Nudity in the gym locker room

Lotta old fuckers around here. Jesus.

 

I didn't want to get old but I figured it was better than the alternative.

 

Maybe where you went to school, Starman. I never once showered at school, or after athletic contests, with a bunch of dudes. My family had two perfectly good bathrooms at home, where I could relax and enjoy my ablutions.

 

I assure you, when I went to HS in the mid-1970s, showering at school after sports and gym classes was overwhelmingly prevalent across the nation.

 

Absolutely. It was the way it was. Every time I hear anything from Led Zeps Houses of The Holy I think of
our HS Football locker room. We had an 8 track player and it somehow got jammed with HoH and it was the
only album we could listen to for half a season.

Pedophilia, outward homosexuality, Catholic priests and cell phones with camera's changed all that.

 

Seconded.

It was not even up for discussion.

The one or two kids in my gym classes who made excuses not to shower were taunted unmercifully.

And they smelled like ass.

 

I'll join everybody else in voting generational (mainly).

A lot has changed in the last 30 years (some for the better, some for the worse). Families are smaller, but houses are bigger. Kids thus grow up with a greater expectation of privacy from the start.

Also, there's a cultural aspect to it. Americans are far more prudish than most European or Asian countries (and I'd even throw in Canada). I'm not entirely sure why that is. Perhaps the religious influence and the inability to separate nudity from sex.

Finally, as long as I'm wearing my sociologist hat, I think integration has something to do with it. A generation ago, white kids mainly showered with white kids and black kids with black kids. The U.S. is much more diverse, and that increases anxiety in the locker room. (My brother was in the service in Korea, an ethnically homogeneous culture that probably wins first place when it comes to people wandering around naked in locker rooms).

As for the age thing, I do think most of us have varying shower anxieties left over from seventh grade, but then we become adults. If you're still hiding to change, you may need to see a therapist or something. That seems unhealthy.

 

Starman is right on for the late 1960s-early 1970s, when I was in high school. We even swam nekked in swim class until we moved to a new high school that had windows in the pool area.

I had first-period gym my senior year and you bet your ass I showered afterward. Everyone did, even in my college gym classes.

 

Rat tails. With the towels.

 

College gym classes?

 

Probably also generational. Duke required two semesters of PE when I was there. If you flunked the swimming test, you had to take swimming. Otherwise, you just did somethng you enjoyed. I went riding twice a week for two semesters--requirement met.

Mixing "generational," nudity and college: Our freshman class was the first one not required to have the naked pictures taken.

 

I had to take two half-credit PE courses in college, but both (golf and bowling) were away from the PE building, so there was no showering after class. The golf class never really hit the course. We hit balls off mats into nets indoors and hit balls outdoors on the intramural football fields.