Jock Check

A posting on Facebook, leading to an article in The Atlantic on locker rooms and the culture of "manliness" brought back a whole bunch of childhood memories this morning, and not one of them good.

Normally, I push my bad Shaker Heights memories back - way back, and then I lock them down, deep down, and throw the key away.  We know now that while an unhealthy way of dealing with trauma, almost everyone does it because its a brains way of moving on.

For my fathers parents, the horror of escaping Russia before World War I was locked up and filed away.  For their grandson, it was the American version something just as traumatic, junior high gym.

First of all, we didn't have teachers in gym.  We had physical education coaches.  The problem with this nomenclature was that it was assumed that by seventh grade, you knew all the basics of every sport.  The coaches didn't seem like they wanted to teach us how football was played, the just want refine our skills.  So if you had zero understanding of how football worked (as a couple of us were), you were SOL.  (If you were a seventh grade girl in the early 1970s in Shaker, SOL meant "so out of luck."  If you were were a 13 year old boy, yes, it was shit out of luck and if you were me, it just meant "fuck me," in the ironic sense.)

Second of all, the "Coaches" were not bad people.  Let me say that again: the coaches were not bad people.  In fact if they were teaching in a Shaker School, they had to be qualified and well liked by their peers.  Shaker didn't hire second run personnel.  Even Blanche Brown, my sixth grade teacher was an outstanding teacher.  She was Evil, and no grass grows on her grave, but she was no slouch if you fit the mold of what one of her students should be.  If you were outside that mold, you were fucked. 

But the coaches they had back then were MEN, damn it, and that was the era that we lived in.  They were there to instruct you, not mollycoddle you. 

The unease didn't start until a friend from high school on Facebook brought up the topic and mentioned the practice in boys gym of the "jock check".

At the Junior High I attended, we had a first rate athletic complex in its own wing.  There was a girls gym was closest to the classrooms. The last building, at the end of the bus dock, was boys gym. A first rate natatorium, complete with guest bleachers split the difference.

On my first day of gym at the junior high, we were brought into the gym and told that in addition for changing into our gym uniforms (which in those days we short blue shorts, white tee shorts, whit gym socks and tennis shoes to be used only in gym) that we were also to be wearing jock straps.   The coach who made this announcement, while pacing up and down the single file lines that we were sitting in ("Indian style") made the announcement, followed by the statement "For some of you that will mean a rubber band and half a peanut shell."

This was the first minute that I felt totally unsafe and scared shitless.  Why?

First of all I had gone through early puberty.  How early? Started when I was 10, which was fourth grade, pimples in fifth and by sixth grade I was the boy with the lowest baritone voice in music music class, which delighted Mrs. Hamm, but brought even more unwanted attention down on me.   And then there was my dick and balls, which on a 30 year man would have been a gift.  But on a gawky gangley 13 year old made me feel like a freak.

Secondly, once we had said jock straps, we were all given twice weekly jock checks.  Whats a jock check?  It varied from school to school, but at our school it meant during roll, as the coach walked down the row, when he got to you, you had to reach your thumb up your shorts leg, hook it around the leg strap and pull on it and SNAP it.  It was degrading.  And twice each week I hated class, a little more, and I hate the coach even more so.  I don't know of anyone who enjoyed it.

Finally, there was the mandatory shower.  Teen boys stink.  I may have been over the puberty hurdle, but the two hundred other boys in Junior high weren't.  So the showers were just another hygiene thing they had to teach us.  So it was a quick in and out.

And this reader, is how I developed a hatred for sports locker rooms.   Combine all this with bad body image issues, and you get a recipe for a Cookie freak out.

But what The Atlantic magazine article gets at is, how did the locker room (baths excepted) become the place where men are at their manliness?   Where straight boys learn to be men?  By walking around the Y locker room with a towel over your shoulder?  Gross.  Dude, their are kids in there.  Wrap it up, OK?

What I really don't get is why do really old straight men love hanging out in sports locker rooms?  What is the deal with their love of the lounge?  They're not gay, but somehow, this is the only place that they can be at ease, surrounded by younger, and fitter men.  I just don't get it?

I mean if nothing else of the selfie era, we know that straight, gay and bi men LOVE posing for selfies in the sports locker room.  But the straight male dance of superiority in locker rooms has an erotic edge to it.  Like bull elephants, trying to out flex, out pose and out impress one and other, the whole thing becomes comic when a scrawny little guy walks in with the biggest dick in the world.  And at that point, everyone in the room knows that their muscles no longer matter.  Their perfect tans mean nothing.

The little insecure guy with the porn dick just won the show and tell.