Burnley Grammar School

Hello, Response to Spelvin!

Do you want eye candy or brain food? I can give you both.

The Yami tribe lives on Lanyu, which means Orchid Island.

On Youtube, there are several videos of the Yami children and youth, but this one is my favorite:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5Q_PnPaka8&list=PLVS7GazMM7sOcnrO4NBQ_gW11VenqPdPf&index=43

The group generally wins out over the individual in Lanyu society, but the boy singing the opening solo seems to be the favorite of all the teachers.

The contributor’s name is in Chinese, but you can find more videos if you click on his name. You might notice this same boy getting a little more attention and a few more privileges. The chorus director probably put him on the front row so she could get a good look at him.

Besides the videos on Youtube, this same contributor has put a lot of material on the Internet. I remember a story about an awards ceremony in which the boys received trophies and certificates, showing their arms and legs and torsos, just like they are here, but treated with as much formality as if they were wearing jackets and ties.

Somehow, I’ve lost most of that material. If you can find any of it, please write back.

The best book on the subject is:

Smith, D. C. 1998. The Yami of Lan-yu Island: Portrait of a culture in transition. Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation.

Before industrialized society reared its ugly head, things were even better in Lanyu. Until then, boys didn’t even wear loincloths until puberty. Now they wear not only loincloths but heavy, sweaty, uncomfortable Western clothes.

Nevertheless, it would be nice of your culture and mine could copy from Lanyu Island. The boys get to dress comfortably, they get to enjoy the sun and the wind and the rain, they get to show their epidermal splendor, and all with no giggling or whispering from the girls. The girls probably think ALL boys show their bums!

One more factor which I forgot to mention: they’re safe from predators too. On page 40, D. C. Smith says so.

Why did that list of things from your post of 2019 that Neil rehashed on here interest you so much Spelvin?

Great post Curtis by the way.

Me and my twin sister started at the same comprehensive school in 1980, a year I have no great fondness for, nor the following one, so we are quite a good example of compare and contrast any possible male & female unfairness in our lives.

Where we went the girls could with teacher agreement simply opt out of showers after PE completely, and she did that, she used to tease me about it actually and wind me up, knowing it pushed certain buttons at the time when I thought she should do the same as me. Boys on the other hand were given no such decision to make and we had to shower always and every time we did PE in a fully open communal shower area with everyone fully naked in the thing together at the same time. Everyone in those school showers could be seen clear as day if the main changing room door was swung wide open and it was always swinging open and shut. Not much in the way of individual privacy was afforded any one of us as we rubbed the soap and were told to get our hair wet through as well as our bodies.

Did anyone else have a PE teacher like me who liked to dictate and direct exactly how you should conduct your shower while taking it? That was not only a little weird but very annoying too. Just going in was not good enough, you got badgered to do things precisely the right way too. Get your head fully under the water and keep it there was one popular instruction.

Go and figure why this happened boy girl difference happened? I often saw girls coming back from netball or hockey with sweat stained tops on down their back and looking all hot and bothered. Why did my sister get a complete free pass on showering at school which she willingly took up without too much thought, yet her brother, me, and all the boys in school had such a choice removed from us completely, with teachers sometimes getting quite angry in the changing room if they thought anyone was trying to wriggle out of it.

All that being said, most of us didn't mind PE showers once we'd got used to the idea of it and doing it so often with each other, the injustice, the rights or wrongs of it didn't end up playing much in the mind ultimately.

Immediately I started school in 1980 I was into bare chested PE regular as clockwork. I'm sure I even remember late that September of that year our new class was outside shirtless on more than a few occasions before the weather finally closed in, so it wasn't confined to just the gym, and the girls of our class were across the field but both groups were in view of each other from a distance without mingling. PE seemed to merge two or three classes I think. Later on we were sometimes divided up into ability groupings too.

I do know we were doing a normal boys gym class one morning in the usual attire in our first year and had finally just about got used to everything as it was done and a group of girls suddenly filtered into our lesson unexpected thinking they were having the gym instead of us due to some mix up. This led to some nonsense from some boys and it was obvious it was because we'd all been caught with our tops off and it made some boys play up to the girls a bit. We thought they'd clear off back out and go do their own lesson elsewhere but they ended up staying and sharing the gym with us all. It was clear to me, we were only boys of 12 and 13, that some of these showy offy type of boys who were trying to look all big and confident about themselves were using it as a mask because they were probably petrified of being near girls at all, never mind in PE in a state of being shirtless in just shorts. I do remember some girls smirking away at us and a few gigglers. We were just all normal boys though, nothing unusual to look at!

