I was old enough to have to go through that, with everywhere insisting it was a very normal rite of passage that was somehow necessary for manhood with the asshole bullies of the school relishing in the opportunity to do lowkey SV in the locker rooms and showers while the gym teachers watched.
It was normalized, even institutionalized, kiddie creeping. What kept it going for so long was the sunk-cost preoccupation of "normal" and not wanting to feel bad or ashamed for their own experiences.
I spent most of junior high as a stinky pariah on account of refusing to subject myself to showering in the school locker room. By the time I hit high school, I was able to game the class registration system such that I stacked a bunch of AP classes and even a handful of off-site college courses and got out of taking PE for two years. This meant I had to take the sophomore and junior PE classes during my senior year, though. At least by that point most of the other kids were too afraid to mess with me. I think that doing sophomore PE as a senior was the only time in my life when I've ever been like 3 or 4 inches taller than most of the people around me.
The funniest part of all of that was that a bunch of the sophomores had been speculating as to why this sasquatch was in the class with them, assuming that I had flunked out twice and had to re-take it in order to graduate. It blew their minds when I explained that I'd exhausted the school district's available coursework for computer programming, so they were paying for me to attend night classes at a local university.
Meanwhile, me in 19XX: I LOVE PROGRAMMING! C++ IS SO AWESOME! CLASS AND INTERFACE HIERARCHICAL TYPE RELATIONSHIPS AND POLYMORPHIC METHODS ARE AMAZING PROBLEM-SOLVING TOOLS AND I CAN'T WAIT TO USE THEM IN THE REAL WORLD!!!
Me in 2024: Please kill me. I never want to see another [VENDOR/PLATFORM NAME REDACTED] project ever again, and this makes me despise the entire tech industry at large because everyone around me who operates in a decision-making capacity -- but does no actual development -- insists that this is the Best Thing Ever because the Gartner Magick Heptahedron told them so. I envy the dead.
The gym teachers would watch the locker rooms and showers... and that's all they did. All the "horseplay" (lowkey SV, but with hooting and fratbro verbiage) and body shaming and bullying was generally allowed to happen. But watched they did.
Looking back, I'm just about 90% sure that those gym teachers saw their "watching" duties as a job perk.
Thankfully ours rarely entered the locker room, but it led to a pretty wild atmosphere. When he found out about said assault he just about turned purple with anger. He was an alright guy.
My old high school had a panopticon-like arrangement where windows from the gym teachers' offices had a view of both the locker rows and the showers. Was fucked.
Yep. Foucalt nailed that one, absolutely dead to rights.
I graduated in the last class before my old school got torn down. Went on a tour of the new building while it was under construction and even the normies on the tour could tell that the place looked like a prison, complete with panopticon pods connected to the main building by long spokes with actual guard bunkers at the base of each spoke.
The prior building was a completely open plan of many disconnected buildings with tons of windows and green spaces.
When the normies know that something fucked is happening you know it's gotten real bad.
So I don't doxx myself too hard, I'll just say that not even rich kid schools were spared. I wasn't myself a rich kid but I squeaked in because of district margins. The bully/jock assholes of that school really enjoyed the SV potential and having their pick of the litter of victims to body shame and even physically attack.
I feel you. I had communal showers a couple of years and I don't remember any specific violence, but I do remember it being uncomfortable.
I would like to look in to how communal bathing ties in to America's nudity taboo and how it's changed over the years. The idea is completely unthinkable now, but communal bathing has been pretty normal across cultural and across history, even non-sexual unisex communal bathing in a few places. And then in America it's illegal to teach sex ed or show a nipple on tv.
In a less fucked up synthesis of puritan and hedonistic ideologies which are systemic to contemporary capitalism, I can see value in communal showers and the like.
However, when it's a bunch of demanding that teenagers get naked and put up with whatever proto-fratboy rite of passage hazing shit that awaits them there, that absolutely reeks of predator culture.
Agreed. I don't remember any time where high school showers were presented as something social, communal, soothing. Everyone knew they were embarassing and a place where bullying was particularly vicious.
Meanwhile, when I was really little my father took me to a workout club that was mostly old guys, and they'd all kind of hang out butt ass naked in the locker room, talking about whatever, completely comfortable and unbothered. It was nominally the same - communal bathing, but the absolute opposite vibe.
I'm not even sure how to get Burgerland into the latter culture instead of the former, though I know in the present that coercing teenagers into hazing rites ostensibly leading into adulthood is just a contagious form of abuse.
Cons of being born at the tail end of the 20th century: Reaching adulthood just in time for the brink of WW3 and climate collapse
Pros of being born at the tail end of the 20th century: I didn't have to endure that particular horror
I was old enough to have to go through that, with
everywhere insisting it was a very normal rite of passage that was somehow necessary for manhood with the asshole bullies of the school relishing in the opportunity to do lowkey SV in the locker rooms and showers while the gym teachers watched.
