Public School/College Nude Swimming Required (No Porn)

[Bearofdistinction]

https://medium.com/dose/a-brief-humiliating-history-of-swimming-in-gym-class-350a58e3e5d6

[Bearofdistinction]

A Brief, Humiliating History Of Swimming In Gym Class

The only thing worse than swimming at school is swimming naked.

 

LIFE Magazine

High school gym class can be mortifying. Unless you’re the punk who gets off on pelting volleyballs into pretty girls’ faces, the experience promises unlimited opportunities for humiliation. For many students, the only place more anxiety-inducing than the gymnasium is the pool.

 

If you were lucky, you went to a high school without swimming facilities. If you were unlucky, you were forced into participating in the most hated gym unit. Swim season meant weeks of sitting in academic classes with skin clogged with chlorine and crispy hair that dampened the back of your shirt. It meant too much time spent in a musty locker room and swimsuits that never really dried, but molded by the end of the semester.

 

Has school-mandated physical fitness always been this annoying? Suit up and let’s take a deep dive into the history of swimming in gym class.

 

 

Janesville Daily Gazette, 1967

A “naked in public” nightmare come to life

In 1885, the Brooklyn YMCA opened America’s first recreational indoor pool and required men to swim nude. Wool swimsuits were potential traps for disease and bacteria, and fibers clogged the pool’s simple filtration system. At the time, nude swimming seemed like the most sensible option (even though incorrect proportions of chlorine had a tendency to burn swimmers’ bare skin).

 

It wasn’t long before school administrators followed suit. Per their pool management guidelines, The American Public Health Association (APHA) required male public school students to swim nude between 1926 and 1962.

 

 

cutanduncut.tumblr.com | Ines Vuckovic for Dose

After pools installed more advanced filtration systems, swimming nude became redundant. The YMCA and public schools phased the practice out in the 60s and 70s, but it lived on longer than was strictly necessary. It’s possible these administrators thought nude swimming built cohesion between young men, fostering a bond through mutual chagrin.

 

The negative emotional consequences of swimming nude

Unsurprisingly, mandatory nude swimming had a lasting impact on its unwilling participants. “Could there be a more frightening scenario on Earth than forced skinny dipping at school against your will?” Bill Flanigin blogged in The Huffington Post.

 

Apparently not: participants remain haunted by the memories and many still write or post on chat threads, seeking comfort from fellow sufferers. NPR commentator, Robin Washington, attended a Chicago public high school in the 70s. His story of swimming naked at school sounds like a scene ripped from an 80s comedy:

 

“The school’s folklore included the tale of Coach Valentine using a lifesaving pole to remedy an embarrassing moment of a backstroking swimmer. The coach swatted him on the midsection and shouted, ‘Get that periscope down!’”

 

The only two people to ever have fun in a high school pool. | It’s A Wonderful Life

Nude swimming also left room for hijinks. Tilmon Brown attended school in Mobile, AL during the late 1960s and he has positive memories of swimming in the buff. “I can remember one day the girls’ P.E. teacher was out sick and they had a substitute that didn’t know the routine. We boys got naked, rinsed off and skipped roll,” he said in an email to dose.

 

“We jumped in only to find the girls were already in the pool swimming. You can imagine the mayhem that ensued.”

Pool-related pranks were not gender-specific: my mom attended a public high school in Chicago during the 60s and according to her, girls did their fair share of peeking through the pool door cracks to spy on the boys.

 

 

Douglass College, 1970 | New Jersey Digital Highway

A maroon one-piece in a world full of green one-pieces

Unlike their male counterparts, women were always required to cover their bodies during swim lessons. The 1948 State of Illinois Public Health Association pool management guidelines stated that ladies had to don plain tank suits to preserve their modesty. Even so, women experienced their own unique forms of humiliation.

 

The Chicago public school my mom and aunt attended in the late 60s required them to wear swimsuits color-coded by bust size. Women with 32-inch chests wore maroon, 34-inch chests wore navy, 36-inch chests wore red and women with 38-inch chests wore green. Our family is historically flat-chested and my mom and aunt always wore maroon.