There was another interesting one involving a weekend school trip our class took to Great Yarmouth where were spent most of our time hanging around on the beach for the weekend having a mostly great time. The girls on the trip were allowed to go into some beach huts nearby to change into costumes and come out, while all the boys had to change openly on the beach and do that wrap around the waist towel movement to get in and out of our swimming gear. There wasn't enough time for everyone to use the beach huts to change so they said, so the girls got them and we had to make do on the sand. One of the most memorable moments of the weekend was the hysterics that happened when 4 boys decided to dispense with the beach towel dance when changing and began strumming at their genitals like a guitar at some girls for a few seconds for a laugh before getting into trouble for showing the school up to other beach users! Something that would have been solved by allowing boys to change in beach huts like the girls. One of our male teachers spent the entire weekend reading books in his normal around school clobber, long trousers and shirt, boys were all required to change appropriately for the beach for the day and on that beach, which was busy with other visitors and families, with our school standing out obvious.

I don't think schools take classes out on pleasure trips like that anymore unless they have an educational reason to go with it.

I'm sorry if it offends you Alan but I have to go along with the comments made by Jon, George and even Iris in reply to a couple of the recent people mentioning current PE practices still requiring some element of required shirtlessness within a gym class.

Born in 1979 I agree with their comments. Not because I have any fetish about it or wishes to ogle or to humiliate or upset those it would affect, because the simple fact is that nearly all boys would not care in the slightest about it, and nearly all teaching staff, hopefully all of them, are not looking at pupils in ways they should not be doing.

There is nothing wrong with shirtless PE lessons being asked for, required or fully mandated across the board for a group in a class situation. If the PE department elects to require that all boys within a school should do that, so be it, there should not be a problem with that. This kind of a mandate should be no more of a problem than requiring all boys to wear a tie to school done up properly with the top button secured, thus strangling some of us. I hated wearing a tie and having my top button done up, always felt like it was too tight on my neck and uncomfortable. It was great when I went to PE and could get my shirt off and into kit, or go shirtless a lot too.

Shirtless PE is about taking a disciplined approach to PE, making it clear we all have bodies that require care to keep in good condition. Why go to a PE class and seek to hide that body? When groups are shirtless like that it does create an extra level of achievement, an unmistakable sense of being, bonding is often said. Why otherwise has Craig of this site had such success with a group of runners who do nothing more than take their shirts off to run in bare chests and some he suggests were not even that confident about it? Would that have been so successful as a normal running group, I suggest not. There is an attraction there, a bond and an experience about it that is hard to pin down why, but there is, and this applies at school too and in my opinion is quite healthy and authentic. I firmly believe that boys who have to attend their PE lesson in the gym shirtless do work better and work harder and just get on with things more efficiently.

It's not scientific I grant you, unless anyone has done any studies on this, if so I'm keen to read up on them. I take this from personal experience. I went to two quite different secondary schools. I had to switch for a year to another when we moved away briefly before returning to my original school. My original secondary did gym for boys all the time permanently shirtless, this was only in the 1990's, a lot more recent compared to some others, and tops were not a discussion point, boy pupils like me went to PE in the gym in our bare chests, simple as that. But for a year I attended another school a hundred miles away that always did PE in some kind of a top, mainly random t-shirts. What I remember about it all is that the PE in that school gym seemed to lack direction and be less driven with less intensity and purpose, whilst in my original school, and when I returned back there after having a full year out of the place I returned to the ways I'd been doing PE all over again and the gym there seemed to just be more effective in so many ways with boys, me included getting down to it, and I think the fact my class in PE, it must have been at least 25 boys most weeks, were all shirtless and in the same boat like that, revealing our own physiques to everyone and our teachers, made a meaningful difference. I also remember I felt rather grown up to be at a school that told boys to do PE like that, and promote our increasingly manly bodies as we grew up.

Perhaps the most relevant comment Spelvin has made to this discussion was about some school in Taiwan mandating very different attire for their students depending on their gender.

Can you elaborate in detail with any evidence, Spelvin? What terms would search engines require, perhaps in Taiwanese language, to research this further?

Hi Iris,

I don't wish to be contentious but it isn't your place to tell your daughter's male classmates how they should have felt. The issue was how they did feel. It is quite likely that quite a few of those teenage boys felt humiliated being forced to go half-naked in front of a crowd of adults and their female classmates. Their feelings should have been given consideration. It should have been their choice what they wore.

After all, I daresay your daughter and her female classmates would have looked quite impressive performing their sports day activities in bikinis, wouldn't they?

But back then, just as today still in many respects, a male isn't meant to have feelings, and if he does he is to be made to stop that silly nonsense.

