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??

Pls can people read the whole bloody thread before commenting.....there are a lot of people who all went through the same thing....we can't all be fabricating things

Wow. This brings things back. Mid 1980s. Communal showers which we were supposed to use but we would quickly wet our hair and get dressed before it could be policed. Mostly we were taught PE by female PE teachers but there was one pervy male teacher who would inspect the girls showers.

My DBro (a year younger) also was taught by the same male teacher. He was a sadistic bastard by all accounts, picking on the weedy boys to get laughs from the big rugby team lads. A few years later he lost his job (maybe also prosecuted?) for beating up a pupil.

Extremely upsetting that these experiences, which happened to me over 40 years ago, and which I have buried away all these years, have been belittled.

This thread has been quite liberating to read, the fact that so many other women felt like this. Thank you OP for starting it.

The comments about lesbian p.e. teachers have been unnecessary I agree, but I'm sorry, surely offense can take a back seat in this instance.

I guess it does beg the question why boys were a) not as bothered by schooldays showers and b) are merrily wandering around changing rooms with their tackle out in gyms today.

1. Body differences. Chuck 30 teen girls in a room and chances are there's a big difference in their body shapes - breasts, hips, pubic hair. All will both be resoundly mocked for being there and then mocked for not being there. You can't win. Boys, though, don't differ as much. It's unlikely any, at that age, will be a gym-honed chiselled Adonis - that takes considerable effort - and they don't have breast size worries. Alright, they can worry about penis size if they want to, but most men are of an average size - there's not much to mock when you're all the same - and they will not be mocked for having pubic hair.

1. Society's obsession with women's bodies never being good enough. Think about it - of the hundreds of replies on this thread, we weren't all the stubby-legged mega-bushed troglodytes we think we were. Some of us were bloody stunners. Some of us would have been looked at by the other girls as beautiful, as the ideal. Looking back - hey, I never naked-showered so I can't say! - but honestly? Slim, narrow waist, C cup? There was nothing wrong with me, and nothing wrong with my friends either. So truth is, most of us right here in this thread looked pretty OK ranging up to Damn Near Fine, Girl, but it doesn't matter, because we all felt 'fat' and hideous because we're told from an early age we're fat and hideous. We grew a hair and we wobbled when we moved. Now, this nice lady on the magazine page doesn't have a hair or a wobble or a crease, does she, and why can't you be like her?

None of us stands a chance against those messages. Especially when those messages are then barraged at us from the other girls - everyone feels better putting someone else down - and, as we see above, even teachers.

3. Threat of bleeding. Boys don't have to worry about pulling a Carrie.

4. The ol' leg hair debate. From September to April, mine are as fuzzy as a footballer's. Boys don't have to worry about the state of their pins. Girls? Again, damned if we do ("She's such a slapper, she's still shaving her legs for PE showers, ugh I hate her") and if we don't ("Fuckin' 'ell, Cozu, you've got the calves of a footballer.")

5.) Female nudity is 'sexy'. Has been since ye anciente times when tribes sat about carving nekkid ladies. The female nude body is all - so sayeth society, so says art, so says the media - about sex. A girl gets naked, it's seen as a sex thing, even when it's not, like an 11 year old trying to take a shower. Male nudity isn't just seen, or portrayed, as a sex thing. Male nudity can also just be nudity. But the intrinsic link in our culture between naked females and sex is so strong that frankly, you ask me to get naked? That is a sex request. Even doctors don't require nudity. I didn't even give BIRTH naked. Maybe, I dunno, how to unlink female nudity from sex? I guess that's a topic for another day.

I would just like to add that I don't think my PE teachers were abusers in any way. I can remember at least 4 female PE teachers during the 5 years I was there. 1 was lovely and a bit plump herself with a plumpish daughter so I always felt she was more sympathetic to those of us without perfect bodies. Another was liked by some, hated by others. I always really liked her. The other two I didn't really like. However, all of them had the same policy of girls going into the showers naked (well they thought we were naked as we hid our underwear under our towels) and periods marked down in register if you couldn't. This was clearly the school's policy, as it appears to have been policy in several schools. I don't hold it against the PE teachers in my school, who absolutely did not abuse me or my peers.

This has brought up a particularly awful memory of how my best friend was treated one time. She was being really slow getting changed for swimming and I was hanging around waiting for her. Once everyone else had gone to the pool she told me her period had started and she had no tampons. I offered to ask the teacher if I could go and get some from the machine in the toilet. Teacher refused and told me to get in the pool. After the lesson my friend told me the teacher had made her put her swimming costume on, walk down to reception in it and ask if there was a tampon machine, before walking back up the stairs to the toilets where it was. It turned out to be out of service, teacher roared at her for not being prepared and said if she missed a single swimming lesson again she would be on Saturday detention, no excuses. We were 13. I was horrified at how humiliating that was for her and we both cried together when she was telling me. I made sure I had a permanent supply of tampons in my school bag after that.

But I mean what was the point of that other than to humiliate her? I had offered to go straight to the toilets, or she could have let my friend go before she got changed.

Late 70s / early 80s.

Naked communal showers, no towels to be taken in.

