to think stripping naked to shower after PE at school was horrific? **title edited by MNHQ**

[Flowersinyourhair]

Recent conversations with my daughter about PE at school (she loves it, I hated it) have got me thinking about why I disliked it so much.

I was reminded of the hideous shower experience. After PE, the girls would be obliged to have a naked shower, all in together. We would then have to go to the teacher, totally starkers and dripping wet, and bit ticked off on a register to say we'd had a shower.

I can't to this day understand why it mattered so much. It's a safeguarding nightmare really and I'm so glad it doesn't work like that anymore.

AIBU to think it's no reason I hated PE and to ask whether my school was particularly weird??

YY to all the horrible stories on here - I was at school in the 80's and had to do the communal shower thing and hated it. I used to pretend to be ill as much as I could get away with on PE days because of it.

Swimming was even worse. We had a male swimming teacher who would stick his head round the changing room door to 'check we were getting ready quickly'

Looking back at the lack of child protection then, all the hideous abuse from that time being reported now doesn't surprise me at all

We had the open shower room of shame too. Miss Barker standing at the end to make sure you got wet. Horrible and humiliating, this was in the 70's.
I loathed pe, nasty sadistic teachers and those awful pe knickers! Freezing on the hockey pitch in January dressed in blue pants and an airtex t shirt. We weren't allowed tracksuit or warm tops, but you can bet "miss" didn't stir outdoors without full arctic clothing.

My DH had his arm broken by his pe teacher kicking a leather football at him, teacher then told him to "stop whining" and made him continue to play.

Happened at my school in the 90s. One teacher used to put her hand on your chest under your towel to make sure you were properly wet.

Unfortunately schools attract people who abuse children as they are full of children. I'm including teenagers as children in these circumstances as that is what they are in this dynamic. I'm always so sad and angry when I hear accounts and it feels like it's so common, even today, though I doubt anyone gets away with publicly watching children in showers anymore.

I'm sure there must be people on this thread from my old school. Sadistic games mistresses, horrible showers, disgusting changing rooms...

I've just remembered the joy of finding a verruca. If you prodded and picked at it enough, it might go septic and then there was the possibility of half a term off games... Dsis had her entire toenail ripped off by a hairy mat (remember those?) and escaped PE for a whole term.

Actually the other girls were just as bad. I was sent to Coventry for three weeks for "letting the form down" by being terrible at games and putting them out of the running for the year cup (like who cares?). This was the 1980s, not the 1930s. And I never told anyone - not teachers or parents. In those days you just didn't .

Reading some of these makes me thankful that our pe teacher wasn't so strict. We were supposed to shower properly but as long as we were seen to be showering teacher didn't enforce it. Ours was also long line of shower heads with flimsy curtains that offered no privacy.
To start with showers consisted of towel wrapped round us, underwear still on, quickly stick arms and legs under running water back to change.
By 4th and 5th year, most of us didn't even bother taking a towel.

Boys went in starkers, no curtains

We had regulation pe kit, white polo, navy gym knickers and skirt, for pe but the boys were allowed any shorts and shirt. We weren't allowed jumpers or jogging bottoms in the winter until our last year there, boys were allowed as soon as the weather turned!

Having said that, Id much rather do pe in freezing temps with blue legs than get in the the showers naked!

None of my dcs were/are made to shower after pe now, I'm glad they didn't/don't have to endure it.

My DH had his arm broken by his pe teacher kicking a leather football at him, teacher then told him to "stop whining" and made him continue to play.

Your poor DH!

I broke my finger trying to catch a netball, and was similarly told to stop complaining and go to my next class. Didn't get it X-rayed until a week later when it was massively swollen and damaged - and then, not able to do PE, I had to listen to the PE teacher lecture the class on how girls who try hard in PE don't ever get injured.

My school didn't have showers, thankfully, but we did have awful brown PE knickers and annual 'foot checks.' I remember one teacher announcing to the class 'Sarah has a terrible foot disease' and only later revealing that the poor girl's offense was painting her toenails.

I wonder how many women were put off exercise for decades by school PE.

Annual foot checks? We had them weekly. And I was caught with pale pink nail varnish on my toes. I had to report to PE teacher the following day to show that I had removed it. Bizarre.

I had no idea this used to happen. These experiences are sickening I'm 25 and when we had PE at my secondary school we weren't required to use the showers and the PE teachers, male or female, would only ever open the changing room door to shout for us to come out. AND there were walls inside the changing room (to the sides and in front of the door) so it was impossible for anything to be seen unless they walked around the corner and directly into the changing room, which I can't remember them doing. There would have been an absolute riot if they'd tried to enforce showers, checks and things like that.