The issue that nobody on here has pointed out is the unconscious sex discrimination that this fosters in the girls themselves. We recently had Mary's breezy commentary about how making boys share a gym with girls stripped to nothing but shorts made it hard on what she called the 'weaker ones', while the girls' much more extensive PE kit was based around 'comfort and practicality'. There have been plenty more posts on here from female respondents seemingly oblivious to their own double standard, like the recent woman who was a primary teacher in the 1970s, who stated that when the girls expressed unease at wearing full-length leotards in front of the boys the kit was changed for them to t-shirt and shorts, but when the boys voiced unease at having to share the gym with the girls stripped to nothing but shorts, they were curtly told, 'these are the rules'. I called this poster out on this and got no response. Women don't like to be told that they harbour double standards.

Hello, Neil!

Yes, that was me.

There don't seem to be any people who are really named Spelvin.
In the US, it was once customary to assign the name George Spelvin to an actor who appeared on stage an additional time to play a different role.
There was a George Spelvin Award for actors.
If I remember correctly, Shirley Temple did not win that award, but was present at a banquet where someone else won that award.

Hello, James!

I somehow let my participation on this board lapse for a few years.
It's good to see that you're still alive and well.

Hello, Tony!

Sorry I displeased you.
I guess I can't please everybody.

Comment by: Jon on 10th August 2025 at 16:26


Comment by: George on 10th August 2025 at 18:49


Comment by: Iris on 10th August 2025 at 22:50




Given the recent outburst of fetishism on the site, thanks to Spelvin, you have to question the motives of people who, like "Iris" , think boys look "really nice", while "Jon" is "refreshed", and George feels boys should be "obligated" to remove their tops. WHY, for God' sake?. Do you have fetishes as well?. Eddie on the 9th August, mentioned a very sad case where a lad killed himself at 18, having suffered name calling, not least from a P.E. teacher. Many of us have described the effects that stayed with us for years, because we had unpleasant experiences with such teachers - my P.E. teacher used personal insults against many of us. It is bullying, pure and simple. In our case, the fact that our teacher was a homosexual with an obvious interest in male bodies made it worse, and more personal.

There is something frankly degenerate about the middle aged wanting to see boys running around in minimal kit, and posting these desires on a forum, and I think you need to give your heads a wobble. What gives you pleasure gave pain to others.

I always think boys look really nice doing things without shirts and look impressive when grouped together doing sport like gymnastics or such like. I went to my my daughter's secondary school sports day a few times in the old days of the 1970s and boys in all the activity remained topless. I've got lots of old slides from those days around 1975-78 when I snapped my daughter at school and there are boys everywhere in the background and in some of her games with her, all with no tops on their bodies. If I'd had a son I would have thought nothing about him doing like those boys were doing in those days at school. I was always impressed by what most of them looked like, and they should all of been proud of themselves, not unhappy about it.

Is all the following from 6 years ago under the name of an American 'George Spelvin' you Spelvin? Try and convince me your contributions are honourable and not what Tony alluded to, fetishism, with all this lot.

Also a check on your unusual name brings up other forums on similar subject matter.

Comment by: George Spelvin on 25th August 2019 at 15:12
Hello, James!
Hello, moderators!

Is there more than one James on this board?
I am interested in several messages which are signed James, but some of those messages seem to contradict each other.
So I am trying to figure out which messages have been written by which James.
If you are one of the Jameses, I would appreciate it if you could tell me which of these messages you wrote.
If you are the only James and I am mistaken in thinking that there is more than one of you, I would appreciate it if you could write back.
If you are a moderator and have this information handy, I would appreciate it if you could write back.

--proudly riding a bike on Sunday, wearing a swim suit and nothing else (March 18, 2014).
--an embarrassing school medical inspection (May 19, 2014).
--translucent gym shorts with nothing underneath (January 2, 2012; July 18, 2014; September 25, 2014; September 27, 2014; January 28, 2015).
--being allowed to wear only shorts at home (March 28, 2016).
--girls admiring boys who are shirtless for gym class (September 22, 2009; April 7, 2013).
--a school gym with huge windows through which the girls could watch the boys (June 29, 2019).
--towel dancing by boys of the present generation (December 11, 2013).
--nude swimming class at a boarding school (September 6, 2013), which was often interrupted by women teachers ordering individual students to get out of the pool and talk (October 20, 2014; October 28, 2014; October 30, 2014; October 31, 2014), and sometimes visited by a matron who bragged that she had seen every boy who attended the school for the past 12 years (May 28, 2014).
--swimming class wearing slips at an all-boys’ school (February 5, 2017). What ARE slips anyway? You’ll have to excuse me. I’m from the other side of the Atlantic.
--coed dance class which the boys had to attend shirtless (July 26, 2015).
--being forced by his parents to wear skimpy shorts until he graduated. This one I have paginated (February 8, 2014, p. 36; September 4, 2014, p. 33; October 29, 2014, p. 32; November 16, 2014, p. 31; March 30, 2016, p. 25; April 1, 2016, p. 25; December 25, 2017, p. 14; April 8, 2018, p. 11; January 3, 2019, p. 5).

