The naked truth
I rented "The Sessions" to see Helen Hunt, an actor I've always found direct and compelling.
By now, most of you will at least know the plot: Mark, a disabled poet (John Hawkes) in Berkeley of the '80s, hires Cheryl (Hunt), a forthright, empathic sexual surrogate, to lose his virginity.
Though she spends much of the film at least partly nude, I was impressed more by the scene of Hunt's visit to a mikveh to prepare for her conversion to Judaism.
The attendant (Rhea Perlman), unaware of Cheryl's line of work, says, concerning the nudity required for the ritual cleansing, that many women are uncomfortable shedding their clothes. She adds, "This is your body; this is the body God crafted for you". Cheryl recalls showing Mark his body in a full-length mirror, and saying the same phrase.
Watching that, I recalled women I've seen who hide their bodies, especially as they age. At my gym, several older women disrobe beneath a rigged burka of towels. One hogs the single enclosed cubicle (where the scale is) to dress and perhaps scrapbook, for she is in there a mighty long time.
I've got flab, wrinkles and scars, but I figure, it's a locker room, not a runway. We're doing something where nudity outside the privacy of one's home is a natural part of the routine. OK, there isn't a long list of such places: change rooms, hot springs, skinny dips, nude yoga (kidding, but if you have, I want to know.)
And if you've participated in Vanessa Beecroft's tableaux vivants or Spencer Tunicks' fascinating installations featuring thousands of naked people, I'm curious about your volunteerism beyond the call of booty.
As a young girl, I was taught to cover carefully, but by my early thirties, years of dance and exercise classes diluted that shyness. (Note to the hyper-modest: If you drape yourself like a Christo project to get out of your soggy workout clothes, you just draw more eyes, because everyone wonders what you're hiding.)
Situationally modest now, I'll wrap a towel around my waist to apply makeup in a locker room but, at the all-women spa Body Blitz, where suggested attire is "swimsuit or birthday suit", I soak blissfully in the buff (and, I notice, the minority). Once, I was reprimanded at a Y for sitting in the women's sauna without my suit on! (I had complied with all posted requirements and was on my towel.) Young Women Clothed Always?
I entreat post-50 women to maintain an au naturel presence, same as you ever did. Pick your time and place and don't pass the buck, naked.
This is the body crafted for you.
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| Photo: 20th Century Fox |
Though she spends much of the film at least partly nude, I was impressed more by the scene of Hunt's visit to a mikveh to prepare for her conversion to Judaism.
The attendant (Rhea Perlman), unaware of Cheryl's line of work, says, concerning the nudity required for the ritual cleansing, that many women are uncomfortable shedding their clothes. She adds, "This is your body; this is the body God crafted for you". Cheryl recalls showing Mark his body in a full-length mirror, and saying the same phrase.
Watching that, I recalled women I've seen who hide their bodies, especially as they age. At my gym, several older women disrobe beneath a rigged burka of towels. One hogs the single enclosed cubicle (where the scale is) to dress and perhaps scrapbook, for she is in there a mighty long time.
I've got flab, wrinkles and scars, but I figure, it's a locker room, not a runway. We're doing something where nudity outside the privacy of one's home is a natural part of the routine. OK, there isn't a long list of such places: change rooms, hot springs, skinny dips, nude yoga (kidding, but if you have, I want to know.)
And if you've participated in Vanessa Beecroft's tableaux vivants or Spencer Tunicks' fascinating installations featuring thousands of naked people, I'm curious about your volunteerism beyond the call of booty.
 |
| Image: Spencer Tunick installation |
As a young girl, I was taught to cover carefully, but by my early thirties, years of dance and exercise classes diluted that shyness. (Note to the hyper-modest: If you drape yourself like a Christo project to get out of your soggy workout clothes, you just draw more eyes, because everyone wonders what you're hiding.)
Situationally modest now, I'll wrap a towel around my waist to apply makeup in a locker room but, at the all-women spa Body Blitz, where suggested attire is "swimsuit or birthday suit", I soak blissfully in the buff (and, I notice, the minority). Once, I was reprimanded at a Y for sitting in the women's sauna without my suit on! (I had complied with all posted requirements and was on my towel.) Young Women Clothed Always?
I entreat post-50 women to maintain an au naturel presence, same as you ever did. Pick your time and place and don't pass the buck, naked.
This is the body crafted for you.
Comments
At the Post Ranch Inn in BIg Sur, I was completely and utterly shocked that people were naked in the hot tub, I found it a bit uncivilised but then we Brits aren't really known for getting our kit off and I do indeed change in the cubicle at the gym 5 mornings a week - door locked, of purse. I like my body but it's private.
And yes, if finally a woman wants to go nakeder, that can be a freeing venture.
Bourbon: I am not suggesting you or any woman abandon her habits; if you want to stay covered it's your business. But one day, since you love California, you might find yourself in a hot tub without layers of fabric- and it's divine! I urge you to try it, perhaps around people you don;t know (except your partner), that's less inhibiting than being naked around your friends.
cgk: One of my favourite things, ever! I'm doing this as long as I'm upright.
Susan: Most of my hot tubs with strangers have been at Esalen. The first foray to the baths was a little nervewracking but after ten minutes I was hooked for life.
Pseu: That's so true, being among bodies of all shapes and sizes a moving experience- here we all are, and it's no big deal
Mme: Wonderful observation. Respect for an elder's modesty is extremely important yet in health care delivery there is some inevitable loss. Most providers I have worked with, like those who cared for my mother, were kind and sensitive.
When I was younger it was no big deal and I posed nude as I was an art student. No desire to do it nowadays. I have absolutely no moral qualms about nudism, on the contrary. It is fine if people want to do it, but nobody should be forced to.
