Dont Drop The Soap

"The more things change, the more they remain the same" ~ Alphonse Karr

The above quotation (which I thought I had coined myself many years ago, but as it turns out, was coined by Mr. Karr first) is often used as a truism, but apparently, isn't always true, to wit:

While I was driving my son to school this morning (after he missed the bus for the umpteenth time this year), I questioned him about a startling revelation I had received a couple of weeks ago in a conference with his school counselor. The counselor told me the boys in the school don't take showers in P.E.

I don't know how the kids can stand going to the rest of their classes smelling of perspiration.

Well, maybe I can see that, but how can the other students stand them?

I then wondered aloud why the kids don't shower after all that physical activity, and my son said the idea of showering in gym was "gross".

"Not", I replied, "as gross as going to the rest of your classes stinking".

Then, after I dropped him off, I reflected on why they stopped showering, and also if other schools across the country have the same non-policy.

Do they? Does anyone reading this know? And if so, why?

I have my own uneducated, unresearched, and uninformed hypothesis:

Could it be the ever increasing acceptance of the gay lifestyle in our schools perhaps?

Think about it for a minute. Society, the schools, and public opinion have come together in the last 30 years or so to make all of us more sensitive to the plight of the poor, persecuted gay minority in this country. We have, for the most part, as a people, accepted the fact that gays live among us, and have successfully assimilated themselves into polite, moral society. So much so, in fact, that now, we who consider the lifestyle abhorrent have been forced to sit on the sidelines and pretend to approve.

Oh, sure, there is still some unrepentant and unabashed gay bigotry around. There always will be, I suspect.

As for myself, although I believe the lifestyle is perversion, I nevertheless treat any gay I meet as an equal. It is not, after all, the sole indication of their character. I can honestly say I have never known a homosexual, male or female, that I didn't personally like.

But has the gay lobby and activists been as successful at removing the stigma as we think?

I suggest they haven't. It would seem to me that the army's policy of "don't ask, don't tell" might work to lessen the amount of open discrimination against gays, but it does little to erase the bigotry that is still very much prevalent, particularly among high school boys.

I'm not suggesting that bigotry isn't somewhat deserved. After all, most right thinking people still consider homosexuality an abomination, as God pronounced it in Leviticus. There are those, (me included) who believe homosexuality is a choice, and not genetic.

But I digress.

When I was in high school, we took showers. We didn't want to attend the rest of the days classes stinking of perspiration. If we suspected any boy in our gym class was a "sissy", we took pains to not let that particular student see us naked, and, Heaven forbid, don't drop the soap in front of him.

Perhaps that attitude was ignorant but it was, nevertheless, the way we felt.

I know I wouldn't want some homo ogling me while I shower.

If any student ever got an accidental erection while showering with the other boys, his reputation within the school was effectively ruined for as long as students memories lasted.

So, to tie this all together, could it be that in their efforts to assure gay students are not discriminated against in high schools, the school administrators believe it necessary to ban showering in the boys locker room in gym class? Could they be merely protecting straight students against gay sexual harassment?

Is not taking showers in gym class a voluntary inaction by the students themselves or is it school policy? Are high school students more modest than students in my day?

Considering the breakdown in morals in the last 30 years, I find that scenario extremely unlikely. If anything, students would be more likely to parade around naked in the halls during school hours than to dive into lockers to hide their shame.

And the school administrators would be less likely to hand out any significant punishment for that singular behavior than they would have 30 years ago.

Ah, probably the only reason they don't take showers anymore is time constraints.