Sent back in tomshower if not emerging properly wet.

Oh - and to be excused because of your period - well, that required showing sanitary towel in situ to the PE teacher. I kid you not.

The memory of the awful humiliation of the huge sanitary pad in the school athletics knickers we were forced to wear... I used to try to get away wearing my gym skirt but the teacher always made me ( and others) take the skirt off.

So I just did everything I could to not do PE if I had my period. If the teacher had allowed me to wear the skirt and cover the bulge up I think I may have not have got so fat. Exercise became associated with humiliation

well, that required showing sanitary towel in situ to the PE teacher. I kid you not.

this is so awful.

Just googled "PE showering policy schools eighties" which brought up some interesting results. Apparently showers were compulsory with mandates in place to enforce it.

So there you go, enforced nakedness of children in front of teaching staff who could decide how pleasant, or not, to make the experience. Thankfully this appears to have dropped away but it was actually a requirement of one time.

In our school the girls no longer had showers but the boys did. I assumed it was unusual as they also had to parade through with their hands on their heads. Most of us assumed the male pe teacher was a 'perv' as we called it back then. Many of the boys found it humiliating, especially the shyer boys.

In a way, although it was horrible for them, at least they weren't alone. All these years I thought it was just our school! All of those boys are now men and they must wonder what the hell it was all about too.

That's the thing, a lot of this stuff is coming out now as the victims are grown adults in their late 30s/40s/50s and feel able to finally report it.

I'm fuming on everyone's behalf...I thought it was just me and my classmates who went through this...I wish there was something we could do

jenlindley!- I had totally forgotten about that grubbyndetail until seeing this thread today

I was in secondary school from 1991 - 1996 and also experienced the enforced communal showering.
I hated it.
We had to take our clothes off then wrap a towel round our body and remove the towel as we walked into the large communal shower room which was visible from the communal changing room.
The teacher would watch us to make sure that we had no clothes on and also to make sure we removed the towels before entering the shower room.
I was flat chested and bullied mercilessly for this. Showering was torturous.
One day our (MALE) music teacher walked into the changing room as we were all showering. We all rushed to cover ourselves and he just said "It's nothing I haven't seen before".
Looking back on it, I now think how inappropriate and sleazy this was!
Boys in the year above me at school would grab my breasts and loudly humiliate me by saying how small they were and that I was flat and had no tits.
I hated school.

God. This brings it all back!

We had two changing rooms. One had no shower curtains at all, the other had clear plastic ones. (Naked) showering was v strictly enforced, with a teacher standing with one eye on the showers to ensure you did actually drop your towel and shower. We all had to file past her to get in there and she would check we weren't wearing our knickers underneath - one by requiring us to lift our towel so she could see the hip, the other by running her fingers along the outside of the towel to check for the knicker seam. Wtf were they thinking?

1998-2003.

If you are supervising a group of students showering, you do have to look at them. It does not mean that you get off on it.
What if you're yanking the cubicle curtain open to tell them to hurry up (not sure why just words won't do), and looking them up and down while they squirm? Are you doing that in order to check the plumbing?

Or 'helping' the early-developing 11y/o to get dried as they're 'too slow' - including scrubbing the towel backwards and forwards on their nether regions?

I haven't read all the replies, will do when I have more time...but yes we had this humiilation at out our school.

Showers were a long tube between two walls that gave out a piddling of water...we had to walk through naked, with our arms in the air holding our towel...supposedly to wash under our arms. Then stand at the end while the PE teacher perv looked us up and down while she marked off our name in the register. If we have a period we were able to wash under our arms in the sinks in the toilet block and a 'P' was put in the register. You would be questioned if you had a period less than 4 weekly.

Utterly utterly humiliating

I think often it was a passive aggressive way of punishing the kids they didn't like very much and generally taking out their stresses on them in an underhand way.

'Maybe it is more of an 80's thing because among my peers (early 30's) I have NEVER heard of period diaries being kept'

I was at convent school from '82 to '88 and never encountered this. Nobody ever took showers there so it wouldn't have been an issue anyway. I am truly shocked and appalled by this thread - nothing like it ever happened when I was at school.

Yes I was at boarding school and had to be observed having naked showers after "games" every day, aged 8-13 in 1980s. You were allowed "off-showers" if you had your period and then got a nightly semi-private bath. So everyone knew you had yourwho had their period as they got to have baths. Luckily I didn't start my periods until boarding shcool number 2 where all showers had private cubicles.

And yes matrons did comment on who was skinny, who was sprouting boobs etc.

I had this too at state high school in the 90s; we had to leave our towels on pegs one side of the shower, walk through & ten around the get the towel again. It was compulsory & quite often we were not believed when we had our period.

"Apparently showers were compulsory with mandates in place to enforce it."

Our school must have decided to ignore that.

The boys got it as bad at my school. Teacher would stand in the room and watch, no curtains, "you must shower". Year 11 we had enough and evicted him forcefully from the room.

He was a sadistic bullying shite. I greatly enjoyed visiting after I left, and having him try to bully me then... My offer to laminate him to the car park had him shifting.

I have no idea how bad the girls suffered.. But I'd hope they got less hassle!