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??

I went to one school in about 2000 where showers were compulsory. You had to go in the flimsy cubical and pass out your towel to be signed off
I hated it
I would skip pe lessons because of it

I then moved to another school where I never saw a single person use the shower and infact chairs were stored in the cubical

Cats no, LIncolnshire. But this eye opening thread has shown me that it was far more common than I thought.

Good grief! I was at secondary school in '75 to '80; there were showers but they were never used. I think they had curtains between, but not in front. I was ridiculed by the bully girls for my training bra's and my tights which had coloured tops like knickers (but not worn as knickers by me), so I can just imagine what would've happened had we had to have showers :(

As, regards clothing, we had airtex shirts and stretchy gym shorts for indoors. Then sweatshirt and kilt (over shorts) with knee socks for netball or hockey outdoors, and tracksuit for field stuff if it were cold enough.

Not so much the showers but having to do everything pe related in navy blue gym knickers. We weren't allowed to wear shorts, pe skirts, joggers, just the knickers. As a slightly overweight schoolgirl this was totally humiliating, especially when we had to do running on the tracker alongside the main road

I mastered my mums signature so I could fake notes to get out of PE and games lessons!

This is 12 pages, so not RTFT, but I think it's odd that our lesbian PE teacher (everyone knew, she was quite open about it) was allowed in the changing rooms. There's no way a man would have been allowed in there, so what's the difference? (No, not all lesbians are paedophiles, but neither are all men). I think if you're attracted to girls you probably shouldn't be in the girls' changing room. These days parents would go ballistic.

As a teenager, boys sports team regularly group shower naked. I had no idea women hate group showering so much. Why is that ? (serious question, not meant to be goady).

e.g. if a bunch of guys from work play football at lunchtime, they will all be expected to shower together afterwards.

We also had awful communal showers. Freezing cold, gauntlet of shower heads to run through.

The trick was to get up to the changing room as quickly as possible, wet hair, wet foot prints and start getting dressed to reduce the risk of getting sent back in when the PE teacher arrived in the room.

We had gym knickers too but were allowed to wear ridiculously short skirts over the top. No idea why we couldn't just wear shorts. Gym knickers were so uncomfortable.

This would have been late 90s.

I hated PE.

I would have loved a proper shower after PE, I've always been a sweaty and stinky sort of person and half a can of impulse body spray just didn't cut it! However we like many others just had communal showers and there was no way on earth I was going to have a proper shower in front of everyone else. Our teacher used to stand in the corridor and we had to go out to her in our towels to get ticked off so we'd strip to underwear, wrap towel and then stick arms and legs under the shower and get a friend to check our bra straps were tucked in before going out. You had to be quick or she would come in. Also if she found anyone cheating she would come in and watch so it was always a good idea to get in quickly.

Makes my blood boil these days. Girls need the chance for a proper, private shower, they need to be able to change their bra too and use a sports bra. And that is before we get on to gym knickers. Urgh. Even then we had arguments about gym knickers. Wtf were boys able to run in football shorts but girls would somehow be impeded by football shorts or skirts and had to run in gym knickers. Fucking sexist crap.

OCSock I went to boarding school too and we all paraded round happily naked. I notice a different more self concious attitude to bodies and bodily functions in my day schooled dd.

I went to school in the 80s and we had communal showers but the (female) teachers absented themselves whilst we showered (so most of us put on a towel and just got our feet wet in the shower to create wet footprints to make it look like we had showered).
Mind you, our PE teachers seemed to work on a system which caused least work for them. In winter they invented an activity which meant we ran around in the freezing cold whilst they stayed inside and drank tea and ate biscuits. ,

I'm amazed at this! I left high school in 1980, swimming lessons and PE at both primary and secondary school and showers also. The shower at the primary school swimming baths, so talking about the early to mid 70's, was literally one cubicle which was a pipe gushing out freezing cold water and we each had to take turns standing under it for a count of 5 seconds! lol! but this was still with our swimming costumes on. In high school just normal communal shower, warm, thank god, and left to get on with it. I'm aghast that during the years you mention you had to stand there naked and dripping and get a tick next to your name! Just really odd.

I started senior school in 1991.
Open plan changing area, open showers and 3 cubicles.
It all depended on which teacher you had. Any of the male teachers, it didn't matter as none of them checked. Some of them were nasty blokes during the lesson, but at least we were free during changing time!
If you got Mrs P you were in for it. Awful woman. Wouldn't accept my severe athsma as a good reason to not be able to keep up with the real sporty girls. She insisted we all used the showers, similar to how other have described. You had to go in naked, she'd check and she had the dreaded period register. This was a nightmare for me as my cycle was, and still is, horribly irregular. We'd be moaned at for not using tampons and thus unable to do swimming,
If you had one of the other two female teachers you were all right. I remember one saying "Well look, it's probably better if you do shower, but you really don't have to. If some of you could get your feet wet and walk around so it looks like you've showered then when Mrs P pops in to check later we wont all be in trouble!"
We really liked that teacher. She didn't shame anyone, she was very encouraging and she taught us lifesaving techniques in the swimming pool.

Sorry not to mid 70's but all through the 70's just to clarify.

I too would love for a retired pe teacher to come on here and tell us why on earth this went on and how/why it was sanctioned!

