I was about to spend a good
chunk of the next day naked.
And at midnight the night
before, I was woefully unprepared.
My body hair situation put
me on equal footing with a Neanderthal adolescent. Street urchins who had never known decent shoe the first had
prettier feet than I did. And
while I wasn’t overweight by any stretch, I was feeling a little large and in
charge from the one-woman cookie-eating contest I killed it in over the
holidays.
It wasn’t pretty.
I shaved my legs and
slathered my crotch with what smelled like floral scented battery acid. My feet would have to do.
For all this trouble you
would have thought that perhaps I was auditioning for the Sports Illustrated
Swimsuit Issue (where I’m sure I would have been directed to the Ooompa-Loompa
casting down the hall).
Or maybe I had been invited
to spend the day playing 50 Shades of Hamm, as in Jon.
Neither.
I was going to a Korean spa
for a birthday retreat. A
spa where the women’s pool/steam area was completely nude, and the co-ed saunas
were clothed. The birthday girl, a dear
friend, who like me was a retired dancer and mother of two, described the spa
as super relaxing. The nudity was
no big deal, she claimed. Somewhat
humiliating was changing in a dressing room with a bunch of in-their-prime
twenty-something dancers. Not
being at a spa with real women.
Still, I couldn’t show my
naked self looking like Chewbacca’s little sister.
On the
appointed day, I entered the ladies locker room. Bare lady bits
everywhere. Canya give a sista
some dark glasses? Maybe horse blinders? I stripped down, lathered up in
the open shower stalls, and got in the pool with my pals. It was the
ultimate female bonding - everyone relaxed in the water, seeing but not
judging, happy to chill.
I even
got a body scrub, one where you lie on a table and a woman scrubs you down like
a potato - half massage half scouring. She scrubbed EVERWHERE, but still
I felt like a child being bathed by her grandmother. I'd venture to say a
hummus tub worth of dead skin was sloughed off, and I got off the table with skin as
soft as my 2.5 year old.
In
addition to losing all that dead skin, I shed my negative views of the female body. I
saw skin old, young, smooth, tight, dimpled, loose, and tattooed in every hue.
I saw women whose bodies bore the topography of scars from childbirth and
mastectomy and other surgeries. I saw women who were leggy and coltish,
muscular, fleshy, pear-shaped, apple-shaped, statuesque, petite. There
were women who rocked it hirsute and who were cue ball hairless. There were
girls whose bodies had yet to change. It was the feminine continuum, and
I was part of the spectrum.
I like a
well toned, well groomed body as much as anyone. But we've gone way too
far over the cliff in the idea that only a narrow band of bodies are acceptable
or beautiful.
Or even
lovable.
What
makes our bodies beautiful is our ability to enjoy them. Our ability to
be free and happy in our own skin. With so much bombardment with the idea
that if we don’t look a certain way we are less than, a woman who is able to
walk around naked, without apology, just being who she is, is a wonderful
thing.
So I'm
not advocating joining a nudist colony, unless that's your bag, of course. If
you want to be more at ease with your naked body, being naked together with
other real women helps. Not the stealth dressing room kind of nakedness, where
people are tripping over themselves to conceal, but the
I've-got-nothing-to-hide kind of nakedness. The what-you-see-is-what-you-get
kind of nakedness.
It
redefines normal, and gives depth to beauty.
It is
what it is.
Looking
good naked is a great goal. But if
you never truly feel good naked, what's the point?