It was normalized, even institutionalized, kiddie creeping. What kept it going for so long was the
sunk-cost preoccupation of "normal" and not wanting to feel bad or ashamed for their own experiences.
I spent most of junior high as a stinky pariah on account of refusing to subject myself to showering in the school locker room. By the time I hit high school, I was able to game the class registration system such that I stacked a bunch of AP classes and even a handful of off-site college courses and got out of taking PE for two years. This meant I had to take the sophomore and junior PE classes during my senior year, though. At least by that point most of the other kids were too afraid to mess with me. I think that doing sophomore PE as a senior was the only time in my life when I've ever been like 3 or 4 inches taller than most of the people around me.
The funniest part of all of that was that a bunch of the sophomores had been speculating as to why this sasquatch was in the class with them, assuming that I had flunked out twice and had to re-take it in order to graduate. It blew their minds when I explained that I'd exhausted the school district's available coursework for computer programming, so they were paying for me to attend night classes at a local university.
Meanwhile, me in 19XX: I LOVE PROGRAMMING! C++ IS SO AWESOME! CLASS AND INTERFACE HIERARCHICAL TYPE RELATIONSHIPS AND POLYMORPHIC METHODS ARE AMAZING PROBLEM-SOLVING TOOLS AND I CAN'T WAIT TO USE THEM IN THE REAL WORLD!!!
Me in 2024: Please kill me. I never want to see another [VENDOR/PLATFORM NAME REDACTED] project ever again, and this makes me despise the entire tech industry at large because everyone around me who operates in a decision-making capacity -- but does no actual development -- insists that this is the Best Thing Ever because the Gartner Magick Heptahedron told them so. I envy the dead.
We had some fucked up shit go down in our locker room.
CW: CSA
spoiler
One kid was anally violated with a broom by like 3 bigger guys after gym. I don't remember anything serious happening to them. This was like 2010.
The gym teachers would watch the locker rooms and showers... and that's all they did. All the "horseplay" (lowkey SV, but with hooting and fratbro verbiage) and body shaming and bullying was generally allowed to happen. But watched they did.
Looking back, I'm just about 90% sure that those gym teachers saw their "watching" duties as a job perk.
Thankfully ours rarely entered the locker room, but it led to a pretty wild atmosphere. When he found out about said assault he just about turned purple with anger. He was an alright guy.
My old high school had a panopticon-like arrangement where windows from the gym teachers' offices had a view of both the locker rows and the showers. Was fucked.
That sounds like a prison wtf
You might be surprised how many public schools have actually been designed by prison architects.
Yep. Foucalt nailed that one, absolutely dead to rights.
I graduated in the last class before my old school got torn down. Went on a tour of the new building while it was under construction and even the normies on the tour could tell that the place looked like a prison, complete with panopticon pods connected to the main building by long spokes with actual guard bunkers at the base of each spoke.
The prior building was a completely open plan of many disconnected buildings with tons of windows and green spaces.
When the normies know that something fucked is happening you know it's gotten real bad.
So I don't doxx myself too hard, I'll just say that not even rich kid schools were spared. I wasn't myself a rich kid but I squeaked in because of district margins. The bully/jock assholes of that school really enjoyed the SV potential and having their pick of the litter of victims to body shame and even physically attack.
I feel you. I had communal showers a couple of years and I don't remember any specific violence, but I do remember it being uncomfortable.
I would like to look in to how communal bathing ties in to America's nudity taboo and how it's changed over the years. The idea is completely unthinkable now, but communal bathing has been pretty normal across cultural and across history, even non-sexual unisex communal bathing in a few places. And then in America it's illegal to teach sex ed or show a nipple on tv.
In a less fucked up synthesis of puritan and hedonistic ideologies which are systemic to contemporary capitalism, I can see value in communal showers and the like.
However, when it's a bunch of
demanding that teenagers get naked and put up with whatever proto-fratboy rite of passage hazing shit that awaits them there, that absolutely reeks of predator culture.
Agreed. I don't remember any time where high school showers were presented as something social, communal, soothing. Everyone knew they were embarassing and a place where bullying was particularly vicious.
Meanwhile, when I was really little my father took me to a workout club that was mostly old guys, and they'd all kind of hang out butt ass naked in the locker room, talking about whatever, completely comfortable and unbothered. It was nominally the same - communal bathing, but the absolute opposite vibe.
I'm not even sure how to get Burgerland into the latter culture instead of the former, though I know in the present that coercing teenagers into hazing rites ostensibly leading into adulthood is just a contagious form of abuse.