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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

See all MNHQ comments on this thread

Original poster

to think stripping naked to shower after PE at school was horrific? **title edited by MNHQ**

883 replies

Flowersinyourhair · 05/12/2016 22:35

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??

OP posts:
liz70 · 09/12/2016 20:40

Neither my parents, in their 70s, nor my brother and I, in our 40s, or my DDs, two teenagers plus one primary school aged child, ever endured this experience. My dad was appalled when I told him, and compared it to Nazi Germany - degradation and humiliation. So that's three generations that it didn't happen to, meaning any claims of "that's just the way it was back then" are utter tripe. Just power crazed heads and teachers, more like. Hmm

Original poster
Flowersinyourhair · 09/12/2016 20:41

Thanks!

OP posts:
user1481201991 · 09/12/2016 21:00

In my opinion there's a big difference between being a child forced to have a naked communal shower by adults in a position of authority, and choosing to have one as an adult on your own terms.

While I hated and felt intimidated by the communal PE showers at school, I've gone naked in nude saunas etc in central Europe and Scandinavia in my adult life. Two totally different experiences.

Sophia1984 · 09/12/2016 21:03

I have a really vague memory of this but honestly think I've blocked it out in some way. Pretty sure we had to have naked communal showers up to Year 8 at least (in late 90s) School PE put me off exercise for about a decade- I hated that the teachers favoured the sporty, popular girls and there were multiple pervy male teachers, one of whom would grope pupils under pretence of helping with gymnastics.

AuntGertrude · 09/12/2016 21:04

I had to do this in my secondary school in the early-mid Eighties. There was a long walkway past a row of shower heads, with a low wall to separate that area from the rest of the changing room. You had to leave your clothes in the areas with benches and pegs, and walk about 10 yards to the shower area, totally naked, and then walk along the walkway under a row of (fairly cold) showers, then grab your towel and hide whilst you got dried and changed. It was horrific.

This was a good reason to love cross-country if you were prepared to kill yourself and run fast instead of plodding along. If you got back first, the teacher wouldn't be back, and only a couple of others a few minutes later, and you could get showered in privacy (you did need a shower after flogging around three miles).

The mortification of having to tell the teacher when you were on your period was awful. And tight-fitting school gym knickers which didn't hide if you wore sanitary towels (grim if you were doing trampolining and had a circle of girls all staring up at your nethers as you jumped up and down nervously).

Namechangebitch · 09/12/2016 21:07

My DP says at his school there was a viewing window into the showers. The teachers could sit in their little PE staff room and peek at the boys in the shower.

Wow the 70s and 80s were fun.

RussellTheLoveMuscle · 09/12/2016 21:08

We were also made to go through showers watched by our P.E teacher- I dreaded it all week. On one occasion she decided I needed to go through again on my own. I was so mortified I kept my towel wrapped round me, she came into the shower screaming at me and wrenched my towel away so hard she ripped it.

user1481201991 · 09/12/2016 21:23

No such luck at our school AuntGertrude, all the showers had to be switched on centrally by a teacher so we didn't have that as motivation to do well in cross country!

whirlygirly · 09/12/2016 21:35

Exactly the same as aunt Gertrude.

It was horrific being made to wear tiny gum knickers and cross the main school in front of lots of older kids to get to the sports field.
Concealing a sanitary towel aged 11 was just grim.
I'd also forgotten all of this but it was truly fucking hideous and we also had questionable pe teachers, looking back.

MissMarplesHat · 09/12/2016 22:21

I was at high school during the 80's and although showers were compulsory (unless menstruating) they at least were individual cubicles and we went to the showers with our towels around us (mum bought me the biggest bath sheet she could find Grin). However the PE teachers would 'check' that we had showered by touching our thighs to check they were wet, wtf. It seems unbelievable now.

maggienolia · 09/12/2016 22:34

We had all this- shower humiliation in second and third year, being called dirty bitches if we didn't shower in later years. Fact is, it was abuse. Pure and simple.
And I'd love to see a proper investigation of this with those teachers held to account.

Lovelybangers · 09/12/2016 22:56

My sister was at the same school as me 10 years later (1989-94) and had to go in the communal, cold shower with (the same) teacher watching.

I am still wondering where the ex PE teachers are to give their side of this..

thenightsky · 09/12/2016 23:00

The more I read of this the more the horror comes back to me... the screechy girls, the shouty teachers, the echoing changing room with freezing floor tiles and the ancient banging pipes of the cold showers as we shivered and shook, letting go of our towels for as short a time as possible. I can even smell that awful rubber gym shoes smell. Horrible memories.

Where are those PE teachers now? How do we get them to come on here and talk to us about why this was okay? Do we need to name them?

Mrs Hill where are you now?

Topseyt · 09/12/2016 23:04

I left school in 1984.