And to add one more thing, having had the privilege of massaging cream into my 82-year-old mother's skin, her cancer-gnawed body that bore myself and all my siblings, I must say that bodies are beautiful in all guises and we really would benefit from recognizing that while we still have them. . .
I have no qualms about getting naked in a change room but I do dress and undress rather quickly!
Perhaps I need to get over this, I do agree that the body God gave me is fine, (more than fine, beautiful in it's way) but it's hard to overcome cultural conditioning.
Susan - I'll say hello next time!
I'm curious about one other thing. Aside from skinnydipping a few times during my college years, I am much more likely to avail myself of a san clothing hot tub now, whereas I was much more modest as a young woman (who had a much better looking body than now.) Perhaps some of my original cultural conditioning has worn off by age 61.
Really fascinating post Duchesse.
If someone wishes total privacy, there are some women-only gyms that have cubicles for changing, but the last two gyms I've belonged to have the usual locker room setup. If you have a moment to plan, it is not one wishes, it is never necessary to be totally naked.
Kathy: Different locales have different customs and sometimes it's great to "go native"- but
only when one is ready.
materfamilas: The soft cover of darkness makes nudity less, well "nude", especially if one is stretching out of the comfort zone. Stripping off at a pool party in front of clothed staff would feel weird, even exhibitionistic.
Susan: I have seen people in suits in the baths @ Esalen, but I am proud of, and remembering my friend Kathy, whose double mastectomy never kept her from enjoying them, like nearly everyone else, in the buff.
hostess: The heat levels can sometimes be adjusted :)
Gretchen:
re the pains some women take to cover, I suspect the main reason is their belief that their body is ugly, and/or fear that others will find it so. So many claims to virtue are just masks for our imagined inadequacies. I wonder, if I could wave a wand and say "Your body is now the most exquisite in the world" how many would still be so reluctant.
I know a woman who will not reveal her body even in the most typical circumstances; she has enduring trauma from sexual abuse. That is an entirely different situation.
Northmoon: It is possible to confront the conditioning but not necessary. As I keep saying, I'm not advocating nudity outside one's comfort zone, rather, I'am asking for us to not regress as we age, out of mourning for losing youthful attributes.
Bourbon: That lone cubicle in my gym is where the scale is! Apparently privacy in weighing is thought to be more sensitive and fraught than offering a glimpse of flesh.
When I studied dance in London there was, in all the studios, one big communal women's change room (usually drafty and grotty) but they may have improved those places in the 30 years since I did that.
Susan@ 11:37: Either we have now realized that the dire things our mothers worried about never happened or they •did• and we found that they were fun!
Anon@12:00- Sometimes the actual facility has its own culture, like a micro-environment.
Bourbon: Your comment reminded me of Goa, where on the same beach I saw Indian women swimming in saris and topless Russian women (the bottoms were exceedingly tiny too). I like •designated• nude beaches- then you know what you're in for and can choose accordingly.
Swedes have become more modest over the years (I blame women´s magazines and porn, putting pressure on everyone to look perfect), and it´s been a long time since I visited a bath house sauna, but I´m pretty sure you´d still be reprimanded for wearing a swimsuit in one. You are supposed to enter the sauna thorougly cleansed of all dirty, chlorined pool water. I have been in gender-separated and mixed saunas, I found it no different.
I really wish this was a matter of hygiene, rather than morals or aesthetics.
C.
Viktoria; When I was 16, in the mid-60s, the Swedish exchange student, who came to our small Midwestern town about gave us a heart attack when she began to casually change into her suit in the open, on the beach. "You can't do that here", we told her.
Yes; I find the approach of that Y to be unhygienic too, as well as removing all pleasure from the experience.
Gauss: Being naked around a mixed group of strangers is still initially unsettling for me (e.g. the hot springs), though I will do it, but I'm at ease around women.
C.: So evocative! I liked being in the natural hot springs, too, feeling like a seal on rocks. Swimming nude in a pool is not as transcendent- but can still feel great.
Elder men sitting around naked and talking is a convention of steam rooms (the "schvitz"), so perhaps they have moved the steam room behaviour to the locker room benches.
Raven: Heck I'd even take 30!
I, BTW, just can't be bothered. Sometimes I would worry I was offending people by undressing by my locker, untoweled, but it is just so much work to bring extra cloth to the task;)
I venture it is not "to avoid offending" anyone; I think it's fear of not looking airbrushed-perfect.
Marilyn: Is that due to the prevalence of porn? When I recall life in the 60s and 70s (mine, anyway), porn was of course around but at a remove. A person had to seek it out. Or is that simplistic?
So I stopped using the pool there.
Would you be ready to explain to your daughter?
G
G,: You damn betcha, just as I would any surgery that resulted in a body alteration.
I'm not saying I think you should uncover, that would be up to you. In you shoes, some days I would not be willing to be the teachable moment. But I hope you use that pool.
lagatta: Hammams, among the most delicious experiences of life! The one I visit most often, at the Grand Mosque of Paris, requires bottoms. I've never been to one in the Mid East.
My friend Mar speaks fondly of a Ukrainian women's steam bath in Winnipeg, where the women bring treats to share and play cards. (Or maybe it is women's night at the steam bath.) There it is naked or towel-toga but she said "We got over our shyness pretty fast b/c who wants to sweat into a towel?"
Hammams are a powerful woman-bonding communal experience; do you know if there are any here?
The Grande Mosque of Paris is very welcoming to non-Muslims as long as they accept the house rules. Not all mosques might be so welcoming.
Heading off to Earth Day!
When I told my younger, marathon-running, and very fit sister about my experience, she said that she hadn't dared to take off her undies when she visited the same hammam, and that she was sorry she hadn't!