Certainly seems odd that girls could wear swimsuits. Odd too that adult males could use swimtrunks at the same time male youths couldn't (so it didn't have anything to do with, "we just cleaned the pool").
Much as the notion of photographing countless people in the nude at hospitals and universities for somotyping stopped. Some of those college archives still exist and some have been destroyed. They are reputed to include such people as GHW Bush and Hillary Clinton in the buff from their college days. All in the name of science, personal liberty be damned.
Oh great! Thanks for that wonderful mental picture while I'm eating lunch. {;-(
Besides, women are naturally more modest than men. We have a hot tub in the locker room at our health club, which is meant to be used naked. I have only seen it being used about three times since I have been a member. My husband says the men use theirs all the time.
GHW Bush with naked “posture” photographs at Yale, possibly— I don’t know when the practice started. GW Bush, definitely. During his era and beyond, stopping when Yale accepted female undergrads. Hillary, definitely NOT. She was undergrad at Wellesley College and Yale didn’t require nude physicals of grad students.
The photographs were supposedly destroyed, along with the negatives, but they turned up years later in the possession of a junior faculty member of Smith College for women, where he was selling them to the girls there for a little side income.
The photography was handled by steam room staff at Payne Whitney gym, one major center of homosexual activity. Hygiene certainly was a cover, it makes no logical sense whatsoever to apply it only to male swimmers, so you are right.