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 dont think boys had it any easier TBH. Okay, no periods, but plenty of risk of other humiliations with the same problems of being too far into puberty in the early years or a late developer in the later years.

On the whole I think it was about wielding power. In any culture where nakedness in front of your contemporaries is not the norm then forcing people to strip is a way of wielding power over them.

I think I was quite lucky! Attended 2 girls schools one a comprehensive rough type the other a fee paying school.

I do recall using showers about 3 times in the comp and doing the dodge eg avoiding them as far as I recall we didn't swim but had a wooden open air pool in one building and although I recall PE teachers prowling about near the showers we tried to be quick and as far as I recall they didn't much bother making us shower... Plus they didn't work etc.

In the private convent luckily no showers at all! which surprises me!

We had the lesbian PE teachers though who'd make us perform in freezing cold outside at both schools.

I was at school 1983-84 to 1987/8.

Honestly safeguarding etc around now I'm shocked by the treatment meted out to other girls and boys but not surprised.

Pretty much the same as OP at our school too. I did my GCSEs in 1999, so not even like it was that long ago!
No towels allowed in the shower area!
Showers were down a corridor (full of hockey sticks etc), about 10m long from the changing room. So you had to strip off completely naked, walk down this long corridor, have a communal shower and then walk dripping wet to the end of the corridor, more often than not queue up behind the other girls and have your name ticked off before returning to the changing room to dry off in front of everyone.

We all rushed to cover ourselves and he just said "It's nothing I haven't seen before".

I absolutely hate this attitude. It sounds like an excuse for adults to ignore that teenage girls have any right to privacy, or bodily integrity, because -what- he's seen a naked female before? (Consensually, one hopes - not because he's poked his head around a female changing room door before).

It just doesn't make any sense - just because a man's 'seen it all before' doesn't mean he has a right to see me or any other random woman naked

I've just remembered gym knickers too. Jesus Christ, they were pants! We had to wear them to do cross country running, the first part of which went through a very busy town centre.

Wow... am amazed how many of us had to put up with this shit in the name of education ! Reading through it is giving me the rage... how was this allowed to go on? I don't recall complaining to my parents though, which is odd. I remember dreading PE/Games day... it seemed to come around so quick.

Shocking stories. Shocking because there are so many of them and shocking because they are not just anecdotes - every post in this thread is essentially saying the same thing! Shocking because I know first hand they are all true. Tens of thousands of girls humiliated twice a week for years. All powerless to do anything about it because of our age and low status. How sad. 😟

TheWoodlander this is exactly how I feel about it now and also how we all felt at the time.
One of my friends said that if he's seen it all before does that mean he's in the habit of staring at naked young girls.
Also what on earth was he doing in the female changing rooms. He was a music teacher!

So who made the decision that kids must shower,it was who's policy? And why nothing in place with this policy to say schools must provide adequate private changing rooms.how the fuck was that made policy

I am still traumatised all these years later. Because I was overweight and an early developer on the puberty side it was just awful. And I remember the high walls and high windows. Changing room was so dark and dingy. Old Victorian building. Truly traumatic but it only happened for years 5 & 6 it was a middle school. When moved into year 7 and a new school we had cubicles

I had no idea this happened. It''s bonkers!

I went to two schools in the 80s and 90s, one private one local comp. We didn't shower after PE in either school, we just changed our clothes.

My secondary age boys have just confirmed to me that they do not have showers.

DH confirmed that he did, in the 80's, communally, no curtains or anything. He hated it.

I'm so glad I didn't have to - it is the sort of thing that would have traumatised me for many reasons. I was very self-conscious as a teenager.

My mum has spoken before about how in the 50's her PE teacher would whip their towels away after showers and saying breezily 'come along girls, nothing to be ashamed of" and suchlike. I always thought this was an anomaly - but it was clearly not that unusual.

Hopefully it's been consigned to the past now - but I'm definitely with those saying "wtf were they thinking??"

