrics, and it probably wasn’t an issue because that’s what blokes did: they swam nude.
Do zombies swim? I thought they just sort of flayed around while floating.
They don’t always swim.
But when they do, they swim nude.
Nice typo - maybe you meant flailed?
The guy who just had his skin eaten off by the zombie in the pool wishes it was a typo.
This thread has gone all over the place, but I haven’t seen more than a couple possible answers to the question of why this was done. In Europe there are many pools that require speedos and don’t allow trunks. That’s not quite the same thing, but along with mandatory showers before entering the pool deck the reason is to keep the pool water clean. Swim trunks, especially big baggy boardshorts, have so much residual laundry detergent in them that they can cloud up a freshly filled pool in a matter of hours.
Someone before mentioned soap in the pre-detergent days, but even modern laundry detergents don’t disinfect clothes. It’s the heat of the dryer or ultraviolet light of the sun that helps, or bleach of course. Thinking back to the early 20th century when pools really started to become popular, imagine how scummy the water could get from soap residue on the enormous (compared to today) suits men wore back then. Of course the farther back you go, the pool equipment had less capability to filter out such contaminants, so it’s something of a double-whammy.
That doesn’t discount the more cultural aspects of it either, with boys allowed to be more free and girls tending to be shamed into covering up. That in itself makes swimming more of a boy’s activity, so with separate facilities the girl’s pool wouldn’t need its water changed as often as the boy’s if they wore baggy suits too. The note about leaving wet suits in locker rooms and mold growth are another factor, though a fairly small one compared to the others I think.
My gut tells me these factors are the majority of the answer, but still not the whole thing.
Old habits die hard, I guess. I was in middle school in the early 1980s when a fellow gym student had to show up after school to make up for a missed class. The school provided Speed-style swimsuits for the boys in the class, but when this kid showed up after school and asked for his suit, the gym teacher - a man in his 60s with the aforementioned old habits - told him that he would not need a suit, since it was just going to be the two of them. The kid promptly left without making up for the missed class, electing to receive a lesser grade instead.
I hope nobody minds another post on this topic but I have a few comments.
I grew up in the 1960’s in Rochester New York and yes, I swam without a suit way more often than with one. Middle School, High School, the YMCA, Boy Scouts, summer camp and an old 1920’s era mold palace they called The Natitorium.
I can’t recall being bothered by it and I don’t recall ever hearing any complaints, which in any case would have come from our parents since kids were expected to do what they were told and shut up. Nobody cared what you thought.
Anyway, in no particular order:
- The CFNM crowd will never stop trying to claim that females in the form of “substitute instructors”, moms, sisters, peeping classmates, picture windows and/or the occasional “accident”, from time to time caused them to be exposed to feminine eyes.
The tales are many and varied, and I call hogwash. Not that such a thing NEVER happened, ever, in 20 or 30 years of this but you need to understand that these situations were EXTREMELY tightly controlled. Doors locked and relocked, checked and double checked and, in many cases, with a staff member sitting at the door.
For the fabled girls classes to have accidentally burst from their locker rooms onto a pool full of naked boys would in most cases have required them to first break down a couple of different securely and carefully locked doors.
The fact that this was indeed a rather prudish time - despite the seeming anomaly of a room full of bare boys - dictated that the places were firmly and carefully locked down. Teachers weren’t any stupider or less keenly aware of the issues involved (including, probably, losing your job) in 1965 than they would be now.The people in charge were extremely conscious of the need to prevent “accidents” of any kind. Just the way they had to be.
- For all the reasons previously stated, the “lint in the filters” excuse is just nonsense. Not that we didn’t hear it, just that, as noted above, it makes zero sense.
In any case, it doesn’t explain, for example, my Boy Scout troop, which went on regular weekend camping trips and also for two weeks at a huge reservation in upstate New York and we were absolutely forbidden to evern bring a swimsuit, never mind wear one and, from time to time they would actually check your pack.