I agree with you Jon, boys of all shapes and sizes should be obligated to do shirtless physical education without excuses about it, so they can face up to what their own bodies and those of others are like and are doing in becoming active and fitter, it's the best way to confidence even if some don't think it is. It's the best way to do things in a gym anyway and as a 'uniform' levels everyone down to the same exact look. The male body was not designed to be hidden.

Stop posting that type of content Spelvin please. There are NO excuses for the kind of behaviour that was described in part of your post. It is sick and pathetic and just the product of someone's warped mind, not real at all. Anyone who indulges in such activity is or was committing a criminal offence on an underage child, not giving a family friendly sex education lesson, and if you don't understand that then you've got problems. I told you people would call out this kind of thing here.

Refreshing and good to see boys are still expected to take PE in bare shirtless chests in some places. There's nothing wrong with that, or being told you must do it that way. I support that.

Comment by: Simon on 9th August 2025 at 22:14
<Our school in Greenock, Inverclyde in Scotland takes many shirtless PE classes for boys, most of these are full class mandated. I've been a junior PE teacher for just five years. There have never been any obvious problems with boys told to remove tops for class. The school requires showering, there have been a few reluctance problems with that from time to time.>



Hi Simon.

I can still remember our induction morning into secondary school in the mid/late 80s when I was very nervous about what they would make me do in PE at a "big school", mostly thinking about all the sports we'd have to do, I never gave the actual PE kit much of a thought until I got there and discovered the reality. I never even thought about such things as showers, I think I'd heard you might do that in secondary school from somewhere.

On our induction morning someone who would be our new PE teacher spoke to us and fielded questions, I know someone asked if we had to shower and he said yes. I remember there was a kind of awkward few seconds silence before someone else asked a follow up, but what if we don't want to, and that teacher said there was no such thing as not wanting to, you have to. That's the typical PE teacher attitude. I'm not especially self conscious but I was not someone who especially enjoyed the school PE showers and I think most of us were reluctant underneath it all, some just showed it more than others. It's actually quite a big deal to show yourself and be completely bare naked in front of others but this was not supposed to be an issue for children and teenagers as far as our school teachers were concerned. Now a clever PE teacher faced with a question like I just outlined might have tried to understand that reluctance a bit more in an individual case.

"Skins" was the word they always used at my school to describe boys without a top on, and skins was very common, I'd say we were skins in the school gym far more than we were shirts actually, and not just for team splits. In one of my teacher's classes in PE it was always known you'd be skins in his gym class if you had him, some teachers were very much pro the bare chest style of doing PE more or less constantly with us. I didn't really mind it but surely it must be clear to any PE teacher that not all boys are keen and quite a few can be set against it entirely.

Mark is right on here, elements of that Spelvin comment posted on here at 12.46 yesterday, 9th August, were certainly descriptions of childhood sexual abusive behaviour, I'm not going to repeat it again, Mark has highlighted it, and to be honest I doubt it ever even happened anyway, it reads like absolute online fictional fantasy twaddle.

There is a legit discussion to be had about double standards between boys and girls, males and females, such as the one Yours Truly is part of, but parts of that comment yesterday were not the direction to go with it.

Hello, Terry!

I just found those two messages which I quoted.
Hilary's message was on June 22 of this year.
Mary's message was on June 25 of this year.
At present, both messages are on page 6.

Our school in Greenock, Inverclyde in Scotland takes many shirtless PE classes for boys, most of these are full class mandated. I've been a junior PE teacher for just five years. There have never been any obvious problems with boys told to remove tops for class. The school requires showering, there have been a few reluctance problems with that from time to time.

Spelvin

'In 2013, when Raymond was 13 years old, his mother found his 10-year-old sister Joanie viewing pornography.
This convinced their mother that Joanie needed to learn about male anatomy. To satisfy Joanie’s curiosity, their mother undressed Raymond in Joanie’s presence, induced an erection, answered all of Joanie’s questions about erections, instructed Joanie on how to handle Raymond’s genitals, induced an ejaculation, and answered Joanie’s questions about ejaculations.
All the time that Raymond was indoors at home that summer, he was to remain nude. That way, he was of service to Joanie on a 24/7 basis.

Does all this information mean that parents of girls and parents of boys are sickos? Not at all. These are deeply ingrained instincts which have been vital for the preservation of our species.'




Yes it does mean they were sickos, very much so.

Enough of this Spelvin. I don't know where you are getting this rubbish from and I don't care to know, this crosses the line. Do you not understand the nature of what you have placed here. Even if these are not your own words and memories, you do know that you are actually posting child sexual abuse filth/material on here don't you? What you have described is not education, it is quite simply an act of domestic family child sexual abuse of a minor, end of.