 

“Even though you’re with peers, when you’re 14 and have to wear a suit that reflects bust size when you’re flat chested and look like a 12-year-old boy, it’s embarrassing,” my mom said. She added:

 

“We all had to wear the same sack of polyester, but I was still self-conscious. The girls who were more shapely still looked good in their red and green suits — and they were the ones with boyfriends.”

I can empathize. I didn’t have it as rough as my older relatives, but no one escapes the swim unit unscathed. My insecurities began in the locker room where I changed in front of more developed girls. The decaying one-piece I borrowed from my older sister did little to cover my nipples, and I dreaded the walk from the locker room to the pool where the boys sat on bleachers, waiting.

 

For women, self-esteem takes a hit during the swim unit. Body image issues aside, female biology makes swimming complicated. If you didn’t swim for a few days and sat on the bleachers instead, everyone knew you were on your period. And period stigma is no joke, folks.

 

Just keep swimming

Today, the idea of students swimming nude is unfathomable, thanks largely to our society’s obsession with modesty and sexualizing young bodies. Still, swim gym continues to provide fodder for high school horror stories.

 

Maybe you escaped slightly disgruntled and celebrated the day you could finally return to curling your hair. Maybe school swimming is a memory that stuck with you for well over forty years, chafing you like an ill-fitting suit. Regardless of your swim experience, we are all united by our mutual distaste for this odious — but necessary — physical fitness unit.

[+ Avalon]

When I was in high school sometime during the year we went swimming but it was the public pool down the road. It was closed off to the public. Class was @55 minutes. So at the high school we had to change in the locker room and then walk to the pool. And then had to walk back to the school. Didn't leave much pool time. I seem to remember we just wore out gym shorts.

[+ WilliamM]

I remember showering after gym classes all through high school and also in the seventh grade

 

No question that I would have remembered 8th grade gym because the same male students were in all my classes. Perhaps the school dropped gym that year.

[Bearofdistinction]

In Junior High we had an Indoor Pool -- And Showers --- No nude swimming because the outerwall of the pool was all windows---- But I do recall swimming classes at the local Y - was gender segregated and boys and men swam nude - but the instructors wore suits or jocks or both

[TruHart1]

I remember my first swim lessons at the local YMCA (back in the mid 1950's) mainly because of all of us having to swim naked. I voiced my displeasure to my mom that some of the older boys (who already had pubic hair tantalizingly sticking out!) were allowed to wear jock straps and why couldn't I at aged 5 or 6? With all the male flesh on view and no girls allowed, it's a wonder I learned how to swim!!! :rolleyes:

 

Later, in junior high and high school, I was nervous that I would get a hard-on and be terribly embarrassed when showering with my fellow students and a few of our hunky coaches who showered with us after gym class! I learned to put the images away in my "wank tank" and I certainly spilled buckets of cum later, when I was in private! I still have clear images of some of the best built and impressively hung boys (and hot coaches!)

 

TruHart1

[+ Axiom2001]

When I was a junior in high school-- I was NOT comfortable being naked in front of others. In our school district in Kansas City, Kansas, the boys swam nude. Because of this requirement which I DID NOT LIKE, I transferred high schools, took physical education as a junior but never learned how to swim. I can't remember if my high school had a swimming pool or not!

 

As a student in p.e. during my freshman and sophomore years-- I volunteered as a towel boy (passing out towels) to my fellow, male classmates once they'd come out of the communal shower. Gosh, I can still see one heavily, hung stud who loved to prance around showing all of his stuff.

 

[in looking back, I'd love to have gotten him inside of the cubical where I stood distributing towels and blowing him into oblivion.]

[MartyB]

My high school was all boys. Swimming in the nude was a requirement. Glad I hit puberty as a sophomore. Others didn't. Of course the teacher has trunks on. When I tell friends and family they are shocked by it. No one back then thought it was sexual misconduct or abuse. As I recall there was some moments where my dick was getting hard and that was the bug no no. Lol

[+ azdr0710]

if anybody is wondering about the four dudes upthread......

 

[+ bashful]

 

I've mentioned this before. In my public high school (early 70's Detroit), we all swam nude in swim class. There was never a choice. We had swim class every day. It was part of our PE requirement of two semesters of either gym and/or swimming before graduating.

