Private changing cubicles instead of one huge locker room.
I mean why should kids, gay or straight, have to expose their bodies and put themselves in a vulnerable position around strangers? Just one reason I absolutely loathed P.E. class.
In my school, if we felt uncomfortable changing around each other (which never happened almost, as our uniforms were engineered to perfectly chenge into each other eithout showing a touch of skin, ie shorts and skirt) we could just go change in one of the toilet stalls.
Don’t ALL girls learn how to change without showing any skin? I know I did. In and out of bathing suits, even.
I was going to bring this up. I think everyone pretty much knew I liked girls by age 12, no one really cared – though I think this was all somewhat offset my a wild rumour that I had a crush on this one guy. I think the rumour existed primarily to tease him.
Gym was only mandatory in the 9th and 10th grades for me. Of course my attraction did NOT lead me to ogle the other girls. I was far too preoccupied with the horrors of my own mutating body to even *consider * lusting after anyone elses in the locker room!
In fact, I mastered the art of putting my regular street clothes on over top of my gym clothes and once so fully dressed, remove my gym clothes from underneath. A feat worthy of Houdini himself. Yes, you may applaud.
Did I check out the other girls? You betcha! For comparative purposes – I sure as hell wanted to know how my puberty-ridden body compared in freakishness to the other girls’! Ladies and gentlemen, a sample of the thoughts running through my head as a queer girl in the 9th grade gym class locker room:
*Oh, God, please, please, PLEASE let me be normal!.. If puberty keeps us all from being ‘normal’, at least make me of average ‘weirdness’… My right boob is bigger than my left boob… Anyone else here have lopsided breasts?.. Surely SOMEONE must have one boob bigger than the other!.. Anyone?.. ANYONE??? Omigod, omigod, omigod! I’m the only one with lopsided boobs! I need more baggy sweaters. I wonder if anyone has noticed this deformity! Half the school has probably seen that my right boob is too big! Oh, I hope this goes away when I get older or I’ll have one nipple poking way out like a Star Trek chick and the other – *
Hey, wait a minute… Janine doesn’t shave her thighs!… I* shave* MY thighs… Am I NOT supposed to shave my thighs?.. Who else here shaves their thighs??.. Oh, that’s just great! I’ve been running around with bald thighs and everyone has probably been making fun of – Oh, wait! Tina shaves her thighs too. And she’s one of the ‘cool’ girls, so it must be okay… Phew!.. Hey, Sandra has tufts of hair growing on her toe-knuckles… The freak!
This issue does not have an obvious answer to me. Those who believe she should be allowed in the girls’ locker room, would you also allow hetero boys in the girls’ locker room? Why or why not?
Revtim’s point is a good one but I’d state it that the “nervous heteros” likely see a gay classmate in their locker room as the equivalent of a hetero boy. Justified or not that is probably the perfecption.
No. A hetero boy does not have boobies. Though the boy may be decent, mild-mannered and truly innocent of all innapropriate intentions, but you tend to be curious with respect to the body parts you don’t have.
Even a boy (gay or straight) would cause some serious awkwardness in a girl’s lockeroom because he has a penis and we don’t. We’d stare at him.
My lesbian S.O. has no interest at all in men, but even she still peeks at the naked guys on Oz when they are walking around in the buff (usually to then comment, “ew, those are ugly”.)
Far from the toddler days when you could take a bath with your brother and there would be no fuss, by the hormonally turbulent years of adolescence, those other body parts take on a whole new bias. They become more fascinatingly different and oddly significant.
Besides that, if I young lad got a nervous woody it would be quite scandalous and he’d never live down the embarassment.
I have boobies, know what they look like and how they feel, and in the clinical certainly-NOT-sexy environment of the locker room I wasn’t particulary interested in the boobies of the other girls (notwithstanding the natural comparissons that you tend to make of your own gawky teenage body to other gawky teenage bodies – similar to the guys in the locker room peeking around to see how well endowed they may be compared to the other boys.)
The gender you’re attracted to isn’t that relevent anyway. If you’re a straight woman do you lust after every man you see? Do you stare at every man you see and undress them with your mind? Of course not. And I didn’t leer at any girls in the locker room either 'cause I wasn’t interested on doing so.
