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I'd say it's a natural inborn "creep detector" people are built with that senses when old farts might be doing things that are inappropriate or 'creepy'.. it's literally genetically built into our makeup since throughout so much of our history much older men have preyed on teenage girls just entering puberty to the point of even having arranged marriages with people who had 20-30 year age differences.
People have such a nostalgic view of the past but really most of our evolutionary history was actually rather barbaric.
I will say the media has taken the paranoia to extreme silly levels where I think parents are too overprotective of their kids and need to let them out of the house more... we got by just fine without phones wandering around wherever 30 years ago... certainly we can wander around wherever with phones now. There are not creeps around every corner waiting to abduct your kids... the prison sentence and what would happen to them once in prison keeps most of them away, hidden away in bedrooms with their copies of tor running I'd imagine.
I've been on messageboards where people have asked about the subject though and was surprised how many women said they were ogled by older men when they were 8-13 years old.. so they do exist.
Same thing here . . . Our gym teacher stood at the communal shower with a clip board to supposedly make sure everyone took a shower. It was horrific. Truly the low point of every week. It was the point in a younger persons life when things were changing, some faster than others. Humiliating. Then, it seemed like you could never dry off, because you still sweat despite the shower, which only exacerbated that.
Indeed. Is there a problem with shower stalls with curtains for crying out loud?
This. It's not instinct. There are plenty of societies where nudity is normal and people don't have hangups about it.
What's the connection between single motherhood and people feeling weird about their bodies?
It's the female part that is the connection. Females are weird about their bodies, and obsess about them. If the boys hang out with their fathers, they will accept male nudity as normal. Instead, they are being taught to obsess about their bodies like their mothers do.
There are social issues too, since the number of male-only venues has shrunk by a couple orders of magnitude in the last 50 years. It's hard to find a men-only barber shop nowadays, much less a men's gym. When I was in college 50 years ago, the men's gym was clothing optional in some exercise areas and clothing forbidden in the pool. Now they have a coed "recreation center" and everybody dresses in designer shirts and shorts.
In basic training, we all showered in open showers.
Heh, as if anyone had time or energy to worry about modesty in basic. 3 men to a shower and 7 minutes for shower & change, it was busy enough that I distinctly remember asking myself, after I was dressed: "Wait, wasn't that cold water?"
Same thing here . . . Our gym teacher stood at the communal shower with a clip board to supposedly make sure everyone took a shower. It was horrific. Truly the low point of every week. It was the point in a younger persons life when things were changing, some faster than others. Humiliating. Then, it seemed like you could never dry off, because you still sweat despite the shower, which only exacerbated that.
That was how it was in junior high. The teacher would mark us as we came out. However if we were on our period we took half showers, basically bottoms still on. In high school we were supposed to take showers (with our bathing suits on) but most just sprinkled water and the teacher was a guy so he never knew if we did. Not sure about the males. When I took regular P.E no one took showers because most of the time the showers were broken and too many girls. PE in high school was coed, junior high school was gender segregated.
Last edited by Idon'tdateyou; 06-27-2015 at 11:55 PM..
I think the whole notion of public school is itself creepy. In what other situation is a parent a remote bystander in a child's life, desperately hoping that whatever the child experiences every day is not "too bad"? Meanwhile the child is hustled around on a rigidly predetermined schedule not of the parent's devising, one that is saturated with a mixture of engineered "activities" and unsettling inactivity, in a social context that is one part panopticon and one part zoo... the whole of which is passed off as "education," while the dissemination of serious knowledge is avoided so as not to undermine the authority of the institution?
DAMN!!!! Way to discuss the ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM!!! Getting right to the heart of things. This is so true and so right under our noses and people fail to acknowledge this!
DAMN!!!! Way to discuss the ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM!!! Getting right to the heart of things. This is so true and so right under our noses and people fail to acknowledge this!
Thanks - I thought there was a bigger point crying out for attention. A lot of times people subliminally avoid it, maybe because they're taught to be good students, in the sense of knowing how to shape their thoughts so as to accommodate the political exigencies of school. You're not encouraged to look at things analytically (another sense of being a good student) because that enables you to realize that the institution is the problem. We need to have the guts to believe that some lies can be that big, and they can be told directly to you for 13 years of childhood.
Speaking from some of my own experience, I endured more than my share of locker-room bullying while in junior high, but the problem died off during high school. It probably also helped that I attended a district where participation in some sport -- any sport, was strongly encouraged (I became an athletic "manager" and team statistician).
While in college I joined a fraternity, and since we often socialized with other houses, I can attest that "open" showers where almost always the rule -- these were your brothers and you were expected to see each other without clothing now and then. That was also likely a factor in the smaller school districts of an earlier time, where everybody knew everybody else, than in the more impersonal large high schools of the present day.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Larry Caldwell
It's the female part that is the connection. Females are weird about their bodies, and obsess about them. If the boys hang out with their fathers, they will accept male nudity as normal. Instead, they are being taught to obsess about their bodies like their mothers do.
I wouldn't characterize the ladies' concerns as "weird", but otherwise, I strongly agree. We don't need our young men taught to see their physical selves as diminishing assets or, worse still, bargaining chips.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 06-28-2015 at 03:57 AM..
The only guys in my high school gym class who showered were the gay guys. They would also walk around the locker room naked intentionally swinging their business around. No wonder nobody else wanted to go in there.
No one showered in the 90s in our school and none of my friends or me needed to.
We were the "anti-sports" crowd that was always picked last for teams and resented having gym be mandatory over things we actually enjoyed like art classes. And we were pretty vocal about it so the teachers went easy on us. It was the "cool girls" who were a bunch of natzi b*tches about it. Acting like the world just ended and we were wastes of lives because we couldn't get a ball in a hole nor did we care to.
Half the time we just forged letters from our "parents" asking to excuse us. It still makes me mad just thinking about that I had to waste 2 hours a week in these classes for 12 years. I was a total geek and loved actual "learning" so this was a huge waste of time.
And I took 10 years of dance lessons and walked a mile to and from school each day so it's not like I "needed it."
GGGRR!!!!
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Getting right to the heart of things. This is so true and so right under our noses and people fail to acknowledge this! 