Comment by: spelvin on 9th August 2025 at 12:46
A Victorian mother took frequent trips to the beach, where her two daughters could “properly learn of how boys grow into men than allowing them to view the physical virtues of these boys at varying ages and stages of development,” and especially to learn about “that part of these boys that are concerned with their reproduction, which is laid completely bare and as naked for the girls to view as the rest of them.”




Father's couldn't or wouldn't take their sons to the beach with equally unclothed young ladies to 'properly learn of how girls grow into women, allowing them to view the physical virtues of these girls at varying ages and stages of development' could they.

Colin that was not a bad analysis of everyday school gym as I seem to recall it 1977-81. But you certainly didn't have to be a standout physical specimen roly poly big boy or a stick insect anorexic looking thin boy to attract comment. In my class at one point during my secondary years about 1979 there was a boy in my form called Mark Jones, a common name and there must be loads of them about. He was a normal boy, average looks, average size, average body, and nothing was remarkable about him in any way. How do I remember this? Well one PE teacher at about 14 began calling him average a lot for some reason, took a dislike I'd say and was always putting this boy down, and began calling him "Average Jones" in class PE, citing his ability and physical appearance. It seemed like a pun on the known phrase "Average Joe" to me. This teacher prefaced a couple of other boys surnames with words too, the rest of us were just our last name. Constantly getting someone go at you like that must be so hard, I felt it was a rotten thing to do and I wasn't the target. This gives open season on the crueller elements in a class to pile on too, someone said he had an average penis in the showers, it could have been worse I guess, and I expressly remember myself saying to Mark that it was okay to be average because at least he wasn't crap at anything or below par then, in an attempt to pick him up. We're all average at most things anyway, or looks I guess. We're not all supermodels and super athletes!

He took his life when he was just 18 in 1983 and all these years I wondered if the way that teacher used to speak to him played any part in how he saw himself and what he decided to do.

On January 30, Danny C told us about a teacher who incorporated male semi-nudity into drama class.
If I understand correctly, the teacher did this two ways: one by holding music and movement exercises and two, by presenting plays which call for male semi-nudity.

I didn’t take drama class in high school, but it was obvious that the drama teacher was an admirer of pectoral beauty.

In a convocation on American history, she stripped some of the boys shirtless to play Indians. The boys still wore jeans, but that didn’t hide their erections.

In the Rodgers & Hammerstein musicale “South Pacific,” there is a scene in which a girl comes on stage and sings a song entitled “Honey Bun.” Next to her is a man wearing a grass skirt. One year, the drama teacher imitated this scene on the annual skit night. My mother was appalled by the teacher's "poor taste."

In a pep rally one year, the emcee introduced us to the beauty queen from the opposing high school. We then saw a tall lanky boy wearing a blonde wig and a bikini. He wiggled while the kettledrum player in the band went boing boing boing. This continued for as long as the audience kept hooting and hollering and clapping and whistling.

It’s too bad that Danny C’s drama teacher and my high school drama teacher couldn’t have met. There’s no telling how many brilliant ideas they could have traded.

////////////////////////////////////////

Response, on August 8, you asked if I’ve preserved the original sources which I have paraphrased. Sorry, I’ve only preserved my paraphrases.

Here are a few good primary sources on nude swimming for boys:

https://sites.google.com/site/historicarchives4maleswimming/home/ii-archives-early-20th-century-after/c-public-schools-municipal-pools-and-ymca-history-of-mandated-nude-swimming
https://www.tnsprofessorsig.org/nude%20swimming%20in%20school.html
https://sites.google.com/site/historicarchives4maleswimming/home/historic-photographs
I doubt if historyworld would want to print my entire bibliography, because it is 100 pages long. If there is any particular topic which you’re interested in, I’ll see what I can do for you.

I just finished reading a message which Alan wrote on March 17 of this year. He speculated that mixed showers for children and youth would result in “fathers who will be repulsed by the idea of their little girls being exposed to such indignities and will take them out of school” and to “mums who will be equally angry about subjecting their little boys to that sort of treatment.”

In these days of sexual abuse hysteria, what he says may be fully true. If he had written these words a few decades earlier, however, the first half of his statement would have been more true than the second.

I make the following observations:

Law Number 1: Parents of girls valued boys as apparati for sex education.

A Victorian mother took frequent trips to the beach, where her two daughters could “properly learn of how boys grow into men than allowing them to view the physical virtues of these boys at varying ages and stages of development,” and especially to learn about “that part of these boys that are concerned with their reproduction, which is laid completely bare and as naked for the girls to view as the rest of them.”