 

This picture is exactly what our first exercise was at the beginning of each class, kicking off the side of the pool.

 

I can still picture in my mind a few of the guys with some big equipment. Never once saw an erection. Never got an erection. Never saw precum. Never had precum. Never once thought it was wrong. Just us guys in swim class.

Edited October 30, 2018 by bashful

[Guest]

The junior high school and high school locker rooms were such torture for me. I had to keep staring at the floor, and concentrate on staring at the floor. One look at a naked athlete, and I would get hard as a diamond, large as the Burj Khalifa...

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Kd763vLco1k/T-XV681bZOI/AAAAAAAAEZA/i021-PhVt0Y/s1600/MOPLKRM_1.jpg

 

 

http://www.freepornpics.info/cdn/2b4d5deb246f67db0ebacf8fd47b526f.jpg

[Guest]

It was even difficult with my gym shorts on....

http://www.spycamfromguys.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/athlete-huge-hardon-bulge-.jpg

[Phlmuscle]

In college we were required to swim nude in gym class. University of Pennsylvania.

[+ Cock Eyed Optimist]

When I was young in southern Illinois, no public schools had pools. So my parents sent me by bus to a nearby YMCA every Saturday morning. There we swan in the nude. Cold bus ride, cold locker rooms and cold water! You can imagine the shrinkage! But this is when I realized that I liked to look at other naked guys.

[+ poolboy48220]

I took swim lessons at the YMCA when I was very young, not sure if I'd even started school yet, so maybe five years old? It was co-ed, we didn't swim naked, but I changed INSIDE the locker my first few classes. I was a very shy youngster.

[Jaguar1]

My high school did not have a pool. Those of us on the swim team had to practice at the Y before school. Although the walk to school was short, January and February often caused discomfort on damp bodies. Nude was also the rule for swim class in college. The grad student lifeguard was an especially hunky guy. This Roman Catholic boy spent much time with "impure thoughts."

[+ azdr0710]

this "nude swimming" thing has come up before in forum threads.....

 

maybe I'm a bit too young, but I NEVER EVER have heard of required nudity in Y/public/school pools.....we swam at public/club pools as kids during the summer, of course, and under those big tent structures in the winter, but they were always just regular co-ed family affairs......we were in the Y, but maybe it didn't have a pool??.....I learned to swim at about four years old and think I wore a suit??!!......I don't think any of my schools before college had a pool used during regular PE......

[Bearofdistinction]

https://www.vocativ.com/culture/fun/fairly-recently-ymca-actually-required-swimmers-nude/index.html

 

Until Fairly Recently, The YMCA Actually Required Swimmers To Be Nude

<img alt='FUN' style='margin:0 auto;max-width:100%;width:100%;position:absolute;z-index:10;' src='https://media.vocativ.com/photos/2015/01/YMCA-Nude-Swimming-PosterBW2423731783.jpg' />

 

By Eric Markowitz

Apr 29, 2014 at 3:21 PM ET

Last week, I was eating lunch with a friend and her dad in Manhattan on 23rd Street, directly across from what used to be the McBurney YMCA, when my friend’s dad had a sudden recollection.

 

Apparently, in 1968, as part of a freshman requirement for the city college he attended, all male students took a swim class at the YMCA. For reasons somewhat unclear to him at the time (and, we joked, probably repressed until now) the Y had a particular rule: If you’re going to swim, you must swim nude.

 

PublicAccessVideos[/paste:font]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beam explains that the first recreational indoor pool in America opened in the Brooklyn YMCA in New York in 1885. Because swimsuits back then were made of wool, and their fibers would clog the pool’s relatively unsophisticated filtration systems, nude swimming was enforced to make sure the pool didn’t break.

 

By the 1920s, there were other, more comfortable swimming alternatives that didn’t shed fibers. However, nude swimming continued. The rationale this time around was that nude swimming was more hygienic. I asked Beam how so.

 

“There was the visual inspection,” he says, noting that part of the aquatic director’s job duty was to inspect the men before they jumped into the pool. The inspectors weren’t just checking for venereal diseases. The idea was to look for any open wounds or other indications that the swimmer might have some infectious disease.

