to the next class . . . Communal showers—the awkward rite of passage into puberty—are a thing of the past. In fact, Oregon schools haven’t required showers for at least a decade. The same is true nationally.77
The New York Times, in a 1996 article “Students Still Sweat, They Just Don’t Shower,” wrote:
Students across the United States have abandoned school showers, and their attitudes seem to be much the same whether they live in inner-city high-rises, on suburban cul-de-sacs or in far-flung little towns in cornfield country.78
The article goes on to quote student after student listing all the reasons they would never shower, or change clothes, in front of their same-gender classmates. “You don’t want to get made fun of,”79 stated one fifteen-year-old boy. “. . . you don’t feel very good about yourself,”80 said an overweight student who used to race to the locker rooms after class so that he’d be done showering before the other boys arrived. “You never know who’s looking at you,”81 said an eighteen-year-old female from Illinois.
Quotes from these students’ teachers only further illustrate the fact that students are changing the way they change. “These guys don’t want to undress in front of each other,” said a high school teacher in suburban Chicago. “I just don’t get it. When I started in ’74, nobody even thought about things like this. The whole thing is just hard for me to accept.”82
An Illinois football coach said “These guys would play a two-and-a-half-hour game, and then they’d just want to go home, all muddy, so they could have their privacy. Used to be, when you get sweaty and stinky, you wanted to take a shower.”83
Also mentioned in the Times article is a boys’ tennis team that practices mornings before school at the community racquet club, just a few blocks from the high school. “But rather than shower at the club, many of the boys get picked up by their parents and driven back home to shower, and then return to school.”84 The article goes on to say:
A generation ago, when most schools mandated showers, a teacher would typically monitor students and hand out towels, making sure that proper hygiene was observed. In schools with pools, students were sometimes required to swim naked, and teachers would conduct inspections for cleanliness that schools today would not dare allow, whether because of greater respect for children or greater fear of lawsuits.85
Mass contempt for public showers seems, to many, to be something which emerged only in recent history. Yet when the American Civil Liberties Union threatened to file a lawsuit in federal court over a mandatory shower policy in Pennsylvania, the lawyer who worked the case was overwhelmed by correspondence from adults who supported him. “People remembered their own humiliation. I myself remember moving from my little country school to the city school, and being mortified about having to take showers. But in those days, you did what the schools said, you did what the teachers said.”86
One author, critical of the normalization of nudity, wrote:
One of my worst experiences was being forced to swim in the nude in high school. This was a common practice in Chicago and other large city schools until the 1970’s. You had a choice: either swim in the nude for four years of high school or take ROTC to get a waiver. Envision 30 young boys at various stages of puberty, with a wide variety of body shapes, lining up so the coach, in his well-fitted swimsuit, could take attendance. There was my dramatically overweight friend with his eyes staring straight at the ground and my other friend, a “late bloomer,” just waiting for the inevitable insults about his manhood. There was also the constant anxiety that a pubescent erection could appear at any time. You could only hope that you were already in the pool when it struck. The reasons for this barbaric and hurtful practice were ill-founded—the need for hygiene, the fear of bathing suit threads clogging the pool or the desire to “build cohesion” between young men. Talk to any man raised at that time and you will get similar stories of shame and embarrassment.87
If it’s true that prior generations were on their own “shower head trip,”88 then that of the current generation is far more severe. I grew up in the era of Diet Coke and Jane Fonda. It was a time when “normal” did not mean you had to be stick-thin and there wasn’t the airbrushing of magazine covers you see today.
Yet if, even in this more “innocent” era, people struggled with body image issues, one can hardly imagine what the pressure is like for teens today. Popular culture has created an archetype of physique that only a small percentage of the population can possibly live up to. The anxiety created by this phenomenon creates a social climate in which many youth view group showers as a form of water torture. The scrutiny is just too intense.
According to the New York Times:
Modesty among young people today seems, in some ways, out of step in a culture that sells and celebrates the uncovered body in advertisements, on television and in movies. But some health and physical education experts contend that many students withdraw precisely because of the overload of erotic images—so many perfectly toned bodies cannot help but leave ordinary mortals feeling a bit inadequate.89
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