I’ve heard about coed showers in college in the 1970’s before, was it fully out in the open or was it more “men and women share the same communal space but the stalls are gendered/have curtains”?
Our college had both kinds. My first year dorm was co-ed and all out in the open. People tended to shower at off hours, or women could go up a floor to an all women floor and use that shower. But I do recall some mixed gender showering. Most dorms had stalls or were segregated by sex. Maybe it was a holdover from the 60s, but nudity seemed to be less of issue in those days.
HS was a long time ago… and I had distanced myself from the “jocks” years before. Senior year I heard that a kid in the communal fieldhouse showers caught a hard on… and that all of the upper classmen beat him up after every practice because of it. The coach, being a good ole boy from the Italian Neighborhood, just told people he got his bruises from practice.
There was nothing I could do about that then as I wasn’t a direct witness (and I was a kid) but given the beatings that kid took ( and the smirks of that evil shit ‘coach’), I will Never give anyone like Gym Jordan an even break.
I was in junior high and high school in the early 70s and took nude showers after gym class in both. (I think things have changed.) The thought never crossed my mind, or apparently anyone else’s.
Definitely not, though I hated high school PE and the whole communal shower thing because I was a fat kid, not because of potential penis exposure. For context, my high school tenure was from 1984-1988.
However. One thing I did wonder after the Toobin incident:
Let’s have another brief pause for how epically dumb you’d need to be to do this…
(brief pause)
… after this event, it really did make me wonder: “have I ever masturbated during a conference call?” because y’know, being a dude and all that, we do get some really bizarre urges at really bizarre times.
The answer is no. No I have not! Sheesh. WTF Toobin. It’s one of those decisions that’s so cockamamie (pun intended) that you now have to question all the decisions this person has ever made.
The thing we were most afraid of was that one guy who insisted on peeing in the shower. Nothing emptied out a communal shower faster.
I was having bothersome private thoughts, even though I still assumed I was straight, so I was quite happy to be excused from gym class in high school. As a college freshman, I was still worried I’d bone up and so I chose the newest dorm, which had individual showers.
Four years later in grad school, when I’d acquired substantially more knowledge about my true self, I’d make it a point to walk through the gym locker room, to check out who might be in the showers.
Let me tell you about my classmate Larry.
Poor Larry. So many guys snickered, but I don’t think he could help it. No, he couldn’t help lt.
Every gym class there would be Larry standing proud, very proud. Extremely proud. After a while we mostly ignored Larry. Except we didn’t shower to close to him. We would cautiously not dress too near to him and nobody would talk to him about his condition. What would we ask, anyway? What could he do about it? He tried sometimes to cover it with his towel, but that just looked silly.
We just got accustomed to his problem . “Yeah, he’s hard again,” was common. It finally turned to pity for Larry.
But, from 9th through 12th grade, in the locker room none of us ever saw Larry flaccid, when we dared to look.
Poor Larry.
If guys could reliably make themselves have a hard on, the world would be a much simpler place.
I saw a reference to a contract for a maidservant in the 17th c. Massachusetts Bay Colony; one of the clauses was that she wouldn’t be given lobster for dinner more than three times a week.
The bullying was quite bad in my JH. We had a shared gym class with the HS guys. You’d see guys knocking down smaller guys in the shower, urinating on them, etc. I was fairly larger so it was mostly just verbal bullying toward me. In retrospect I’m not sure why the teacher never stepped in. I guess he never wanted to get near the showers himself.
I had plenty of fear in the locker room showers but not about getting an erection.
Ooh, sorry. That’s terrible.
No problems at our Jr. High… I guess we were just too busy getting out of our gym shorts, into the shower, getting dried and dressed and running a comb through our hair before our next class.
I’ve often thought back to that locker room, surprised that no one made a big deal about all the naked wienies flopping around. In Jr. and Sr. High (gym classes, football, wrestling, track and volleyball), I never once heard anyone comment on anyone else’s junk.
The First Law of the Locker Room (and showers) was that you studiously avoid looking any at anyone else’s junk (also when you are using side-by-side urinals). Indicating that you were checking other guys out would imply that you were gay. (Of course everyone did look only surreptitiously.)
With a talent like that, he probably went on to a lucrative career in the porn industry.
Yep, it just happened all the time, for no particular reason - and once you noticed it was happening, it became a sort of self-reinforcing phenomenon. It wouldn’t go away, specifically because you were thinking about how much you wished it would go away.
And yeah, because it could happen at literally any moment, it was a thing to be feared in any setting where it might be noticed.
I suspect that for many men, the penis is a shy introvert in public. I once saw an, err, “art” film of a group of twentysomething young women and men playing a strip/sex game. The premise was overtly sexual, all the players were speedily divested of clothing, and all knew the game would end with them having sex with each other. Nevertheless, despite spending ten minutes watching attractive young women disrobe and touch each other, neither of the guys got erect until they were actually being fellated.
That accords with my experiences; whenever I’ve been nude in mixed situations, I’ve never had an involuntary erection.
This is going off on a completely different tangent but I was told by my friends you should NEVER have an erection in front of a woman unless she’s has touched your penis already, otherwise you look like an overeager loser.
I’ve seen plenty of bad sex comedies where this is the case too, a clothed man has a woman naked in front of him and the woman becomes offended seeing that he has an erection underneath his pants.
I can kinda see the quasi-logic there, and maybe this is a cultural difference, but IME utterly untrue, based on 30 years of dating and hooking up with women.
Women giving the glance down there and seeing wood is like incontrovertible proof that this guy wants them, yei!
+1
It’s fine if you’re not hard prior to being touched, but IME a hard dick is always treated as a welcome start.
My parents sent me to private school in middle and high school, for various reasons but in part so I wouldn’t have to shower after gym (we had showers there but using them was optional and probably three times in the six years I spent there someone used one). But my friends that stayed in public school were showers were required told me that one kid got a boner and they were still teasing him about it at the end of the year. So the fear was real.