Double standard in pediatric offices - Input?

Remember, folks: friends don't let friends threadjack. When I first mentioned that this thread had spun off into something else, I hadn't seen anything yet.

A) I did NOT bring up the counter theory, YOU did.

I was giving the alternative to the notion/idea/theory that things change because a majority of people want them to change.

And that last notion did come up first.

Nudity went away because it was time for it to go away. Public opinion/desires changed and swung to the prudish side. It’s gone because people don’t want it

I contend that nudity has become less accepted because a loud vocal minority ended up forcing its opinion on a majority that probably did not care one way or the other. It is like the spanking debate on other threads. Spanking was considered normal behavior for parents until a vocal minority began protesting and managed to enact its opinions into legislation. Which many people, if I read here correctly, still feel is unjust and unwarranted.

So: minority forcing its opinions on a majority. This happens more than is supposed to happen,

@agracier if you read the Wikipedia article that @ILuvLadyDocs based most of his post off of, you’ll see that in the US at least, title IX required the enactment of equal programs for women in public school athletics. For cost reasons, the schools decided to make programs such as gym co-educational vs running 2 separate programs. Prudish agitation had little to do with it. Hell, according to the sources cited in that article, nude swimming came about and lasted as long as it did through a desire on the part of the schools not to have to pay for swimsuits for the students. It’s always been a money issue.

Secondarily, if, as you say, the majority simply don’t care, than weren’t the pro-nude people pushing THEIR minority opinion on the majority?

Finally, as I contended below, if there was an actual demand for nude swimming, there would be private clubs supporting it.

Nudity went away because it was time for it to go away.

LOL. I don't even know what to do with that. Finger-wagging scolds have ALWAYS supposed that their time has come or is about to. It is always the idea of people who say this kind of thing that the tide of human events is on their side, when on even casual inspection it is something human and natural that they are railing against. It is the exact same mindset that leads to groups and movements with grandiose names like "Moral Majority" or "Silent Majority." They are not a majority, but they are remarkably maladjusted and noisy and manage to steer everyone's focus toward them as they insist "it's time" for them to decide what is right for everyone.

@JakeNewYork you’rereading way too much into that statement. I merely meant that if enough people supported nude swimming - or casual nudity for boys at the doctor, to bring this back on point, there would still be casual nudity. Whether or not a vocal minority was the driver, the plain fact is enough people either agreed with them or just didn’t care one way or another for it to happen. Ie it was ‘time’. At some point in the future it will come back. That’s the ‘trend’ theory in a nutshell. ‘History repeats’.

@JakeNewYork you’rereading way too much into that statement. I merely meant that if enough people supported nude swimming - or casual nudity for boys at the doctor, to bring this back on point, there would still be casual nudity. Whether or not a vocal minority was the driver, the plain fact is enough people either agreed with them or just didn’t care one way or another for it to happen. Ie it was ‘time’. At some point in the future it will come back. That’s the ‘trend’ theory in a nutshell. ‘History repeats’.

Maybe you are right and I should have looked for another way to interpret the sentence. There is no reason to not give you the benefit of the doubt. but this thread became way too soap-boxy. So, I will just un-follow it and not impede what the discussion has become. But, this is why the admins shouldn't admonish people for starting new threads with similar themes as existing ones - the old ones can go off the rails and earlier active participants drop off so that a few people can hash out their worldviews. Enjoy!

@JakeNewYork I personally DGAS about male nudity. You wanna swim nude, have at it. I do have an issue with enforced nudity, but I’m more than a little anarchic and have a problem with enforced anything.

I do think people suck in general and that giving adults unfettered access to naked minors is a bad idea. My ‘people suck’ attitude is also why I carry a gun.

I always started out the exam naked with the nurse present in the exam room with the door closed.

@Nurse_Phillips

There actually WERE private clubs that continued the tradition long after. Several former members said that the private clubs had far more relaxed codes of conduct than any school or fraternal organization. This led to some interesting things happening at the after-meets.

The girls and women were much more flirtatious, touchy, and physically affectionate towards the boys, while the boys were much more bold, confident, and aggressive ( in a non-threatening way ) when approaching and presenting themselves to the ladies. One poster compared it to the ancient human mating rituals of eons ago.

After some of the stories I read, I don't think that comparison was far off.

I think this should just keep on-topic, and I think nude swimming and things like it should be on other topics.