But and 15, if a guy was walking around in the locker room the teenage version of “vive la différence” would be over the top.
I think Neidhart has it, personally. Many gyms and pools provide changing cubicles…heck, even the MEPS I had to go to last Thursday managed to have them. I see no reason why schools couldn’t have at least some in each locker room.
Everyone seems extremely concerned with the “comfort” of the other girls in the locker room, and while I’m not out to make them UNcomfortable, does anyone remember being 13? No one feels comfortable in the locker room- nakedness in front of anyone, including yourself is unspeakably embarrasing.
I think the locker room experience is in some measure a way to fast forward the “growing up process.” You have to learn that bodies are just bodies and eventually you’ll have to suck it up and deal. I don’t think we can protect our kids from the awkwardness of that age, and that making private changing stalls would only reinforce the idea that naked bodies are shameful and taboo.
I’m not saying everybody should be forced, in the middle of their most awkward years, to parade around naked for an audience to “get used to it.” But I think a locker room is a safe enough environment (I mean, it IS possible to pull an Eats_Crayons and never show an inch of skin) that the added cost, hassle, and social message of private changing rooms is uneccesary.
Panache you know, the ironic thing is I’ve so totally grown out of that “HIDE ME!” stage that I’ve posed nude for art classes…
And I did notice that while the 9th and 10th graders did all sorts of cortortions to avoid flashing their classmates (no one would dare actually shower, egads!), by the 12th grade, no one seemed to care.
Well precisely, the same way that when I was an adolescent I thought that National Geographic was scandalous because of the gasp naked people!!!
There is some stage between “I’m young and carefree and run around with no pants on a daily basis” and “I’m an adult that understands that despite their erotic power, everybody’s “got one” of one kind or other, and it’s really no biggie” wherein you just go insane.
The insanity doesn’t last, but I remember one day when I was in the wretched phase (bred mostly through serious insecurity) where my Mom was looking for a shirt to wear and accidentally walked IN FRONT OF AN OPEN WINDOW- in broad daylight no less. The entire population of our backyard probably saw her BRA. The shame!! I was mortified, I wanted to run away from home, I could no longer claim her as my Mother…and then, well, I grew up a bit…
They didn’t, at least not according to the first cited CNN story. That article says that the other students wondered about why Ashly was always in the principal’s office, and assumed she had misbehaved, which is one of the factors that led to her ‘humiliating and denigrating’ feeling.
In other words, as usual, it seems like the kids themselves could have cared less, but it was the adults who felt uncomfortable with having her around.
Well, I’m a fifteen(almost 16)-year-old heterosexual girl. I wouldn’t have any problem with lesbians being in the locker room with me. Part of that may be the fact that one of my good friends told me she was bisexual this year, but I still don’t think I would be too bothered. Even I have a tendency to look at the other girls, for comparison purposes. However, I also am not overly self-concious of changing in front of guys, so maybe I’m not the “average” teenager.
lots of people are saying “its a totally nonsexual enviroment” and “its not like they will check out everyone because they are gay”
I don’t know how long ago you guys went through puberty… its been 10 years for me… but dude! don’t you remember…
thats the age that boys watch nova to see the tribal girls with no shirts on, thats the age EVERYTHING is a sexual environment if your hormones decide it is. thats the age sexuality is so crazy and out of control and such I wouldn’t trust anyone that age to be in the same town as a naked person of the gender they are attracted!!!
Another excellent example of children leading the way. The students at that school forced the school administration to be more openminded. The kids are fine with it, it’s the adults that have to be dragged kicking and screaming into enlightenment.
Question: Is this more of a guy thing? Neither I nor my girlfriend can ever recall getting any kind of sexual charge from being in the locker room during the hormonally charged years of 14-17. My hormones certainly never sexualised the locker room.
Smut on TV or in movies? Sure. That would lead to a hot and bothered Crayons. Locker room? Nah. Not at all. It would be like getting turned on when my doctor checks my breasts for lumps – just ain’t gonna happen.
Where’s Matt_Mcl? I’d like a guy’s persepctive of the locker room scenario.