I was told that such a policy existed, by someone a fair bit older than me. At first, I thought he was pulling my leg. But when I looked it up, it appears that such a thing was commonplace in the US back in the 50s to early 70s. It appears that my source wasn't just pulling the wool over my eyes - there really was such a policy.
It obviously caught me by surprise, considering the US of A is the land where a pop starlet's "accidental" nipple exposure from a wardrobe malfunction ends up becoming a towering monument in the pop-cultural landscape, and the words "puritanical" and "America" often go hand-in-hand when the country is discussed from a (usually) European perspective.
Was the cultural/moral zeitgeist of the time so very different from now that it was widely considered to be perfectly normal for adolescent boys and adult men to abide by a rule that required them to swim nude in school and YMCA pools?
My source also told me that it was perfectly normal for the Agony Aunts of the time to advise mothers of teenage boys to have their sons swim naked, so that their daughters could "get a better understanding of the male body".
I've come across articles that claim this, although I cannot verify as to the validity and veracity of these claims.
Or, is this whole thing just a cleverly made-up hoax, like the many stories of Bigfoot and Elvis sightings that abound in the tabloids? This is a swimming pool.
Was there really an all-boys-must-swim-nude rule enforced in school and YMCA pools during the late 50s until the early 70s in the US?
A lot of it had to do with assumptions about public health - more cultural than scientific - and also that public pool filter systems were easily clogged and it was believed that swimsuits would have lint and threads that would make keeping the filters open more expensive. The practice largely came to an end as the technology improved and as co-ed gym classes became the norm.
My dad said that, at the time, they might feel a little awkward at first, but most guys got used to it and it was no big deal. This piece tells a slightly less happy story - www.wbez.org/.../c9a3a9e2-6ae3-404b-80e5-0c4bf4d5a0be - but I assume individual experiences varied.
(Sorry to hit you with all these links.)
Anyhow, that was then. Given that my dad was a doctor and that he treated nudity in our home like just another day at the office, our family tended to be a bit casual about it. So it likely would not have bothered my brothers, sister or me.
Things, though, suffice to say, have changed. Funny thing. We are in what is considered to be a more liberated age - and yet we are veritable prudes when compared to the supposedly straight laced 1950s.
I'm trying to imagine swimsuits having stray lint and thread clogging up pools... it's hard to imagine when you see the material used in today's swimsuits.
You're 55... so I assume this was before your time?
Yes, it was a bit before my time. Though as I mentioned, my dad tended to be a bit casual about nudity and while I never saw my mom nude and only saw my dad nude at the gym or maybe getting out of the shower, seeing my brothers and sister nude was not uncommon.
In fact, my brother and I, in the summer, would come home from our summer jobs or maybe after mowing the lawn or whatever, and not switch into swimsuits but just strip and jump into our backyard pool. My younger brother and I were also famous - or infamous - for coming down for breakfast in our tighty-whities or even naked - to my mother's exasperation,
Anyhow, as to the swimsuits, I agree. Especially since you would figure that women's swimsuits would do the same thing. (I'm guessing that they were protecting girls and figured that by making guys swim nude they were just lessening the problem. Also, in some places, women did swim nude - including in Michigan where I grew up.)
Anyhow, part of it was that swimsuits in the early part of the century were made of cotton and actually would tend to leave threads and such. There was a little truth to it, even if schools were being a bit overboard.
However, by the 1940s that was no longer true. Old habits die hard I guess.
Oh, in belated response to your last question, I don't know for sure. As I say, it was true where I grew up in Michigan - and Chicago as the articles show. I would imagine a lot had to do with what part of the country you were in.
Yes, that's what I said - though I can't say that I am an expert in the subject. In my case it was just the fact that my brain picks up useless bits of information and keeps them - and that, as I say, I can remember my dad and uncles talking about it.
The agony aunt but is exaggerated and some fakes are around though in milder forms are true.
Traditionally girls were expected to require modesty and basically boys weren’t. It wasn’t till there started to be a push for gender equality that really began to be questioned seriously (and in both directions with some hippies taking a “everyone can be naked” approach while most others decided everyone got modesty). Then child sex abuse started to get more of a public hearing and things moved -fast-
The echoes of that low modesty for boys and men still is around though with old locker rooms still having for instance the communal showers etc.
There were some "All Girl" private schools in UK that had the same rules. My family knew a fellow Pagan lady that was at one of those schools. She has sadly now passed away.
I didn't know that this also existed across the pond. Why did you put "All Girls" in quotation marks? Were there boys that attended those schools as well?
I suppose, like in the US, it was a same-sex thing in the pool.