I'm wondering now what caused these changes, in such a relatively short period of time too.

I only remember having showers occasionally at school, and I'm pretty sure we wore swimming costumes after swimming at primary. At secondary the showers were rarely used at least for class PE lessons.

I actually slapped my pe teacher when she pulled me by my hair into a shower, i had always refused.

Body issues and a bad time at home meant i had a fear of getting naked, they would also inspect that each girl was wet, this was 1989 and i was 10 years old, we had no primary school here then and this was middle school.

I got a warning but i think she did too as the other girls backed me up, she had pushed me and literally pulled me by my hair under a shower, i had got a bit wet and i turned and slapped her, i can still feel my anger and hurt.

There was no safeguarding, terrible things happenned at that school. One girl was teased for looking pregnant, her stomach was huge, turns out she was pregnant, she was 12 years old and it was her dads. So sad when i think back to the changing room and what she went through after awful things were happenning to her at home. Pe just made it worse.

We had a kind of corridor of showers on either side, you had to walk through it in a line holding your towel above your head

Reading this thread and posting brought a tear to my eye, i had forgotton some of it, but it was the tip of the iceberg.
I remember techers putting their hands down kids crotches, pinging bra straps, rearranging their bits in class often, a female tacher who snogged a boy in my year in a cupboard and much more.

I dont think my school was that unusual either, this was late 80s.

Techer and tacher = teacher, sorry

I wonder what the purpose of the register was. I mean yes it was tick who had showered but why?? Who needed that information? Who looked at that register after the class and thought "oh X hasn't showered today" and then do what exactly with that information? Attendance registers serve a purpose. But A shower register? Did the government collect those stats?

Reading all these stories has honestly reduced me to tears and made me feel really angry at the same time! How any grown up could have ever, ever thought this behaviour was acceptable is absolutely unbelievable. Some teachers really were arseholes weren't they?!

We had this too.
First you had to hang your undies up on hooks at one side of the 'wet area' Then walk a passage way with a row of showers at head height and another at waist height at either side and you had to carry your towel through above your head and the teacher (miss B later to become Mrs Y) would stand there with a register ticking your name off whilst you wee naked holding a scrunched up towel above your head.
I always thought she must be a lesbian but I see now that it seems to have been common practice in schools at that time.
My DDs are now at the same school and the PE teacher does not even enter the changing roo whilst the girls are getting changed

Designed by men, for men -- this is so disgusting.
And people say we don't need feminism.

'you were naked' not you 'wee' naked LOL That would be a whole different kind of weird!

It wasn't just teachers - huge swathes of the culture treated children, particularly female children, as fair game. Builders would wolf whistle at 12/13 year old girls (in school uniform, so clearly underage), male teachers would lech over pupils, female employees had to put up with everything from sexist comments to sexual assault - and even though issues were flagged and flagged and flagged, no-one did anything. Boys will be boys and the rights of grown men were repeatedly allowed to triumph over the rights of children and women to basic respect.

It was the same at my school OP, (late 80s early 90s) and I'm still a bit bitter about it. I think I could've been better at PE if it wasn't for the showering bit, I just dreaded it. We had to drop our towels at the entrance and then run around a sort of corridor of showers (which were all pointing in different directions so you couldn't go in in your towel). Then you went to be ticked off by the teacher who had pulled up a stool to enjoy the spectacle. It was absolutely inappropriate but you just thought it was something you had to do and you didn't question authority.

If you had your period you were allowed to not shower, and one girl should've been in the record books for the most continual period in history. She was a Sport Billy though so got away with it

I have a recurring nightmare about having to shower or go to the toilet publicly and it must be from the experiences I had in PE.

I can't believe it was allowed.

I had this backwards. I went to a prep school that had just turned co-ed, they were feeding in girls from the bottom but I came in at the top. I was the only girl in my year and head girl so had some authority.

We were sent into the changing rooms to shower and get changed and I didn't even consider showering just got changed. Then I was teased by the younger girls that I would smell. Maybe I did. They all showered together as a giggly group of younger girls.

Went to boarding school, completely shameless about naked bodies, us........

Starsorwater

Shropshire?

Another one with communal showers.

At middle school - so aged about 8/9 our teacher also made us all do PE with no tops on. Not only was it embarrassing (break started just as our lesson finished, so the whole school saw us), there was no sun screen or anything required in school back then, so I dread to think of the damage to our skin.

I was at school (convent) in the 80s. There were showers in the changing rooms, but I never once saw them used in the seven years I was there. I always seemed to have P.E. in the afternoon, so it was a mad dash 💨 just to get changed and get out to catch the school bus as it were.