On Friday I went to happy hour. It was like having lunch, only with alcohol, which means the conversation was even more coarse.
So of course it was a menstruation conversation.
I thought I might shock young Miss “I Don’t Know What a Brassiere Is” by telling her stories of menstruation back in the day.
I mock-whispered, “Back when I was in school, if you didn’t want to participate in gym that day, you just had to tell the gym teacher you were having your period and you got to sit out.”
She said, “Well, yeah, sure, but I loved P.E. so I never used that excuse.”
“Wait,” I said, “You mean you even know about it? It still comes up?”
“Oh yes,” added a woman who might be thirty, “I hated P.E.. I used that as an excuse all the time.”
“Did you say ‘No shower’ during roll call? Because that was the code.”
She laughed and said, yes that is still the code, and she got out of gym all the time because her male gym teacher was to embarrassed to call her on her perpetual period.
I pulled the shower scam every other week myself, only my gym teachers were all women. None of them called me on it. At some point in the 70s Title IX was put in place and I found myself in co-ed gym classes, but roll call was still segregated so the boys wouldn’t know why we were sitting out.
Gary, who finished high school in ’72, claims I lie and would never have had a gym class with a boy. He also is skeptical about the shower excuse. “Why couldn’t you play sports during your period? No one would make up such a stupid rule.”
“No, you could have played the sports but you couldn’t shower afterward, so that’s why you couldn’t play, you’d be all sweaty.” I really don’t know the logic after that. You’d catch a chill in your delicates? You’d bleed on the shower floor? No place to dispose of your pad? Of course, I’d gone from pads to tampons in eighth grade, but I wasn’t telling anyone that.
Here’s what I really want to know, since the shower scam evidently still goes on, does it continue into college? Anyone take college P.E.?
11 responses to “The Shower Scam Lives On”
I discovered to my delight the other day that I could still transfix my 21 year-old, by telling her about school bathroom incinerators for sanitary pads – the one outside the stall doors, for everyone to use.
Next time I want her to listen to me, I’ll tell her about the home-made pads my mother made me wear. Get your Miss “Brassiere?” to suck on that! (Metaphorically, natch. Ew.)
I took tennis and dancing and have no recollection of being offered a shower. I suspect we were expected to shower back at the dorm. and I do not recall being allowed to skip PE on account of having a period.
Tennis and dancing in college that is.
I don’t recall ever taking a shower after gym. Even when I had first period gym. I don’t think anyone else did, either. At most, we would covertly wash our arm pits and apply an extra layer of Ban Roll-On. We were all shy and delicate flowers back then, except for the core team of girls who made up all the sports teams.
I never had to sit out a gym class because when I got my period, the cramps were so bad that all I could do was stay at home on the bed and try not to puke.
Oh, and I’ve taken (as teacher) PE classes in both NZ and England at high school and no-one’s ever even suggested having a shower. Because if everyone smells, no-one smells? I dunno.
I had PE the last hour of the day and went straight from there to pom practice, so no point in showering. I have never heard of someone missing PE because of a period. I did know girls who missed because of pregnancy.
Big Dot – Yes! My mom got out her sanitary belt and slung some weird pad on a sling when we were out of my adhesive-backed pads. Then she scared me by telling me Granceil did the same thing when she was young only she used rags. The horror.
Zarina – Maybe it’s a Saint Louis thing?
Becs – This is so strange. All the girls who needed to shower all piled in to a big shower together.
Big Dot – This is baffling. Then again, maybe your people are less afraid of sweat?
Caroline – Huh, and you went to school in St. Louis, albeit 11 or 12 years after I did.
This was a fairly new (back then) school. There was one dressing room for two girls on each side with a shower in the middle. I don’t think it was designed to be for four girls. Had it been for two girls, I think the showers would have been accomplished. But except for Vicki who got knocked up in the seventh grade, we were all fair young innocents and our own bodies were too much to deal with, much less somebody else’s.
Becs – what? Showers you had to share with three other girls? We had prison showers here. One shower for everyone. I think I used it once.
We had the circular, spray-style, everybody-in-at-once, shower in our HS girl’s locker room. I never saw it in use the entire 4 years that I went to school there – not during the school day, and not after field hockey practice. It just wasn’t done.
Tami – oh, all kinds of girls were in our shower. You are such puritans up there in NJ