Schoolkids love smelling, hate showering (naked, in school, in front of peers)

We had to take one year of gym in high school. I took mine as a freshman. And lived in abject fucking fear four out of five days per week that I would spring a boner either during class or in the shower. There was one kid who sprung wood the first month or so and was called every name in the book (this was 1987, so nobody flinched).

I am not kidding: Every single day, before class, I recalled Judy Blume's "Then Again, Maybe I Won't" and how it was mind over matter, mind over matter, mind over matter. It wasn't easy, there were some cute girls in my class. Don't think don't think don't think. Every Friday was paradise: We watched a video in the gym. I could let my freak flag fly in my pants and not have to worry about it. The last day of gym class was one of the best days of my life. Thank God.

So to summarize, yeah, I'd rather smell than shower, too.

 

We didn't shower during school, but we only took PE for 1/3 of our freshman year. And they kept the a/c in our rather large gym on year round, so when no one was in there but a 30-person class, it was freezing cold.

But our baseball coach required us to take showers after our pre-school conditioning, and I don't recall anything particularly traumatizing. There were a couple guys who showered in underwear or gym shorts, which I always thought was weird, and we had one guy who used to shave his entire body, including his man parts, in the shower every now and then.

I always looked at it like this: I'd rather sit through class feeling clean than stinking like ass.

 

Showering was a brutal rite of passge for me in Junior High (ours was 7th-9th grade). Here I was, a 12 yr old, the smallest kid, felt like the last kid to hit puberty, and there would be 15-16 yr old manchilds who looked like the hairy Bigfoot in the shower. Talk about "get in, get out." Luckily, I was a decent athlete so I had played against those guys my whole life up to that point. Highlight? Putting on Brut underarm after the shower and pretending I'm Joe Namath (only coolest dude at the time).

My 6th grader now takes a gym shirt and then stinks the rest of the day. I think he's got it better than I did.

 

My nephew is a sophomore in high school and basically personifies this.

 

We had gym usually twice a week for about 45 minutes. No one ever showered.

One gym teacher tried to make us at the beginning of the year, but, like someone said on here earlier, after 15 minutes of roll calling and pushups, 5 minutes of picking sides, 10 minutes of the game and 15 minutes to shower, he got tired of cramming in everything. Especially, he got tired of writing late slips for us because we didn't have time to shower. This lasted about a week.

 

Well, I graduated from HS in 1976 and my youngest sibling in 1992.

IN MY DAYYYY (I hate saying that), everybody showered after gym class. We got 10 minutes at the end of gym class to scrub up. You could usually do it if you didn't waste time. The showers were also fire-hose strength water jets -- no water-conservation shower heads in those days -- so you could get soaped up and then rinsed off in a good 60 seconds.

By the time my youngest sis came through, hardly anybody showered at the school, ever. I think football players ususally shower down, but hardly anybody else.

My dad had a house rule for the younger kids: if you had PE or played a sport that day, into the shower the second you got home. He said, "I'm not gonna have the whole house smelling like a goddamn locker room."

During my high school days, I don't think showering after PE was absolutely required (there were a couple kids who refused) but it was very very strongly encouraged. Teachers used peer pressure ("you don't want to smell like hell all day") to get ALMOST everyone to do it. Those few who refused, of course, caught all sorts of hell from everyone the rest of the day for, of course, allegedly smelling like hell.


I think the communal-showering thing in American public schools is pretty directly a result of the World War II generation moving through the teaching and school-administrator corps.

Virtually everybody who had served in the military had the experience of communal showers (the whole concept of mass phys-ed classes was pretty much a post-WW II development too, I am pretty sure).

That group has passed out of the scene the last 25 years or so, and replaced by new generations who for the most part never served in the military. Plus of course the risk of lawsuits, harassment charges, etc etc, and basically they just gave up on it.

Not only showering, but gym class in and of itself is basically fading out of schools. I had gym class pretty much every day from 5th grade on through high school. My nieces and nephews, now entering junior high school, have never had gym class in their school lives. And with the "I don't want to pay no taxes for nothing" brigade taking over, it's going to get cut out more and more until it pretty much disappears.

 

Showering counted toward part of our grade in junior high (1972-75). A teacher would stand outside the towel room and mark off our name when we exited.

Miss too many showers and your grade went down.

Had friends at neighboring schools who couldn't exit the locker room unless they turned in a used towel.

 

I'm not sure how none of us ever caught staph or MRSA or anything worse.

Our locker room, and thus, shower, was in a basement. It was dimly lit, and no one else used it until the next morning when we used it again. I know the school janitors stayed out of our locker room -- it was our job to clean it -- so I'm guessing they never cleaned the shower either. That's pretty fucking gross to think about now.

 

We had PE every day in junior high.

"Brad" was the guy who looked like he was 25 -- with or without clothes.

"Christian" was the kid that stepped into the shower, wiped out, busted his head open and had to be carted out on a stretcher.

Me? My father died the year before. I had no fucking idea what protocol was. Had no idea when to wear a jock strap -- none of that shit. But I was teased at home as much as I ever was in school, because my year-younger sister had hair under her arms and I didn't.

 

All that stuff happened pretty much just like you described.
Folks that don't remember or didn't recognize all the "peeping" or the more mature guys making wisecracks about those who'd not pubertized yet were wearing blinders.
Lots of kids at that age are 1.) mean as hell 2.) nervous about puberty issues

I remember that stuff well and I've seen it over and over as a teacher.

 

Lotsa cute guys, huh?

 

One kid popped a boner in the shower our ninth grade year, and he was forever known as Boing!

I couldn't tell you his name today if you put a gun to my head. Just Boing!.