Changing Rooms
Throughout primary school, boys and girls have always changed for PE in the classroom, standing next to each other at our desks. In the early years, we didn’t even change into kits - we just simply stripped down to our vests and underpants, and headed to the school hall to pretend to be trees and elephants and the like. But at some point during Year 6, the girls suddenly become self-conscious of their bodies, and are uncomfortable changing right next to the boys of the class. It begins when one girl asks the teacher if she’s allowed to undress in the book corner, which offers screens in the form of bookshelves. The teacher permits her. Over the course of a couple of weeks, the rest of the girls follow suit, and now, for the purpose of PE, the book corner becomes the girls’ makeshift changing room.
This gets under the skin of some of the boys in the class. They seem to be annoyed that the girls have the audacity to request some privacy when undressing. The boys purposefully stand as close to the book corner as possible in order to undermine the girls’ efforts. They say things like: “You’re so immature - no one cares about your pants. Why do you think everyone wants to watch you change?” They do this whilst staring directly into the book corner to watch the girls change. The teacher orders them away, but the girls now take extra measures: whenever it is PE time, they all retreat to the book corner, and one of them will stand at the entrance holding up a stretched blanket whilst her friends shuffle into their kits. When a girl is ready, she will then relieve the book corner bouncer of her duties so that she can get changed. All the while boys will be muttering under their breath about how “pathetic” and the girls are. This continues throughout the rest of the school year.
In Year 7, now in secondary school, things are different. The gym hall has dedicated adjacent changing rooms, separated by boys and girls. Now with a space of their own, and perhaps finally respecting and understanding the girls’ right for privacy, the boys no longer harass them. No more snide comments are ever made, and no boy attempts to peek into the girls’ changing room. Until.
Halfway through Year 7, our usual PE teacher leaves the school, and the head of the PE department, Mr Purdy, becomes our new teacher [author’s note - I have changed his name, for reasons that will soon become clear]. Mr Purdy is a grumpy, late-middle-aged man with a heavy limp. He seems to have a deep contempt for everything the teaching life has to offer, especially the children. Our only experience of him so far is the times he has been on playground monitor duty - he will patrol the tarmac with his uneven gait and a deep frown, barking out detention orders for the slightest infraction of the rules. Our class collectively groans when we learn he is to become our new PE teacher, but our first lesson is actually fine - fun, in fact. We gather in the gym hall where he instructs us to set up the trampolines. We line up to take turns free bouncing for one minute each, whilst Mr Purdy just sits on a bench off to the side, watching us. He’s docile, and not as mean-spirited as we had feared, and we have a fun PE session.
After class, the boys and girls head into the changing rooms to get back into our school uniforms, before breaking for lunch. Once I’m dressed, I linger outside the gym block, waiting for my girl friends to hurry up and finish getting dressed so we can go and play. When they eventually emerge, they are in an agitated state, talking excitedly amongst themselves. I ask what’s bothering them, and they say that Mr Purdy just walked straight through the girls’ changing room, right as they were getting dressed. I pull a doubtful face, but they insist it’s true. “Exactly when we were all standing around in our bra and knickers! It was well embarrassing!” I still struggle to believe it: “But why would he do that? Did he say anything?” They shake their heads: “No. He just opened the door and walked straight through to the other side. And we were all too shocked to say anything to him - we were too busy trying to cover ourselves.” I suggest that maybe he didn’t realise he was in the girls’ changing room, then once he did realise, he was also really embarrassed and got out as quickly as he could. They are not convinced. “He’s just a pervert, like all boys.”
And their concerns are not unfounded, for the same thing happens the following week. After the session, whilst both boys and girls are changing back into their uniforms, he decides to walk through the girls’ room. “This time we shouted at him to get out,” they tell me afterward, “but he just said ‘Don’t mind me, girls’! And I swear he eyed me up and down - he’s so creepy!” The girls all vote to put an end to this behaviour instantly, and go and report him to our form tutor. I join them as they forgo their lunch break to go and knock on the staffroom door to tell all to our form tutor. Our tutor listens silently, with a concerned look on her face. Once the girls have finished their breathless retelling of events, our tutor gives a curt nod. “You’ve done the absolute correct thing in coming to me, girls. Don’t worry, I’ll handle this.”
Over our late and slightly cold lunch, we gossip excitedly about how he’s sure to be fired. “I bet that’s why he lets us play on the trampoline,” one girl posits, “just so he can watch our boobs and bums bounce around. He is such a perv - he should be called Pervy Purdy instead.” Another of my friends playfully throws a french fry in my direction: “You’re so lucky that you’re a boy and don’t have to deal with this.” I give the awkward shrug of the compassionate privileged.
The next morning, our form tutor asks the girls to remain behind whilst the boys continue onto the first lesson of the day. I impatiently listen to our History teacher go on about history, waiting to see what news the girls will bring. But when they come to the class fifteen minutes later, their faces tell me it’s not good news. I have to further wait until History is dismissed before I can catch up on the gossip. “It’s complete bullshit! He’s just allowed to perv on us! Apparently there’s a policy that Year 7 and 8 students aren’t allowed to be unsupervised for more than 10 minutes at a time, so it’s his duty to check in on us!”
“But he never checks in on the boys,” I say.
“That’s what we said! But Miss said that he said that we girls ‘dilly-dally’ and waste time messing about, so he has to give us warnings.”
“But that’s not true. He hasn’t given you a warning for…dilly-dallying.”
“We know! He’s such a fucking liar. He’s a pervert and a creep, and we know it, and he knows, and she knows it!”
“So what now?”
“Nothing. You could tell she doesn’t believe him, but there’s nothing she can do. She just advised us to get dressed as quickly as possible. The whole thing is disgusting!”
And it continues to happen. Pervy Purdy continues to walk through the girls’ changing room. At first they shout at him, and some even call him Pervy Purdy to his face, but once he starts handing out detentions, they stop immediately. None of the girls want to be alone in detention with him. And so they revert to developing ways of protecting themselves. They master the art of exchanging shorts for trousers in split-seconds; they form circles around each other, shielding the girl in the middle from sight; they wear their school uniforms over their PE kits and then change properly in the girls’ toilets at lunch; they forge notes from their parents asking to be excused from PE due to “women’s issues”. The girls try to keep as far away from him as possible, and live under the constant threat of his wandering eyes, all throughout the whole of Year 7, and then Year 8 too. In Year 9, we get a new PE teacher, Mr Campbell from Australia. He is much younger, and is actually athletic. He has thick biceps, tanned skin, and floppy hair like Leonardo diCaprio in Titanic. The girls all swoon over him, and now look forward to PE lessons. “He doesn’t come into our changing room,” they say. “Unfortunately.”