After calling the girls’ attention to a boy, and in turn calling the boy’s attention to the girls, and allowing teasing from the girls, “the concomitant stirrings of emotions with which nature charges him swell to their inevitable physical manifestation.”

Law Number 2: Mothers of boys presented their own boys as apparati for sex education.

Paul had to swim nude in the family pool in the presence of his sister and her friends. According to their mother, his nudity was healthy for him and educational for the girls. Their mother was always willing to lecture to the girls on male anatomy, using Paul for a prop.

His worst humiliation was at the age of 12 when his sister had her tenth birthday. There were 8 girls, ranging in age from 6 to 12. At his sister’s request, their mother took a picture of Paul, posing nude with the girls.

Law Number 3: Parents of girls scouted for immaculate nude boys as possible mates for their lovely daughters.

Over here on this side of the Pond, Manuel grew up in a time when high school swim meets took place with the boys swimming nude. As one of the team members, he has this to say:

The girls in our team. at meets especially, the girls would take me to talk to their parents . . .

Sometimes I feel like I was tricked to agreeing to something that I didn't want to do. Like a forced date.

We had drive-in theaters and I would get invited to movies on weekends with usually both parents in the front seat, and me and my girl team mate and her siblings in the back seat.

It was fun, and I enjoyed it. but sometimes it felt like I couldn't say no but to go along with the invitation. Maybe I wanted to do something else. Of course, I kept this to myself. . .

I could see when parents wanted me for their daughters.

And I was flattered. It was nice. I just didn't like being railroaded into something.

But it’s over. No more stress.

(I wish I got that much attention as a diligent violin student!)

A mother demonstrating Law Number 1 and a mother demonstrating Law Number 2 could make a cozy symbiosis.

Kerry had a 7-year-old daughter, Maura, who asked what boys looked like underneath their clothes. To answer the daughter’s question, Kerry asked her friend Barbara if she and Maura could drop in some time while Barbara’s 6-year-old son Tim was taking a bath.

When the surprise visit took place, Tim “did not seem bothered at all”—at least according to Kerry.

In fact, a mother demonstrating
Law Number 1 and a mother demonstrating Law Number 2 could be the same mother.

In 2013, when Raymond was 13 years old, his mother found his 10-year-old sister Joanie viewing pornography.

This convinced their mother that Joanie needed to learn about male anatomy. To satisfy Joanie’s curiosity, their mother undressed Raymond in Joanie’s presence, induced an erection, answered all of Joanie’s questions about erections, instructed Joanie on how to handle Raymond’s genitals, induced an ejaculation, and answered Joanie’s questions about ejaculations.

All the time that Raymond was indoors at home that summer, he was to remain nude. That way, he was of service to Joanie on a 24/7 basis.

Does all this information mean that parents of girls and parents of boys are sickos? Not at all. These are deeply ingrained instincts which have been vital for the preservation of our species.

It was in our evolutionary interests for girls to become well-acquainted with the male gender. If she succumbed to the wrong male, she could find herself stranded with a cave full of children with no one to help her.

However, it was not in the interests of males to be so monogamous. The more recognition a male got, the more offspring he engendered and the more descendents he left down to us.

Did your parents seem unsympathetic when you had to attend gym class half naked? Did your parents seem apathetic when the girls’ gym teacher watched you take a shower? Did the double standard seem unfair to you? I can empathize with your frustration, but try to understand.

The Eastern European text I auto-translated was a comment under a video uploaded by the YouTube channel @armymedicaltest which uploads official footage from medical examinations conducted on potential conscripts in post Soviet countries. A cursory glance at those videos will prove that this has nothing to do with fetishes and everything to do with the institutional discrimination and indignity those countries inflict upon their male citizens.

Most of those videos feature men stripped to their underwear waiting nervously to be examined, often by female doctors who have no sympathy for the humiliation these men must be suffering. Some of these videos were filmed by the local news, with a female reporter nonchalantly interviewing young conscripts wearing only their boxers and briefs. Some of these men try to appear confident on camera, though their embarrassment and discomfort is too obvious to hide.

Of course, the parts where the conscript is made to strip completely is left out, either by the cameramen or by the uploader in line with YouTube's policies on nudity. Websites that archive historical material still have Soviet-era black and white photographs and footage of male conscripts standing stark naked before a committee of men and women under a photograph of Stalin and other communist leaders.