 

Beam’s narrative checks out. In the 1922 edition of “The Sanitation of Bath Houses” by William Paul Gerhard, nude swimming is encouraged alongside a pre-swim “physical examination.”

 

“Much can be done to keep the water in a swimming pool sanitary by an efficient supervision and management of the bathers,” Gerhard wrote nearly a century ago. “A physical examination of the bathers, while nude, to exclude the diseased, accomplishes much good, but it is difficult to enforce, except in YMCA buildings and in school or military baths.”

 

a photo of young boys in a shower as part of a spread on the concept of democracy.

 

“Taking a camera into a boys’ locker room at school and photographing teenage boys completely naked while showering, then, printing that photo taking up an entire half page for the world to look at was considered perfectly appropriate,” writes a historian on the subject. “The published letters to the editor immediately subsequent to this edition never revealed any reader voicing concern about it.”

 

Sentiments began to change around the early 1960s, however. Societal norms shifted and some boys—and their parents—began speaking up. In 1961, in the small town of Menasha, Wisconsin, high school boys and their parents petitioned the school board to allow boys to wear swim trunks to swim practice.

 

“The boys were affected morally, physically and psychologically by forcing them to swim in the nude,” one of the mothers noted at the meeting. But the petition was voted down. The all-male board claimed swim trunks would be prohibitively expensive. They also claimed that swimming nude would build a man’s character.

 

“Physical education considers that this experience is a good one for later life, for example the armed services, where the disregard for privacy is real and serious,” the director of the board noted.

 

In 1961, sentiments began shifting, and more boys were protesting the nude swimming rules.

 

Within the YMCA, there was no national mandate, so each location decided for itself on its nude swimming policies. But Beam believes the tide began to shift in 1961 when Ervin Baugher, the general secretary of the Allentown, Pennsylvania, YMCA reported to an executive YMCA conference that, basically, the reasons for nude swimming—wool fibers and cleanliness—no longer made sense for modern pools, which were then equipped with chlorine and powerful filtration systems. In fact, Baugher said the only rational reason to continue the tradition of nude swimming was “encouraging a proper attitude toward the body.”

 

Nude swimming became less and less common in the mid-1970s, and boys were forever spared the nightmarish experience of strip-down inspections. But nude swimming is sort of an interesting exception to the general pattern of our culture becoming less Victorian as time goes on. Today, if some head of aquatics at the Y suggested naked swimming, let alone tried to actually implement it, they’d probably lose their job immediately.

 

Girls did not have the same requirement. They were forced to wear bathing suits from the beginning.

 

“One of the things that’s fascinating about it as a story is that we tend to assume back then was more puritanical than we are now,” notes Beam. “That’s not necessarily the case. It’s a pretty interesting little narrative about American culture and body image and masculinity.”

[Guest]

Until Fairly Recently, The YMCA Actually Required Swimmers To Be Nude

 

Apparently, in 1968, as part of a freshman requirement for the city college he attended, all male students took a swim class at the YMCA. For reasons somewhat unclear to him at the time (and, we joked, probably repressed until now) the Y had a particular rule: If you’re going to swim, you must swim nude.

 

Now, I'm no Spring chicken, but are there a lot of people who consider 1968 "fairly recently"? I would never have survived. From when I was about 12 to 19, one look at a muscular torso, and my erection was instantaneous. Talk about the elephant in the room....

[Rod Hagen]

This is a great Tumblr I follow on Swimming nude in Public in the "olden days" with lots of photos from YMCA and coed (men nude women clothed) swim teams. Enjoy:

https://boysswimnude.tumblr.com/

[+ poolboy48220]

From that tumblr - I would totally have been "the elephant in the room" in this situation :-)

https://boysswimnude.tumblr.com/image/174236994120

[BasketBaller]

Here's an earlier thread with some interesting links.

 

https://www.companyofmen.org/threads/nude-swimming-at-the-y.114780/

[Guest]

I don't mind the "new" requirement for swimsuits...

[Guest]

[Guest]

http://i.imgur.com/Z933h.png