I was at an all girls school in the late 80s/early 90s. There were shower blocks but they were never used in my day. There was a proposal to reintroduce showering when I was about 13/14 but we all proclaimed that we would turn up with swimwear and there were some pretty vigorous objections. The idea was dropped. We never got that sweaty during pointless PE anyway.

Who made the decision this was obligatory? Whoever they are I think they should be obliged to stand naked in a bare concrete entirely open shower room in front of their peers whilst trying to hide the fact they are on their period whilst someone shouts at them. Because that's what we had - and at probably the most sensitive stage of your lifetime.

And for you West Yorkshire people - I was Somerset miles away and same thing happened there (1986-93).

Some of what I've read here is so wrong and awful.We were lucky at my school. There were showers in the girls changing room but they'd either been condemned or didn't work. Maybe we got smelly but I don't remember over exerting myself that much in PE.
Things like this put girls off, showers should be optional with a cubicle and no way should the teacher be wanting to check naked girls!

I went to a school in the East Midlands that had been a grammar but went comprehensive in 1977 - the year I started secondary.

The school doubled in size and was given money for a new sports hall and changing facilities and we were all shocked to find in our second term there, when the building work was done, that we would all be required to shower after PE.

The thing that amazed me was that in 1977 they built new facilities with only one cubicle shower (which only the very overweight girls were given permission to use) the rest had to use the horrible corridor showers. Why they didn't plan the facilities better I don't know.

The teachers ticked our names on the register - and we had the red dot next to our names if you tried to get out of showering because you had your period.

I would be very interested to know who mandated the compulsory showering. Was it a diktat from the Education Authority?

You couldn't tell your mum. Mine was too innocent. She would have said 'They'll have seen it all before, why do you always think everyone's looking at you, etc.'
Once, after a school medical, I locked myself in home bathroom and refused to go to school- that was a crisis- one loo, six people in the house. In the end she fetched a PE teacher to try and talk me out!!! A very nice PE teacher, her friend from another school but by then I was past reasoning with.

I hadn't thought about it before, but why did my parents stand for it? Why did my mum think it was acceptable that her 11 year old daughter had to run through the city centre in a pair of knickers on cross country? Why was it acceptable when I was 14 and more developed? I would never allow that to happen to a daughter if I had one. My sister is 10 years younger than me and didn't have to endure this crap as she went to a state school where the practice had been stopped.

It would never have occurred to me to tell my Mum how distressed I was about it. My parents never challenged authority, or the "way things were done". She would have been completely unable to talk to me about it, we have never had a conversation deeper than the weather. My relationship with my DC is so different.

This has been playing on my mind all day.

I can't understand why my parents allowed the school make my sister and I run through villages and woods, places we weren't allowed from home because it was too far, in just a pair of knickers and a T-shirt because the school said so.

I know all my friends and I hated the showers, but we didnt go home and complain because our parents would have just said that's what happens at school and gone along with it.

I'm so glad times have changed and parents challenge things that are obviously not right, nowadays.

To be honest I think we all just had to get on with it. I never told anyone how much I hated it or expected it to change. I just accepted that was how it was, whilst hating every second of the hell.

We had the period register too. I didn't include that in my OP as I had blocked it out of my memory! You've all reminded me. How awful to subject girls to such a total invasion of privacy at a time when privacy is so important. An adult would never be expected to put up with such ritual humiliation and yet as children, we were. Thank God it's stopped.

Knickers and a t-shirt pretty much describes the outfit of female, elite cross country runners.

Onchao: your story is the most shocking. Are you saying that in your medical at school, there was a doctor who sexually abused all the girls? Because there is absolutely no reason why they should put their hand down girls' knickers and tell them to cough. What exactly was he trying to as ascertain? Was this "doctor" ever prosecuted?

"Knickers and a t-shirt pretty much describes the outfit of female, elite cross country runners."

Your point being?

How many elite athletes are there in your average group of self-conscious pre-pubescsent & pubescent girls?