They were looking for any sort of contraband of course - candy, cigarettes, etc. - but they most explicitly also confiscated swim trunks.
The reason they gave us, since there were obviously no “filters” in the various lakes we swam in, was that you had to learn to pack as light as possible and swim trucks were just unnecessary weight. As if a swimsuit for an 11 or 12 year old boy would be such a burden that he’d be likely to break down on the trail and have to be carried like a casualty from the Chosin Reservoir .
Like the lint filter fable, it was utter nonsense but they said it and we didn’t question it. Nobody ever raised their hand and said “Excuse me sir but isn’t that just a bit ridiculous?”
I only relate that story as another illustration as if one were really needed, that there were other issues at play here.
- Also, people should stop with the “girls weren’t allowed to be naked” posit. Again, in my experience, they by and large a) had no desire to run around naked with anyone, boys or girls and b) most would have been horrified at the very notion that they might be asked to.
This was not, as some would have it, a case of “repressing” females or, my favorite, the ultra-modern, thoroughly PC “teaching girls to be ashamed of their bodies” contention.
Complete pile of rubbish.
Young girls (and we’re talking, say, 10 - 14 years old) are, by nature, modest and shy about ANYONE seeing them without clothes. (In fact, there are multitudinous statements around from young boys who felt the same way). We as a society have an obligation to both respect that feeling and provide for it, and that goes double for society in 1960.
Absolutely no one was saying that ANYONE needed to be “ashamed” of their bodies. (Certainly not boys, who would have been thought a bit odd). Rather, it was a recognition that - sorry to have to pass this along - girls are very different than boys: physically, psychologically, developmentally and socially.
Hang me now.
- As others have suggested, swimming was traditionally something males did, like voting, smoking cigarettes, playing sports, drinking, holding jobs outside the home, etc., etc., etc.
Pre-1920 - give or take - swimming was something you did outdoors, and mostly in the country (since cities don’t generally have a lot of ponds and creeks). Around the turn of the last century, 80% of the population did not live in cities; they lived on farms.
As such, swimming naked, at least for boys, was really the only option. Nobody would have had a swimsuit anyway. The girls weren’t out running wild in the countryside, stripping off whenever they felt like it and hoppingi into the Old Mill Pond, they were home with Momma, as all good girls were.
In those situations where both genders were, say, at the ocean, for modesty sake everyone had to be well covered up. (this was almost exclusively upper middle and upper classes; lower classes, farm folks and the like didn’t vacation at the shore, they were home working themselves into an early grave)
The only available swim attire was, as we know, large, woolen, bulky coveralls which can’t have been remotely comfortable,were nearly impossible to swim in and weighed a ton when wet. No one would have ever worn such a thing if they had a choice.
Men wore them because they had to because, if no other reason, beaches were actually patrolled and you could be ticketed by a policeman if they felt you weren’t appropriately covered.
True. Ridiculous, but true.
So by the 1920’s, when municipalities (and later the YMCA) started building indoor pools, a) only men went there (women were still being kept at home) and b) as a result there was no earthly reason to wear one of those gawdawful males swim modestly coverall jobs which everyone hated, and for which there was no other choice.
Plus of course most men who had experience swimming while growing up had done so completely bare, as noted. To them, it was how you swam.
And I guess I should add that some people claim that this was actually the genesis of the “filter lint” fable. At that point, it may actually have been an issue. Filters were large, inefficient and expensive to maintain, and wool does indeed shed and degrade with chemicals and water, so there may have actually been - briefly, but perhaps just long enough - for the story to have some currency.
But as I said, there were never any women around anyway and everybody knew that swimming was something you did naked. I doubt if anybody ever gave it much thought
Which is how traditions, customs and habits begin.
It wasn’t until after World War II and more like the early 1950’s that women began to peek their heads out of the kitchen and start wanting a little of what men had now that they had washing machines,didn’t have to churn the butter or milk the chickens or whatever. They had free time occasionally,something women had never had before.