Any skeptic who still thinks this is about fetishes and fantasy is disproven by searching the terms 'musterung' and the 2010 report about it, 'Medical Rape: State Authorised German Perversion'

Bare chested school PE lessons (gym/sports hall) were often, in actual fact always mandatory for me in comprehensive school from first to fifth form years even in front of and sharing the lesson with girls who I seem to recall seemed almost over dressed at times, some wore a tiny skirt, others shorts, all wore cotton tops of some kind, polo style or T-shirts but boys came to PE in nothing more than our shorts on. Tops of any kind were strictly not allowed for us and shirtless was the rule for everyone, it didn't matter if you were puny as hell or very obese, and I remember a very fat lad in class who was useless at everything and always shown up and mocked by teachers for his wobbly body, a teacher even called him disgusting to look at for his age. That's really cruel, he didn't ask to be out and shirtless like that, it was a real body shaming thing that you could get away with in the 1970s period, but then boys who were quite puny also got it from the other extreme. The school gym I remember from the time was filled with comments to kill anyone's self esteem for a lifetime like that fat lad. I remember when they fed us into the compulsory school showers after PE how nobody would want to stand near this big guy as if they would catch his obesity from him. I wonder what he would say about all that now if he was here. My memory of school PE and teachers is how they were always picking fault with all of us over something and shaming us over it, and that included what we looked like. There were many personal comments flying. I never understood the whole shirtless obsession with school PE in those days, many boys already disliked a lot of PE, or the teachers who took it, and for some I think shirtless made it an even bigger deal still, and everyone used to hate compulsory showers where teachers made us strip naked before their eyes and watch us all wash in a line shoulder to shoulder. Many of us were treated quite poorly in those days at school.

Spelvin

'Yet it seems to be possible for boys and girls to mix and mingle despite differential treatment.
We are told—I don’t know how true this is—that in some parts of the United States during the Sixties,
high schools held competitive swim meets in which the girls’ teams wore swimsuits and the boys’ teams swam nude.
These meets were open to the public and were attended by the boys’ mommies, the boys’ sisters, the boys’ girlfriends, the boys’ girlfriends’ mommies, and the boys’ girlfriends’ sisters.
When a boy was not called to participate in a race,
he would wander off onto the bleachers and converse with his admiring audience.'


Total myth I'm sure without a grain of serious evidence anywhere to back it up. It may just about have been possible over there in a previous time that boys who had to swim mandatory naked, which is clearly true in places, were watched by their own families in a single sex situation, but no more than that, and I bet even if that did happen it wasn't very common at all.


'Response', that long cut and paste translated item you put on here has vibes of fetishism and fantasy about it to me. Valid points have been made about irritating double standards boys put up with (and men) and even intrusion by females into private male changing spaces when at school, but anyone thinking of starting some kind of fetishism narrative on here and passing it off as genuine just because someone has mentioned CFNM, a fetish term, needs to be aware that many of us will know what's going on and call it out.

I'm not suggesting that either you Spelvin or 'Response' are doing this, but the swimming 'myth' points to going in that direction.

Comment by: Spelvin on 7th August 2025 at 01:16
Hello, Hilary!
Hello, Mary!



It would have been quite useful if you had identified which comments of Hilary and Mary you are responding to, possibly with a date. I can't even remember any recent persons with those names commenting on here and haven't found them.

Nick Z, you made mention of being 'often confronted with the opposite sex' while you and the boys were bare chested. Did the girls ever say or do anything that made their presence a particularly noteworthy memory? What did your school have them wear?

Through my research into institutionalized discrimination against boys, I have often encountered Spelvin's summaries of accounts written by others. Many of these discussions can no longer be found as the forums they were posted on have gone offline, which is unfortunate considering they contained unique first hand testimony of institutional policies that may be historically valuable.

Have you preserved an unabridged copy of the original texts you paraphrase, Spelvin? If so, would you share/reupload those texts somewhere for posterity?

I think it is important to preserve and aggregate these records as evidence of institutionalized discrimination against boys to counter the mainstream narrative of male privilege. Indeed, many of the people who shared their stories on various forums have expressed this sentiment and cited this as one of their reasons for sharing their experience, so it would be a shame if their testimony was lost and forgotten.

For my part, I will follow up my contribution to the discussion comparing school mandated nudity to conscription and the concomitant medical examination by sharing this anecdote from an Eastern European. This text was originally in some Cyrillic language and was auto-translated, which may introduce some unnatural phrasing and obscure abbreviations.