No. They were single sex schools. Just females. I guess there might have been similar schools for boys. I should add that this school was a boarding school. Not a day school.
Funny you mention that, because on sports radio here in Boston there’s a guy, Glenn “The Big O” Ordway, who is probably the biggest sports radio personality in the city for a long time. He gets made fun of a lot by his cohosts, two ex-professional athletes, for being short and fat, and for thinking he’s a big deal, etc, and it’s overall a very funny back-and-forth.
So a few years back a the creator and public face of a local blog site posted a picture of Tom Brady’s young kid running around naked on the beach, and the theme of the blog was basically like “How about the absolute HOWITZER on the Brady kid?”, not in a pedophilic way, but tongue-in-cheek, basically saying Tom Brady is just the ultimate champion of life, he’s the greatest football player of all time and fucks supermodels and sires children who have huge dicks at 3 years old.
A lot of people took as a joke like I did, and weren’t offended, as the picture was just out there from the paparazzi, and basically if you’ve ever been to a beach, there’s always a naked little kid running around somewhere, and no sexual connotation should even enter your mind, it’s a fucking child for fuck sake. But others were wicked offended, boycotted the blog, we’re calling the blogger a pedo, Brady should punch this guy in the face when he sees him, etc.
That’s another debate for another day, but the point is, they were discussing it on The Big O’s show, and he was of the same mind as me, there’s just not supposed to be anything sexual about it, that’s on YOU if there is, little kids are just naked in public sometimes, so parents need to cover up their kids if they’re worried about that, they’re causing the situation and could just put the kid in a swimsuit. So he starts justifying the normality of publicly nude children by saying when he was growing up in Lynn, Massachusetts (he’s 68 now, so this is probably early 1960s we’re talking about, maybe late 1950s), when you were a kid and you went to go swimming at the YMCA in town, you swam naked. The two ex-pros are like mid to late 40s, they grew up in the 1980s, so they’re like “WHATTTT?”, and just dying laughing, because Big O is talking like it was the most normal thing in the world. So that's funny to hear it was a rule, I don’t know if they got into that on the show, it sounded like it was more like a common custom, but apparently that was required. That’s pretty crazy, lmao.
I don't know about all boys. In middle and high school gym class, the boys team often swam laps on the opposite side of pool, since lap training often involved pace setting and relays were practiced as they were in competition. Boys against boys and girls against girls. Sharing the pool was common, but having a boy and girl in the same lane, doing different drills, didn't make much sense. Once I accepted the fact that the girls liked what they saw when looking at us naked boys, the only part that still bothered me was having our testicles lifted and anus exposed by female coach or student coaching assistant (ironically, my classmate in English literature and band, as well as my next door neighbor) in view of female classmates and volunteer mom's from the PTA and band and sports booster programs. Every boy went through this before entering the pool, but those of us that had too be examined more thourouhgly and enduring the humiliation of having a type of medical swimming sock fitted too penis or testicles by female in front of females, like the guy too my right did, or myself having waterproof ointment rubbed into penis, scrotal sack, and up the poopshoots with a couple fingers covered in jell shoved unceremoniously up my keester, getting some giggles here and there as my face turned crimson and my penis saluted too her fingers encounter with my prostate. On the upside, double entendre intended, she did become my study partner and girlfriend, and her presence in the doctor's office while I got my sports physical out of the way didn't feel like an invasion of privacy too me, since there wasn't anything private about my anatomy as far as she was concerned. This arrangement had one advantage, though. With both our mom's being conservative, responsible family planning focused where sexual intercourse before graduation as a no, no, Niether saw a downside too us making out on the couch with her hands all over my nude body, mine respectfully at my sides, or us holding hands while kissing. I often wondered at the double standard that she could masterbate me on the living room couch without raising an eyebrow, but I had too go into my own bedroom alone too do that myself, except when instructed too demonstrate male ejaculation too female health students at school. If it was for my benifit, it was private time. For future mother's benifit, public domain. Weird.
It wasn't a "rule". What the YMCA, Boy's Club, and various Natatoriums had in place, was all male swimming periods, and ones for all female swim times. During those, SOME of the places with INDOOR pools "allowed" nude swimming. I specifically remember this being allowed as a kid.
In Europe, there are rules banning swimsuits for hygienic purposes, which applies to both females and males. I would understand the rationale for nude swimming if it applied to both male and females, but it perplexes me why it would just apply to boys. The article seems to explain it, but the double-standard appears odd.
I went to college in the 80s and I took a senior life saving course there as an elective. The pool was an all naked pool. We would sit on benches buck naked while the instructor lecture us then we went in the pool and did drills. They said that the lint from the bathing suits clogged up the filter.
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