I recall the showers. A large room just off one end of the girls' changing room. Having to walk through naked before going to get dressed. We also had a PE teacher who liked to turn the showers to cold on us.

Then, we would be given a totally inadequate couple of minutes to get dressed, and sometimes turfed out into the corridor in just our underwear if we didn't manage it.

I hated PE. It was awful. Worst lesson on the timetable.

Badly taught PE with its sharp practices can be very damaging. I am relieved to hear from my DDs that it generally isn't done that way anymore. Certainly not the shower ritual.

megletthesecond · 09/12/2016 23:07

This is why I usually bunked off PE from year 9. Hated it. The scrutiny of my body from the perfect girls and have to try and avoid every PE shower.

If I find out secondary PE is still shit and humiliating when my dc's start it will be the only thing I've ever gone against the school about.

Justaboy · 09/12/2016 23:15

We also had a PE teacher who liked to turn the showers to cold on us.

What is it about PE teachers?, and why haven't we one on here to reply as yet?.

YouTheCat · 09/12/2016 23:28

I went to a girls' high school in the 80s. Only a couple of times were we asked to shower. We created so much of a stink probably literally that they gave up and the showers were no more.

However, the PE teachers were both absolutely lovely and would always let people off for the flimsiest reason or let girls wear a swimming costume.

It was at my previous secondary modern that the PE teacher was a perv who insisted on total nakedness and watched. She was such a cow. I was really self-conscious, having started my periods at 9.

AndNoneForGretchenWieners · 09/12/2016 23:32

One of our PE teachers had been dismissed from his previous school for tying a pupil to an upturned table. He played rugby for our local city side and was a huge angry man who also taught English. He terrified us. When my DS was contemplating going to the same school we went on an open evening and this man had been promoted to head of English. He was still an arsehole so I decided there and then my son would not go to the school and suffer like I had.

What made it worse was that he was so proud of his dismissal - he would use it as a threat to us "watch your back or you know what I do when I am annoyed". Mind you one of the PE teachers and the head were convicted of running a paedophile ring 3 years after I left the school.

PootlewasthebestFlump · 09/12/2016 23:35

I'd forgotten this but it was horrendous at the time. Mid-late 80s secondary comp, having to run through the communal shower totally naked and if you went too fast or didn't get wet enough you had to do it again. Teacher watched the whole time.

And the period diary - must have blanked that out.

Our teacher was (probably) a lovely woman but very much 'out' and quite strident and I remember this made us nervous about being watched because we used to wonder why she had to observe how wet we'd got.

I remember the boys teasing us and saying there was a hole through the wall to our showers so they could spy on us. No idea if this was true. I hated PE and used to vomit at the thought of it.

Cherrysoup · 09/12/2016 23:40

Child of the 80s here. Made to walk naked into the communal showers, reach up a height for the on handle as one of the tallest, no hiding. I'd come out, having kept my long hair dry, knowing I had needlework next ms not wanting to drip on the item I was making and was sent back in on my own, watched by the teacher, as she thought I hadn't showered.

I too would love to hear from one of the nasty bitches who tortured us as kids.

SeventyNineBottlesOfWine · 10/12/2016 00:01

I'm not surprised there's not been any PE teachers come on to defend themselves. You can't defend the indefensible.

I don't understand why they'd watch us. Getting undressed, getting naked, showering, all under their watchful eyes.

It happened to me from the ages of 11 - 16. Why did I need watching over like a hawk as I took my clothes off?

There can't be any reason other than humiliation?

LynetteScavo · 10/12/2016 00:02

I think the only reason we stopped having showers was that there were some VERY bolshy girls in my year who at the time I considered "naughty", and weren't particularly nice to me, but with hindsight they probably had horrid/abusive home lives and weren't going to be forced to shower publicly. I probably have a lot to thank them for.

Toadinthehole · 10/12/2016 03:42

I expect the PE teachers are too busy torturing kittens to reply.

BitOutOfPractice · 10/12/2016 04:18

I still don't think the title is right because how else do you shower apart from naked. I think it should say "forced to publicly strip naked..."

ifigoup · 10/12/2016 04:20

Is there anyone here who grew up in e.g. Germany or Scandinavia who can comment about how things were for them? I spent a few weeks at a school in a Nordic country in the early 1990s when I was a young teenager, and coming from a British school where I had to endure naked showers (similar to a lot of posters, we'd go in with our towels round us and just dab water on our shoulders) I was amazed that the girls in the Nordic school were quite happy to shower together, stride round the changing rooms naked, etc. Of course they were used to spending time totally naked in saunas with their entire family!

I'm not disputing that a lot of what happened in British schools was terrible, but I do wonder whether it was made worse by British reserve about communal nakedness in the first place. The Nordic attitude was sold to me as healthy, sensible, and based in a wholesome attitude where bodies and nakedness were positive and prudishness was sad.

Are there any Scandi MNers who found school showers as terrible as the rest of us did?