'I also passed in the military registration and enlistment office of the VVK. A young VVK nurse took us into the room and told us to undress for a medical examination. Everyone began to undress, then she said socks and panties also need to be taken off. Everyone immediately began to gawk and said that we would not take off our underpants, because many were shy. She repeated her demand in a commanding tone once more. And she said there was no need to delay the commission, otherwise she would call the military commissar. Then she added with a smile: "No one will tear anything away from you there." At this time, a fat aunt came into the room - an employee of the military registration and enlistment office. She started yelling at the guys and said do what you are told. Three nurses and a female secretary of the draft commission came to her scream. The secretary asked: "What happened?" An employee of the military registration and enlistment office told her: "The boys violate the order and do not want to take off their underpants, and I need to close the room with clothes." The secretary turned to the conscripts (i.e. to us) and said: "Boys! What's the matter? Such an order! You leave all the clothes in the room, we lock them with a key. And you begin to undergo a medical examination. There is no need to be shy! Otherwise, you will be held liable for evading a medical examination. I will not repeat it again!" And the nurses added: "What are you really like children!" The fat aunt began to yell again. Then the guys began to take off their underpants. And we found ourselves completely naked in front of them. Many guys blushed, their eyes were lowered. Three guys had small penises and testicles. And it was especially difficult for them. I watched the secretary, nurses and an employee of the military registration and enlistment office. They all looked at the guys' genitals and smiled slightly. They took all the guys out into the corridor, and the room with the clothes was closed by a fat aunt. The secretary told the nurses to go to their offices. She also added with a smile: "Don't look at the boys, because they are shy." She showed the doctors' offices and how to pass. The doctors were mostly women or young girls. Only the otorhinolaryngologist and the dentist were men. The nurses were young girls. The surgeon was a young woman, and she had a young nurse with her. A female surgeon examined me carefully. Then she asked to expose the head of the penis, spread the opening of the urethra, raise the scrotum up with your hands. I felt the testicles, scrotum, groin and penis, slightly rhythmically slapped my palm on the scrotum several times, as if playing with a ball. This is in order to detect varicocele and dropsy. After that, I had an erection. She smiled slightly and said that it was normal. She asked him to bend down and spread his buttocks. And all this in the presence of a nurse who looked and smiled. There were no screens or partitions. It was the first time it happened to me. The erection did not subside. I blushed all over. After that, the nurse began to measure my height, chest and weighed me on the scales. She wrote it all down and I went to a dermatovenerologist, while there was no need to go out into the common corridor. From the surgeon's office, you could go to the dermatovenerologist's office. The erection has not come down yet. In the office there was a young woman, a dermatovenerologist and a nurse. They smiled slightly. The dermatologist said it was okay. She examined me completely, including my genitals. I was the last doctor of the VVK. Then I had to go to the draft commission. The doctor said that I needed to calm down. The erection went away and immediately from the dermatologist's office I got to the draft commission completely naked. There were 6 or 7 people there. All were women, and the secretary is a young girl. He was only a military man. I went in and covered my genitals with my hands. I'm all on fire. The military commissar ordered me to stand in the drawn square and lower my hands. I carried out the order. The female chairman began to calm me down: "This is how it should be and there is no need to be shy. Nothing will surprise us." And that's it.'

Hi Spelvin,

Surely it would help to overcome boys' shyness of being nude when swimming if girls were nude to especially for the first time when swimming nude.

Hello, Hilary!
Hello, Mary!

I have attended nudist resorts, where boys and girls are both nude.
The boys and girls mix and mingle.

I’ve read an article about Bushmen society, in which children of both genders dress immodestly.
The boys and girls mix and mingle.

I’ve seen videos and still pictures of Lanyu Island in Taiwan, where boys are often expected to wear loincloths for school programs and group photographs.
The girls, however, are fully dressed.
The boys and girls don’t seem to mix and mingle.

I’ve seen pictures of Victorian beaches, where the boys skinny-dipped and the girels swimsuit-dipped.
The boys and girls didn’t seem to mix and mingle.

Why the correlation?
A hasty explanation would be that the boys in the CFNM setting were too embarrassed to approach the girls,
whereas the boys in the less discriminatory setting were not.
But the boys in the Lanyu Island culture do not seem to be the least bit ashamed of their minimal attire.
They spend much of their leisure time in their informal attire.
Whenever they wish, that is how they attend school.

My hypothesis, then, is that the less adults treat boys and girls differently,
the more they mix and mingle.
Conversely, the more adults treat boys and girls differently,
the less they mix and mingle.

Yet it seems to be possible for boys and girls to mix and mingle despite differential treatment.
We are told—I don’t know how true this is—that in some parts of the United States during the Sixties,
high schools held competitive swim meets in which the girls’ teams wore swimsuits and the boys’ teams swam nude.
These meets were open to the public and were attended by the boys’ mommies, the boys’ sisters, the boys’ girlfriends, the boys’ girlfriends’ mommies, and the boys’ girlfriends’ sisters.
When a boy was not called to participate in a race,
he would wander off onto the bleachers and converse with his admiring audience.

So tell me, Hilary, and tell me, Mary,
was your experience more like that of the nudist society, like that of Bushmen society, like that of Lanyu Island society, or like that of the Victorian beach?

I submitted a comment on here late last night which hasn't shown up but others have since mine was sent, not sure why? A pity. Anyone else ever had that issue with comments no published?