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 wasn't an elite athlete though, I (and many others on this thead) was a 12 year old child who very much wasn't gaining anything from being out in public in what amounts of underclothes. I felt very vulnerable running first in heavily populated places and then into the countryside often in the dark of the last lesson of the day in depths of winter.

"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?"

And are elite athletes then subjected to naked showering in front of a fully clothed person who ticks them off and notes their menstrual cycle?

For elite athletes, there is an element of choice - they can choose to participate, they can choose their outfit. Boys were allowed to wear shorts. That didn't seem to detract from their performance so why insist on it for girls?

I've just been reading the Department for Educations advice RE shower facilities at schools - sounds like they must be provided but doesn't state that showers MUST be taken. I wonder if the original advice came from them or if it was a policy made by individual schools? I think a lot of former pupils at these schools need to be seeking an apology and an explanation.

Ah this brings back awful memories, PE was just ruined for me because of the showers, the ritual humiliation of being crap at sports but still expected to play, one of the last to be picked for any team sport.
In fact for around the last 3years of school, I didn't bother to go at all. No one ever asked why,

I was so very skinny but after about 12, I was skinny with enormous tits. No bra cos my ma was so hippy like , so running was excruciating. And the boys loved to take the piss

I have blocked out masses of my childhood in general but some bits stick in my mind. Communal showers, if you weren't wet enough (no soap or shampoo was ever used) you were forced back in. Towels too small to cover any part of you. A male teacher walking in more than once in the few years i bothered with PE. The female PE teacher watching you shower, still don't know why. The male PE teacher occasionally taking over (when female teacher was sick possibly?) And him watching you shower.
Being winded in a hockey lesson by being tripped up, hauled to my feet still not breathing and pushed to run. West Yorkshire 78 to 86

Onchao: please come back and tell us that you were just talking about the boys' medical?

My point being that women and girls are still running around in knickers and T-shirts - so, although i sincerely hope the showering humiliation has become history, the knickers=sportswear thing hasn't.

I quite fancy an apology from the Department of Education actually. Lining naked wet children up in a line for inspection is revolting.

Girls and women are running around in knickers and t-shirts through choice. I was told I had to do it, up hill and down dale, during puberty, wearing sanitary towels that resembled bricks, as they did back then. It was awful.

When DS1 went to secondary school in 2006 the boys and girls had the same PE kit, and it included tracksuit bottoms for those who wanted to wear them. And there was no showering

Reading this thread makes me feel exceptionally lucky that the school I was at (70's) didn't have shower facilities. I can't recall anyone humming excessively either although the place was a deep freeze especially in winter so that probably helped.

YY to the period register for swimming though. One of my friends ducked the lesson for three weeks on the trot and got told she needed to see a doctor. The teachers also thought nothing of standing in the (communal, naturally) changing room while mid teens everyone was doing their damnedest to protect their modesty with totally inadequate towels. All seemed quite normal at the time

Yes it was awful. I think it still is awful.

Identify with many of these stories. Commual showers, awful skimpy PE kit and the period register (WTAF?) Why was this so routine across the country for years?!

I had forgotten all about this, but this thread has made me furious. I am relieved to hear things have finally changed.

Mixed comp, left 1999.

Elite athletes may do official races/London Marathon etc in knickers - but it is (hopefully) their choice. Not proscribed to them en masse at school whilst going through puberty.

But then, all the runners I see training (and there are many where I live) are wearing leggings, not regulation school uniform knickers.

I run on occasion (with the dog purely for my own fitness) but I wouldn't choose to do it in knickers. I wear leggings or gym trousers.

My DD(8)'s PE kit includes shorts, netball skirt, tracksuit. She has, at times, worn all of these at once, believe it or not. Because she doesn't want to show her knickers to the boys. Or wants to be warm/or be able to take off the trackie bottoms and still have shorts underneath if she gets too hot.

Thank god, too. This ritual humiliation of girls needs to stop - hopefully it has already. The thought of my DD going through this shit makes me furious.

In the 70's we did PE in infant school in our knickers and vests. Thank god that's stopped too.

I started secondary school in 2001 and luckily they never made us do this! Maybe I just managed to avoid it...

curly what do you mean about the boys medical? I've no idea what the boys medical was like! I've absolutely no idea what he was trying to ascertain. I read his obituary in the school magazine a while back where he was praised for his services in taking care of the pupils or some bollocks like that. We just knew that if a friend had to go and see the doctor, you skipped lessons to go with them. But for the medical, you're 13, sent off to boarding school for the first time, full of admonishments to do as your told and not cause any trouble etc. The matron tells you to turn up for your medical, the nurse tells you to get undressed etc. You don't question it, do you? None of us did. It was a standing joke, hurt your knee, oh the doctor will tell you to take your shirt off. We just tried to make sure that we either never had to see the doctor or that you didn't go alone and accepted detentions for skipping class. Thinking on it, I don't know if our matron tried to keep us from the doctor, her mantra was "if you're well enough to ask to see the doctor (i.e. to leave the boarding house to walk to the doctors office) then you're well enough to go to school." My parents would never have made a complaint about school procedure anyway. It just wasn't the done thing.

