Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

michael scuffil wrote:a certain sort of lesbian attachment was so normal and accepted as to be in practice institutionalized/ritualized.

I can understand that, i think with females to show afection is just an everyday thing. I dont think twice when out somewhere say a bar with a good girlie friend to grab their hand and hold it so we dont loose each other! Thats just a concern for each other. Im sure many others would agree or do the same

absolutely. Everyone needs someone to love and if there is no-one of the opposite sex then transference is a a well known psychological phenomenon. However it may not be physical among women.

There is another psychological saying (pace my daughter's Cosmopolitan that I was reading yesterday), "Women have sex as a way of declaring love, men declare love as a way of obtaining sex"

WOW !

This thread is getting very interesting !

I'm still lost in the fog here.

Victorian public conveniences didn't have doorless toilet cubicles in them, presumably because it was realised that people want privacy when they're perched on the pot.

So are we saying that doorless toilets etc. existed at CH to stop boys from engaging in bloke-on-bloke nookie? Or did they exist to facilitate bloke-on-bloke nookie?

Mind you, go back to the pre-World War One era and boys all seem to have skinny-dipped together in the local swimming hole.

You've started a thread based on the premise that buildings determine sexual orientation. You didn't actually want serious debate about this did you?
They're just toilets.

englishangel wrote:absolutely. Everyone needs someone to love and if there is no-one of the opposite sex then transference is a a well known psychological phenomenon. However it may not be physical among women.

There is another psychological saying (pace my daughter's Cosmopolitan that I was reading yesterday), "Women have sex as a way of declaring love, men declare love as a way of obtaining sex"

Is a manifestation of this "being cracked on somebody" that I've read about on Hertford threads?

Yes

See, what I don't get is that Victorian adults seem to have qualified for toilets with doors and swimming-pool cubicles with curtains, while Victorian kids didn't qualify for either.

What was the thinking behind it?

One has to assume that boys at CH were meant to be improved in some way by a total lack of privacy....but in what way exactly?

I've never bought the idea that desensitising people improves them, any more than f**king them up in the head improves them.

And as for doorless toilets being intended to stop kids getting up to naughty things, surely it'd only work if teachers neverendingly patrolled the toilets, staring in at anyone who was using them. Which is a seriously weird concept, not to say sick-in-the-head.

Almost as weird as rugby, in fact.

Spoonbill wrote:desensitising

Is that what you call the effect of someone repeating a point over and over and over and over again?

Spoonbill wrote:See, what I don't get is that Victorian adults seem to have qualified for toilets with doors and swimming-pool cubicles with curtains, while Victorian kids didn't qualify for either.

Time for bed in The Great Southern Land, but first this adult will partake of her doorless toilet facilities (long story involving me creating a large enough hole to climb through after locking myself in during the early hours of one Sunday morning, and finally getting around to moving the offending/offended article to the carport). I will then shove the cats off my pillow and hopefully leap into bed with sufficient alacrity that my head reaches the pillow before they regroup. With luck, at some time during what's left of the night, Bernietheboxer will brave said cats, particularly Swish of whom he is mightily respectful, and curl around my feet to keep them warm.

CH has soooooooooooooooooooo much to answer for

When I was at CH, and that was half a century ago, the toilets that we actually used had doors. True, they had no locks, but there were recognized ways of indicating they were occupied (e.g. putting your coat over the door) and this was universally respected. This whole thing is a complete red herring.

But toilets and bathrooms are two totally different matters. It is true of course that our baths, showers (not that ours worked), trough etc. were entirely public, but that just makes them like present-day saunas, the showers in swimming baths, sports clubs or collieries, or traditional baths in Japan. Until quite recently this was considered perfectly normal in schools.

However, that the same communal bath was used by boys aged 11 - 18 (at once) was, I agree, pushing it a bit (given that pretty boys were, for many, substitute girls) and I think it was a factor in the discussion that led to senior and junior houses.

Still, the novelty or frisson or whatever quickly wears off. German saunas, for example, are mostly mixed and nakedness is de rigueur, and no one thinks of them as louche in any way. The same is true of clothing-optional beaches (which again are almost the rule here in Germany).

Unless my memory is playing tricks it was only the "lav end" bog that didn't have a door and the pan was out of view behind a partition. The downstairs bogs all had doors from 65 onwards. I can't speak about before the changing rooms, toilets and "Quiet Rooms" were built.

Spoony is milking this one I think

Have been discussing this with my sons, (we have a very broad-minded household) and older son said that the latrines in the army are just seats in a room where everyone gathers after a meal to continue their conversations. Also until very recently football teams all shared a bath and it was actually stopped to prevent the spread of HIV.

A propos the men v women thing. #1 son also said that on Frasier, his (Frasier's) producer Ros says "Don't tell me you've never used sex to get what you want?" his reply " I am a man, sex IS what I want."

This is a really dumbass thread, it has to be said. So was CH designed to be gay?

Well I sure as hell hope so! It did wonders for me!

If one or two heteros left with doubts about there sexuality, then hey, that's life. There are countless gays, men and women, who left CH after a tough time living in a so-called completely heterosexual environment, more sure and secure about their sexuality, without any help from the establishment. If anything, the school should be sued for not providing positive gay role models, education on the contribution of gays to the history of the world, safe sex, the joy of being one's self, self-esteem, interior design, and all good things that make this life worth living.

If anything, CH isn't gay enough, but then, you can't have everything. (But what you can have, grasp it, and don't let it go!)

normal wrote:This is a really dumbass thread, it has to be said. So was CH designed to be gay?

Well I sure as hell hope so! It did wonders for me!

Nicely put