Ever since Adam and Eve bit into the apple, looked down and gasped at their naked bits, man has shied away from nudity and sought forever to cover himself in garments. Without clothes he feels somewhat embarrassed, as if exposing something that would give himself away to others. Long has this characteristic woven itself into Western society, so often crossing paths with sexuality. But somewhere along the way, man, or Finnish man at least, dug up the notion of the sauna. And while today there are many social channels promoting a fearless sort of nudity (Germany certainly isn’t short of them), none seems to do it with quite such whole-hearted abandon as the sauna. Its almost like we’ve found a return to paradise, albeit temporary.
This allusion to an idyllic place is hardly one that strikes the anxious sauna first-timer. The prospect of complete nudity, everything told, in front of strangers who may well be the opposite sex can be alarming. Most of all, the mind cannot separate the sauna from sex. A foggy blur of sweaty bums, breasts and penises spring up and stand like blockades to objective judgment. I twitched every time my girlfriend set the idea upon me. ‘But what if…’
And then I was there and all the fog cleared (the steam sauna apart). This was like a fancy dress party. Turn up in normal clothes and you feel completely ridiculous compared to the person smoking a cigarette in the hippo outfit. Here of course, it was absurd to wear any clothes. Nudity was the norm, unremarkable. Bums there were, but these were as common as a pair of jeans on the street. Sexuality was a non-issue. Besides, does the appeal of sex not find its most potent form in the promise of what is hidden rather than the full exposé itself?
Something didn’t seem right. Something that I took for granted everyday, that I did as naturally as I blink and breathe. Ah yes, judgment! Categorising people that you see everyday and fitting them into the banal social pools that before long, becomes reflex. I couldn’t place the guy with long hair and a small tattoo over there on the far bench. Hair, and sometimes a tattoo, are all one has to go on. Long Hair might be a Harley-Davison character. But there was no moustache. Is he a grunge figure then?
This was the sauna guessing game. More pertinent however was the unearthly and refreshing neutrality of it all. It is said that early Finnish traditions saw the sauna as a welcome break to the great gender divide. In work and leisure, man and women had separate roles, but in the sauna everyone rolled up together. Similarly, it seems that some of our social divisions evaporate in the heat of the sauna.
Sure enough, I met Long Hair shortly before we left the place. Here in the changing rooms we underwent a metamorphosis back into society’s labels, namely clothes. And I felt mildly ashamed. Now, getting dressed and covering up all those bits I had never wanted to expose in the first place, there was shame! I was giving myself away to others. I put on a hoodie, so I was a skater-dude presumably. All around me people were doing the same. For the last three hours these people had passed me here and there in the sauna, and I knew them only in their naked guise. Now that they suddenly wore clothes it was strange. Their bums were concealed but they were altogether exposed.
Some of my fellow saunerers turned out in the clothes I had imagined for them. But Long Hair, brandishing a clean-cut suit with a pink shirt underneath, and no sign of a leather outfit, came out of the blue. And then we slid back into the ‘real’ world, where nudity was a virtual sin, where the apple had been bitten.
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