We had to do that shit too! It was awful and gave me all sorts of issues which I still haven't resolved!!! I can't believe how or why it was allowed. Absolutely awful. I never enjoyed sports or PE due to this. I didn't start exercising until my mid 30's as the whole PE experience was so negative for me. It was only in my 30's that I felt confident enough to go into a gym and be able to use the changing rooms and not feel exposed and humiliated. That should have never been allowed in schools...nothing short of abuse really.

Onchao - I think she means that for boys there is (I believe) a medical reason for putting hands down pants and asking them to cough like that. For girls - there isn't.

Totally understand what you're saying, of course. He should have been prosecuted.

The medical reason for boys is checking for a hernia

Our PE teachers were a disgrace. My Nana got so enraged she wrote a letter excusing me from PE for the rest of my time at the school when I was 14. The were cruel, sadistic bullies in numerous ways (including locking away my inhaler which resulted in a blue light ambulance to hospital).

One female teacher used to shower with us. We had two rows of showers, facing each other, no curtains. She used to call out "legs girls" then "bellies" etc to make sure we were washing properly and nothing was missed. If you were on your period you got to use the end cubicle which had a waist high divider thing and no shower opposite so you were supposedly "protected from being embarassed".

Teachers were eventually banned from the showers when she allowed the creepy-as-fuck lifeguard (foisted on the school when a pupil had to save another pupil in trouble in the pool because the PE teacher couldn't swim) to come in to the showers to chat to her about the next lesson. The attitude was that we were being ridiculous because he was a married man who had absolutely no interest in us (bullshit, he was a perv).

Enough people complained, and several parents got involved, that the teachers were banned. They then complained that they couldn't supervise and showers were banned completely for girls (the male teachers had never showered with the boys).

Showering teacher got sacked, and is probably responsible for the homophobic lesbian comments for several generations of kids in our area, when it emerged that she and her 19-year-old former pupil girlfriend had been dating for 4 years, not 2.

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

Yes, and?? Presumably elite athletes choose to dress like that. If they wanted to they could wear shorts or even trousers. That's fine. Enforcing children to dress like that in all weathers, knowing full well that they won't be feeling comfortable in themselves, isn't.

This thread is truly shocking, I've been thinking about you all, all day. And also thinking about the fact that I have family members, my parents etc who have probably been through the same thing. I was fortunate in that enforced showering wasn't a thing in my school, my only gripe was that we weren't allowed tracksuit bottoms until year 10/11, only shorts. The mind boggles as to why.

That's nothing compared to what a lot of posters have been through I know, but it begs the question doesn't it? Why? Why couldn't we wear practical weather appropriate and comfortable clothing for pe? Why was it acceptable for an adult to watch pre-pubescent and pubescent girls and boys shower and then have them stand naked in a line afterwards? Why is/was pe made into such a traumatic and degrading ordeal for so many when surely the aim should be to encourage exercise and physical activity in a positive way? It seems a lot of rules just exist/ed for the sake of it, as a way to exert power and control over vulnerable children.

It's honestly no wonder we have an obesity epidemic and a mental health crisis up and down the country. The stuff some children have been put through at the hands of our own education system is absolutely horrific. So fucked up.

I wish there was some way we could raise awareness or something. Not sure what that would achieve though really.

My thoughts exactly, DeleteorDecay

I'll be keeping a v close eye on this with my DC. I will be that mother breathing fire to the Head and excusing their child form PE for life if there is any hint if this.

I suspect this was what stopped this awful thing in the first place.(it does seem to have stopped).

"Be interesting to hear what happened in other countries for PE in previous decades."

Scarily similar to the stories here. I went to an all girl's school in a former colony in the mid 90s.

We had a sadistic teacher who liked the sporty girls and was scathing to the rest of us.

We had a period register.

I loathed school sports, faked illness, injury and notes to get out of every class I could - and to this day hate sport and think it's 'not for me'.

Same at my school in the 90's, OP. I hated it. When my son started secondary school, he came home really worried about having to have a communal shower. I made an appointment with the head of PE to discuss it and his attitude was very much "tough, it's policy." I told him my son would have a communal shower...provided every teacher at the school had one, too, watched over by the pupils.
The insistence on showers was promptly dropped

I think there is a lot more of things like this to come. First the celebrities preying on children, now it's football which will inevitably lead to other sports too and here, clearly, it was an issue in some schools. A large number of adults had absolutely no respect or regard for children and culture back then was that kids just had to get on with it. No matter what "it" was (violent parents, abusive coaches, bullying teachers) because nobody seemed to realise that their children needed stuck up for.

I know there's a lot said now about how much things have swung the other way with parents berating schools for upsetting their prescious snowflakes, but you have to hope that means, at least, this sort of shit just couldn't happen to children now. I mean, it probably means certain children are more targeted by predatory adults, but hopefully there just isn't the opportunites, or social acceptance, of children being bullied and belittled, or worse, by adults who had a duty of care toward them.