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??

Something that never made sense to me was the fact there was no soap in the showers, and iirc shower gel wasn't such a big thing then as it is now, there weren't any little travel-sized bottles like there are now.

So we were being forced to run naked through water, but it wasn't exactly for 'cleanliness' purposes because we weren't using soap, so really, what was the point?

I used to arrange my peripatetic music lesson for during PE if I could, and one term I even PRETENDED I had a music lesson during PE when I didn't, and got caught sitting in the instrument store room in the music block with another similarly-minded girl. We were both humiliated in front of the rest of the class and punished by some method I forget what.

If they'd have sorted out the shower issue, I'd have probably enjoyed PE a lot more. As soon as I left school I got a lot more into fitness and realised it didn't HAVE to be the way it had been at school - all shower humiliation, being picked last, freezing cold legs on the hockey pitch being hit with massive heavy wooden hockey sticks you could hardly carry.

We had to walk through a 'corridor' of sprays so impossible to avoid as no way to avoid the water/save your towel if you kept it with you.
I don't remember it being particularly mortifying, but as my whole school experience was pretty grim I don't think the showering necessarily registered.

I don't know what went on before or after us, but my year refused. As a school councillor, I campaigned for shower curtains, but the teachers refused, as they refused us the right to wear trousers and refused to fill the tampon/pad machines.

They didn't try to force us to, probably because it was getting towards the late 90s and adults demanding children get naked before them was probably falling out of fashion.

So many women all saying the same thing from our childhoods,all of us put of sport...wtaf I mean seriously wtaf

It didn't ever occur to me to mention this communal, forced showering to my DM.

I think we just did what the teachers told us to do back then. No questions asked.

I am still quite body conscious now. 35 years + of dieting and being unhappy with showing off my body. It's ridiculous. Forcing kids to get naked isn't the way forward.

I remember my mum being massively sympathetic to my PE woes as she'd had similar at her (all girl's grammar) in the 60s. So it's not like my mum didn't KNOW what was going on, but parents were as conditioned as us back then I think. Don't question the authorit-eh! My mum would offer to write me a note every week to get me out of it, but I knew it wouldn't, you could've been dying on the floor and still not have got out of doing PE at my school. They were evil.

If my daughter told me this stuff was going on at her school - even though I went through it myself - there is no way in hell I would let it continue. I'd rather homeschool her!

no one gave a fuck enough to go in and complain

I'm not sure that that is what it was about. It was just accepted that this was how things were done. I don't think I even mentioned it to my mother. I would have died of embarrassment if DM had gone storming up to school (which sounds ridiculous especially after being forced to shower naked in front of everyone) and back then I'm not sure it would have made a difference.

This is the ONE thread I desperately want the DM to pick up. It actually makes me weep that so many of us went through it, and all the issues we probably still carry today about it.

So many of us telling of similar details - showers pointing different ways, bright red Ps on the register - was this stuff TAUGHT at teacher training? How come it was the same all the way up and down the country? I was in West Yorkshire by the way.

TakeIt W Yorkshire here too.

I went to a mixed school in the 60s. and we had to do PE in our navy blue knickers with the boys only a short distance away. One day one poor girl got her period while we were out on the track and the PE teacher shouted at her and called her a 'dirty girl' and 'why wasn't she prepared'. It must have traumatised my classmate for life as we were only 12 and it was her very first period! All this in front of the boys and their male teacher. I was good at sport but I hated the PE teachers and got out of it as often as I could.

No bloody chance takeit - the comments section of the DM would be filled with those weirdos with half a brain and a compassion bypass saying things like "They should have been caned, and then they'd stop whinging, bring back the strap" and "Nonsense, spoiled women getting all uppity, they're probably all on their periods".

At state primary I remember a female head telling us to line up naked facing her and she remarked that we werent hardly developed . I remember feeling very scared and weirded out.
I must have been 9 ish . I had and have body issues . This was end of the 70s.

We had to have communal naked showers too and the teacher would come in to make sure we were showering. That was late 80's early 90's. I hated it cos I was a late developer and was embarrassed cos I no boobs or pubes like a lot of the other girls.

We had showers in PE. You had to stand in there naked with about 15 or so other girls until you were allowed to come out. And we had to throw our towels over the wall at the back of the showers so no chance of wearing extra underwear etc or staying under a towel.

DS who's 13 is amazed to hear that we all had to have showers. He says there are ones at school but that no one seems to use them. Will have to see whether my 33 year old sister had them when she was at school (she's 8 years younger than me)

Oh and it was impossible to look anywhere. If you seemed to look at any part of flesh of anyone else then you were immediately branded a lesbian. And people were teased more for being slower to develop as well.

We used to smoke in the showers!

Also, I just asked my boyfriend (who went to comp in the 80s) and he said that their PE teacher used to shower naked with the boys!

I don't think that communal showering was much less humiliating for boys actually. I know a couple of men in their 40s who are still knicknamed 'Stiffy' by their peers from school due to an unfortunate episode in the first term of secondary school. Imagine going through your whole life being reminded of what must have been one of the most humiliating things that could happen to a boy of that age, and feeling obliged to laugh along so that you don't get a reputation for being easily offended

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?

PLEASE, please, please tell me you are kidding me? You can't see the difference between a lesbian woman being in a women's changing facility and a man being there? What's the difference? You think that a lesbian woman would be perving over the schoolgirls she is teaching? Really?

It seems that as well as lurid tales of being dragged naked into showers, this thread also displays some of the rampant homophobia prevalent at the time. "Not all lesbians are pedos"- gee, that is good to hear. Because as a PE teacher, encouraging students to shower properly after exercise MUST be sexually motivated.

I've just remembered- in junior school showers having to stand naked (the whole class) and being told to demonstrate with the towel how we were planning to dry ourselves to make sure we were being thorough. Really weird.

I still hate the smell of Impulse body spray as it immediately reminds me of PE changing rooms at school.

We had the compulsory naked showering as well. And period registers With the PE teacher- standing IN the showering area so she could "see" who hadn't showered properly. Shouting things like "Come on girls, don't be shy. We've all got the same bits and bobs"
Fucking horrific.

It wasn't the 70s or 80s. It was the early 00s. What the actual fuck. We were in PSHE lessons learning about 'our rights' and then going to PE where we were forced to be naked in front of an adult. I hated high school. I remember being so relaxed and happy when I started college just because the teachers seemed to respect us as people.

I'm a teacher now and my form (only 5 of them) get changed in the bathrooms during breaktime before the PE lesson- completely private, no other students or adults watching them. I can't imagine what kind of a weirdo you would be to humiliate children like we were.

A lesbian adult is attracted to adult women, not underage girls!

maybe people will start coming forward from schools with the same thing

Yes. Please, please do come forward if you have been a victim of abuse. Why should teachers get away with it?

I got my ears pierced to get out of PE/showering. You weren't allowed to do it for half a term after ear piercing. I didn't tell my Mum why I wanted it done and I was so scared one of the other mums would tell her about the no PE/ear piercing rule. That half term took me nicely up till I left after my dad was posted to Germany. No weird showering ritual in the army school - in fact a much more relaxed and happy school all round which is surprising considering it was full of military children and ex military teachers or at least teachers who had always taught in military schools.