My ‘people suck’ attitude is also why I carry a gun.

Remind me never to sit on the opposite side of a debating panel with you ... ha ha ha

@agracier nah you’re safe as houses.

My wife and I were talking about our teen physical exams and even though she is 6 years older than me she was surprised that my brother and I were examined together ,with mom watching, and that we had to undress the moment we got into exam room. She was surprised that we saw each other's genitalia when she asked what my mother thought of all of this I said she told us before we got into the office 'you are boys and boys should not be shy about disrobing. Ive seen penises before and since you are my sons I want to see yours.'My wife had gotten gowns after age 12 and before that she only had to undress as needed. She was even more surprised to know that we would meet the doctor in either our briefs or once completely naked. The thing that surprised her the most was that there was no changing screen. In short the double standard has always been there

@agracier nah you’re safe as houses.

I know ...ha ha. I consider these discussions like courtroom cases: defense versus public prosecutor who afterwards go out for drinks together. I do like me a good historical/sociological discussion though. It would, however, drive my late wife up the walls if friends and I started one within her hearing range ...

My wife and I were talking about our teen physical exams and even though she is 6 years older than me she was surprised that my brother and I were examined together ,with mom watching, and that we had to undress the moment we got into exam room.

This resonates with me. My wife and I don’t talk about this very often. I do recall that the first time I mentioned that my physicals growing up were undress from pretty much the second I entered the room with no gown given she was floored. She is just under 2 years younger than I am, not much of an age gap. But she had no idea that boys exams were done so differently.

To get back on topic...

As a kid growing up in the sticks on a farm, I didn't have regularly scheduled appointments with a pediatrician. Shoot... we had the local doctor and his nurse. When we needed shots or any kind of physical for school, we generally went to his office. If we were sick or hurt, half of the time he'd come out to the farm.

The few times I remember going to see him, I was stripped to my tightie-whities. My mom was always in the room with me. After she died, it was one of my older sisters (there was quite an age difference between us).

It was never discussed what happened when my sisters went to see him or the nurse. But it was such a rare occurrence that my older brothers teased me and generally scared the shit out of me prior to any appointment ("he's going to stretch your pecker, it's so small" or "he'll do tests that can tell if you've been playing with yourself")

I think like Medfet person after his talk with his wife that the double standard at médical examinations between boys and girls was much more admitted in a recent past. It was admitted by boys and male teenagers because they might comply to adults instructions without complaining ( it would have been useless ) and also because they were so used to that difference that it seemed to them normal and it was also and even perhaps more admitted easily by mothers because they believed that adults figures of authorities were right if they told that boys did not need the same respect of privacy than girls.

And fathers did not intervene in so small issues in family life, they were not interested by such subjects and they had been submitted on the same double standard rules when they were young, so why change them ?

It is interesting that the wife of medfet person who had been a girl almost at the same time he was a boy discovered by that talk that boys might undress much more than girls and were sometimes examined together with a brother ( it could have been in front of a sister like it was often related since doctors did it often )

And I think also that it was not linked with the rule of swimming in the nude at school or Ymca because that rule was never applied in France and nevertheless there was a double standard towards nudity at physical examinations. Group exams in public were more often praticed with boys and so on..

About the change towards nudity, for boys I am not sure that it was what wanted the majority of persons, I believed more that it was a minority but most persons did not say anything about it!

To get back on topic...

As a kid growing up in the sticks on a farm, I didn't have regularly scheduled appointments with a pediatrician. Shoot... we had the local doctor and his nurse. When we needed shots or any kind of physical for school, we generally went to his office. If we were sick or hurt, half of the time he'd come out to the farm.

We weren't in the sticks but the rest of that was about right. What's a Pediatrician? I don't think there WAS such an animal in my town. The first time I went to a doctor when I wasn't sick was after taking my son to a doctor for something when he was about five years old. That doctor said we all should be getting annual checkups so I began going but he left town after a year and I liked the attitude of the doctor who came running into the ER when I went with my tenant who was having a stroke so he became my new doctor.

His physicals were always nude from the minute I walked in his exam room and lasted about a half hour, no gown. My wife did get a gown, I asked her. He retired the day the ACA went into effect and we have a new female doctor and we both get gowns.

She never had a pediatrician either but her family doctor lived a few houses from her family out at Fortieth and Plumb. For you city folk that's Forty miles from nowhere and Plumb out in the sticks.