Heck, they even started letting them bowl. Imagine.
But as women started being integrated more and more into recreation outside the home, they also felt maybe they’d like to swim as well. Which created two problems:
First, as everybody knew, swimming was something men did naked, with other men. Clearly it would not do to just throw open the doors.
Second, even if you arranged for women to have some small amount of segregated time in the municipal pool, you couldnt very well demand that they get naked to do it. They didn’t want to and, anyway, they had no tradition of naked activities. It would have been just weird.
So women swam the new style nylon swimsuits that were worn on public beaches while men remained, well, men.
- Still, the whole “men always swim naked” thing proved to be very very strong when, in the early 1950’s there should have been substantial movement towards doing away with it.
Part of it was because the people who owned and ran everything were older men who had grown up with this particular esthetic and saw no reason to change it. Yes, they would let women use the place sometimes if the had to but they had no desire to change anything else about the arrangement which had been going on for 50 years.
But there was a second reason, which some people in this thread have touched on, albeit from the wrong angle, and it’s this:
The military.
Not just Selective Service, as some mentioned. As one poster said, he was swimming naked in school in Canada well after they had ended the draft.
Rather, there was a societal consciousness that the country had been in two world wars before the century was half over and with the Soviet Union making scary noises it was more or less a given that at sometime not terribly far off our young men would be called into the army once again.
Furthermore, the parents - fathers - of the generation of young boys who grew up in the 1950’s were all - almost literally all - veterans. There was a largely unspoken feeling that part of raising a young man was helping him get ready to join the army and serve his country.
And in the Army,you learned to spend a good deal of time with other men, particularly in training, and there was no room for modestly. It was important for your smooth integration that you be comfortable in the company of other men in all ways, including being naked.
So they saw the whole “bunch of bare boys running around together” as a very positive and important socialization thing.
I’m not arguing that this purpose caused the naked swimming deal, and I think it’s a mistake to suggest otherwise.
Rather, I’m suggesting that the whole military preparation mindset kept it going past the early 50’s when it logically might have been expected to fade away.
The “men have always swum nude” feeling, like so much else, should have been trashed by the war. But ironically, it was the war, I think, that caused it to continue.
It proved incredibly resistant to change all the way into the early 1970’s in some places, by which time the Vietnam War had changed people’s view of the nations young boys as soldiers in waiting. And this, along with the emerging social demands of women who weren’t interested in being told that on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays the pool was reserved for men only, eventually forced the powers that be to open the doors and, coincidentally, forced men to put on swim trunks.
Having said all that, we come towha I consider the most interesting aspect of this whole thing:
The girls didn’t know.
Oh a few surely did but, for the most part if you tell a femaleover 50 that her high school classmates spent a couple hours a week naked in gym class she’ll say you’re insane.
I myself was not aware of this until very recently. I assumed that everybody knew.
I don’t know that it was a secret necessarily but rather that the only way they would have known was if the boys talked about it and nobody ever talked about it.
Even if you were fine with it, spending time naked with a bunch of other naked guys was something you weren’t entirely comfortable discussing. In mixed company or otherwise.
It just wasn’t talked bout.
So whole generations of girls - quite literally millions and millions of them - sat in math class next to a boy who, 15 minutes earlier, had been in a room with 30 naked boys for an hour.
Or walked by the locked pool doors where, 50 feet away, every boy they knew was standing around stark naked.
When I first discovered this I could hardly believe it. I text messaged two women I have known since my teens and - after apologizing for asking a weird question - briefly laid it out for them and askedif they had any idea it happened.
One replied “WHAT???” and the second said I needed to stop drinking in the middle of the day.
After I sent them both some links and they became convinced it was true they were dumbfounded.
I’m just curious why and how this whole thing went on for 40 or 50years and almost literally none of the girls in the schools had the faintest idea it was going on.
Fascinating.