In praise of the naked spa

A Mutually-Assured Body Acceptance Zone.

I originally published this post about a year ago for paid subscribers only. But, I just went to a spa again yesterday and felt moved to share this piece with all of you (especially because there are now over 2,600 more of you here since it was last posted). Let me know what you think! Check out my full archive, and please subscribe — I’m leaving everything free and open to all for the next couple months, but if you’d like to support this independent, one-woman show, feel free to essentially “tip” me with a paid subscription of $5/month or $50/year.

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Let’s get into getting naked in (sort of ) public:

I’ll say this at the top: The kind of place I’m recommending — typically a Korean spa, where you fully disrobe in separate men’s and women’s sections to use various hot tubs and pools — can be incredibly fraught for trans or non-binary people, for reasons Arabelle Sicardi gets into here.

Some spas explicitly state that they are inclusive in this regard — like Wi Spa in Los Angeles, which was was at the center of anti-trans protests in 2021 — but those seem to be in the minority. I wish this weren’t the case. My recommendation springs from the fact that I can use the naked spa with no problems because I’m a cis woman.

The very reason I’m recommending the naked spa and wish everyone could comfortably visit one is because the experience has been transcendent for me, body image-wise. Never have I felt more comfortable with my own body than when I’m chilling in a whirlpool surrounded by dozens of other iterations of imperfect human shapes. In the naked spa, everyone has entered into a kind of Mutually-Assured Body Acceptance Zone. After all, you can’t really be weird about someone else’s body when you’re sitting there with your junk out, too.

In the naked spa you see — you don’t gawk, of course, but you do see — every possible breast shape. No one has breasts that are both gravity-defying and perfectly spherical. Everyone does different things with their pubes (there was a time when I stressed over what I was “supposed to do” with my pubes, lol). People jiggle all over when they walk; doesn’t matter how little body fat they have, something’s jiggling. People have skin discolorations and bacne and assne and pockmarks and “hip dips” and “love handles” and stretch marks and areolae of countless shapes, sizes, and colors. Most people’s thighs touch. Maybe one person out of a hundred has a totally flat stomach. More people than I would have imagined have belly buttons that are kind of “frowny,” like mine. Absolutely no one looks like an Instagram model. And, honey: Everyone has some cellulite.

In the naked spa, bodies become mundane. I wrote in this piece about my latest body image mantra that when I stared at a picture of my body for a long time, my “flaws” seemed to fade away and I wondered what the hell I thought the big deal was 10 minutes prior. Such is the power of the naked spa, where sagging and protruding and discoloration and asymmetry are so commonplace that they cease to earn notice or meaning. The naked spa reminded me that bodies are only rather bland collections of data — cells and genes and molecules conspire to create us and give us shape and make us the organisms we are and wow, isn’t it so ridiculous that we fret over alleged flaws when flaws are just what happens when you put a bunch of organisms together in a room?

How often do most people see an array of other adults’ totally naked bodies? Where does that happen for most of us? In movies and shows featuring professionally hot people? In porn? Is this maybe the reason you feel like everyone but you has a pert, poreless body with a gravity-defying ass and a particular type of genital landscape? Is this maybe why you think your body is weird? That is a fiction created by and perpetuated within the unreality of media. As they say, maybe you need to touch grass, which here means: Take off your clothes and get in a whirlpool.

The naked spa did not fix me. It did not keep me from scrutinizing or being annoyed by my body parts ever again. But every time I do something I deem a body image boost, I’m cultivating and collecting more moments of feeling comfortable in my body at any given time. I’m just trying to make that pile of moments bigger.

My favorite part of the naked spa is the cold plunge. On my first visit there, I saved it for last. I had spent hours sweating in saunas and letting jets of warm water beat the tension out of my traps. I had floated in the main pool until the water and the air and my skin were all the same temperature. There is no other kind of physical relaxation like it. There were times I forgot I had a body.

Then I braced myself and charged into the cold plunge: Every muscle tense, a last gasp caught in my throat, a galaxy of goosebumps, the rush of every blood cell. I remembered I have a body. It’s part of me. It is me. It responds, it adapts, it knows exactly what to do. It is an agent of pleasure when I let it be. How could I ever find it a source of shame? It’s not mundane, actually — it’s sublime.

With that I pulled it, shivering and electrified, out of the water and back out into the world.