I don't think the boys got off any easier, I'm sure they were equally humiliated by this.

I can't believe some of the stories on here. So so horribly sad

I left school in 1991. I had quite a few changes of secondary school and luckily there weren't compulsory showers in any of my schools. There were a few shower cubicles but they were largely unused, there just wasn't time between lessons.

But I was so painfully shy and self conscious I found even the communal changing hard. I hated even showing my bra. I was also rubbish at PE and got teased. At one school I barely did PE for about 2 years. My mum would write me notes or I'd forget my kit or I'd skive off. I didn't care and I think the PE teachers gave up on me in the end.

I have a lot of bad things to say about my school, but reading this thread has made me appreciate how reasonable my school was about PE (and uniform as well).

We had showers but they were cubicles, and nobody was ever forced to take a shower or shamed for not taking one. We had the knickers for shorts, but we also had a skirt and the option of a tracksuit.

We also had a lesbian PE teacher who was absolutely lovely and very kind (I mention this as I was slightly disturbed by how many people mentioned their negative experiences with pervy lesbian PE teachers upthread, and I wanted some balance!) It was the straight one who was a bit of a horror, but no more than some of the maths teachers.

The only real bad thing (other than the general humiliation of being picked last etc.) was when a girl had her period and was doing swimming for games, she was supposed to announce this to the entire year bring her normal PE kit and do hockey or whatever with one of the other classes.

I feel really bad for all the people who had to go through ritual humiliation or worse.

I'm so glad I never had to endure any of this. It sounds awful. I was at secondary school late 90s/early 00s and there were showers but never used. We could wear any shorts and t-shirt (within reason - tight denim shorts wouldn't have been allowed) for indoor PE and jogging bottoms for outside.

I hated PE as it was; I genuinely don't think I'd have gone to school if I'd have had to shower in front of everyone, too.

As a teenager, boys sports team regularly group shower naked. I had no idea women hate group showering so much. Why is that ? (serious question, not meant to be goady).

Women's bodies are public property so openly stared at by anyone and everyone (men and women alike). Girls are taught all their self-worth comes from their body and how much it measures up to our society's standard of beauty. Women are also taught their bodies are shameful and something to be embarrassed about (breastfeeding in public is apparently terrible and attention seeking, for example).

So, forcing a load of pubescent girls to shower naked in front of people is humiliating because they will almost certainly instinctively feel it is shameful and if they have any imperfections they will know these will be scrutinised and they will be judged as unworthy. It also further brings home the fact that girls are not allowed any sort of autonomy over their bodies and anyone in a position of power over them has more right to their bodies than the girls themselves.

Oh, this was late 80s-early 90s.

Gosh - sounds like I got off lightly. We had communal showers after swimming but kept our costumes on. No showers after other sports as I recall. Communal changing rooms but that was ok as you could keep a towel around you mostly.

I don't think naked communal showering for boys is a good idea either.

I'm not at all prudish and wish we were more comfortable as a nation/race about nakedness. But it should never be forced, and certainly not in the self conscious/body changing/different rates of development teenage years.

We had this at my school in the 90s.

We had 'towel inspection' where you had to line up and your teacher would check you were naked under your towel - if you forgot it you'd have to stand there naked. Detention if you tried to wear underwear underneath.

Then naked in the group showers as the teacher watched. Now and then she'd shout 'we're all girls - stop making a fuss'. She was a part-time presenter for a gay TV channel, which to our teenage minds made us feel as vulnerable as if it had been a male teacher watching us. Rightly or wrongly.

PE would also end dead on the bell ringing for next lesson - which meant you had to shower/dress afterwards and just accept you'd be late for the next lesson and get a detention then.

We also had PE knickers to wear in winter - as the teachers drank coffee, wore giant coats and warm tracksuits. Playing anything like football or netball was torture.

Totally put me off any sort of physical exercise until this day.

Why is this an issue?

Very young women just on the turn of puberty are both potentially very attractive but also vulnerable - young, inexperienced, perhaps not understanding the nuances of sexuality. They are learning to be adults - newly menstruating, developing breasts and pubic hair, acquiring bras -and also learning whether they are attractive/ unattractive/ finding their places in their social group.

They are taught by the media to be very body conscious - that they are full of imperfections and that they need to buy hair removal cream/ tweezers/ make up/ hair straighteners etc etc to put the imperfections right. It is big business, it is very controlling, but it is also nigh on impossible to escape, being female.

Young people want to be like everyone else and they want to know who they are and they want to feel safe. They want to feel respected and in control of their bodies and they want to be treated like human beings in fact.

I would have hated communal showers, PE was bad enough as it was, and indeed I never broke a sweat, I would have skulked off with a book given the opportunity.

As a teenager, boys sports team regularly group shower naked. I had no idea women hate group showering so much. Why is that ? (serious question, not meant to be goady).

My school was renowned for rugby they did little else and played in all weathers and seasons and were absolutely filthy of course. Making showering a necessity. No rugby or football for the girls, we stayed inside, for the most part, in the winter and did 'softer' sports like gymnastics and keep fit, with field sports confined to the summer. We ventured into the showers only when needed and possibly just weren't used to it (one explanation).
My private school didn't have showers at all in the PE building.