I’m sorry but this is quite simply gross. Parents are really okay with their children walking around stinking to high heaven all sweaty in their clothes because they don’t want their bits to be visible by the same gender for all of a few minutes?
Come on 'murica, get with the program.
I think the issue of nudity is nothing more than a learned behavior. It either comes from your parents at home telling you to cover up or teasing at school. I remember back in junior high when we went swimming. There was one guy who got a woody in the change room and never heard the end of it, hell I still think of it when I see him, but I would never bring it up. The other thing may be that some are insecure about penis size and worry they don’t measure up. I find it hard to believe that someone would worry that someone in the locker room was gay and may be looking at them and if they do I think they may be flattering themselves a little more than they deserve.
I play hockey 4-5 times a week and have seen it all. From the UTD guy to the guy who will stand in the middle of the room, naked with a towel over his shoulder, and finish a conversation before getting in the shower. There are guys who strip down naked, but don’t get a shower and guys who wear spandex like pants under their hockey gear and just pull their pants on over them after the game. Penis size makes no difference to the naked shower guys. I have seen everything from a button on a fur coat to something that could be used as a weapon in a bar fight. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t go out of my way to look, but I have no hangups about seeing a penis. I have seen lots of guys peek at me and I could care less.
Something new that I have seen lately among the 16-18 year olds is showering with their underwear on. I can’t wrap my head around this at all, but to each their own I guess.
Also I might add that it seems like all the really good players shower after the game. I think this comes from our younger days when we played Junior hockey. You had to wear a suit and tie and had no choice but to shower after the game. I think for alot of these guys ,they had to learn to get over their insecurities early and now have no problem being naked in a locker room.
Exactly. I graduated in 1997 and no one ever showered after PE and everyone smelled like spray deodorant and vague BO. But we were teenagers hopped up on pheromones, so who cares!
I’d just like to call your attention to the last panel of this comic from The Oatmeal.
Woman here. I hate being undressed in public, despite years on swim teams. In high school, I tried really hard to avoid sweating in gym class. Getting undressed to shower would have been horrible enough, but messing up hair and makeup was unthinkable. I mean, seriously, back in the day (late 80s/early 90s - might be different now) it took girls more than an hour to get ready for school, but they’re going to replicate all that during the 5 minute shower period after PE? I don’t think so.
That would also explain the nude sing-a-longs in the showers at Bible camp. Also the boys and girls tent-cabins were on opposites of the camp and not visible from eachother or any shared areas. I don’t know what it was like on the girls side, but we boys are constantly naked in our tents or (much to our counselors annoyance) walking around outside of them or hanging stuff up to dry.
The pool that I swim at has cubicles around the pool itself for changing, and shared showers (no nudity, this is the UK). There used to be a few people who liberally used body spray in the side cubicles, leaving a fug of perfumed aerosol wafting over the pool, causing me (and others) to gag as we swam through it.
There are now prominent signs in the cubicles banning the use of deodorant sprays. I, for one, are happy (I use a roll-on).
Si
I think you’re really overstating the amount of times you get super sweaty in gym class. Beyond that, a person who showered in the morning shouldn’t need to shower again a few hours later.
I don’tknow about other gyms, but ours has a well-posted, strict policy that if you take a picture in the lockerroom you lose your membership and are banned from re-joining.
I wouldn’t get super sweaty, but teenagers? Teenagers usually do get sweatier and sometimes even more oily, and another shower wouldn’t hurt. More to the point, I can’t see a clear argument against not having a shower, unless someone can present one.
Gym teachers didn’t give us enough time just to change and get to our next class, there’s no way they’re give even more time to let kids shower, dry off, change and get to our next class.
Isn’t the solution then to simply ask gym teachers to truncate the session by 15 minutes?
Well our gym teachers did repeatedly tell us that they’d write late passes (or allow to go into the lockerroom early) to anybody who wanted to take a shower. Very few boys took them up on that offer.
Yeah, that is gross. I won’t even walk around barefoot in a lockerroom. Even at home I don’t like sitting naked on things without a towel in between (well, except for the toilet).
There’s also the idea that the gym teacher is failing at his job if his students aren’t sweating enough to need a shower after class.
[QUOTE=Illuminatiprimus]
Isn’t the solution then to simply ask gym teachers to truncate the session by 15 minutes?
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My HS gym classes lasted 42 minutes including the time it took everyone to change, rollcall, warm-ups, any explantation or instruction of what we doing (admitedly something the boys’ teachers seldom did), and what time we were given to change back into our school clothes. I think we only had less than 30 minutes of actually physically activity.
If the school actually required or expected all or most students to shower it would’ve needed to allow for longer gym classes in the timetable. I suppose they could’ve made gym a double-period class you only had every other day for a semester instead of a single-perion class every other day for the whole year. Or a double-period class every 4 days, although that could create other scheduling problems.
Never trust a man who wears his underwear into the shower at the gym.
What’s THAT about??
Mind you, I’m talking back in the 1960’s, but PE was required, and the coaches reveled in running us in the dirt, sweating to the max, and getting nasty rotten dirty. And we had no choice about it. Of course, this was also in Georgia where the premise of Deliverance (“Squeal like a pig!”) is believable.
I spent a LOT less exercise in boot camp.
Funny! I just saw a Bud Lite commercial on YouTube, called the Clothing Drive, and one woman’s reaction to a nude guy sitting in her office chair immediately brought your comment to mind.
None of the people in the gym classes I was in ever got sweaty enough to need a shower. If we had, the school would have smelled terrible, since no one used the showers, but it didn’t.
Maybe that’s what’s missing for me - at school PE was always a double period so there was plenty of time at the end to get showered and changed.
I’m not even going to get into THAT particular insanity.
We had a thread a while back about young women who walk with their eyes to the ground and their arms crossed over their breasts. If only the towel-to-underwear guys and them could meet, this world would be a happier place.
Or at least that cotton mill that makes sheets with holes for Orthodox Jews would have more customers
We did that as kids after a game too; you’d always come out dirtier than when you went in and need a shower after. Some joker would always get the freezing cold hose pipe out and start spraying it everywhere, too. Every club now only has communal showers, from what I’ve seen.