Nakedness

You know what I don’t do at my gym? Shower. It doesn’t seem to make any sense. I go straight home after class, and it seems silly to lug all kinds of shower stuff down the block and back. Lately though I’ve been wondering if in showering at home I am missing out on a valuable chance for cross-cultural connection.

This is what happens: a bunch of us women go to a class. The music is loud. Someone tells us what to do over a speaker-system. We’re all out of breath and sweaty. Then we go back to the locker room. I put on a lot of clothes: fleece pants, a sweatshirt, a hat, a scarf, my coat. I hunt around for my umbrella. Meanwhile, everyone else is undressing. As I’m leaving, people are standing around either naked or in their underwear, and it’s not like in locker rooms I’ve been in the US, with a general sense of self-consciousness and urgency. Naked people sit on the benches; they lean against the lockers; they talk about the instructors, other classes they’ve been to, their friends who were too lazy to come to class. I guess eventually people go and shower in the little communal shower room, although people are generally still chatting when I finally locate my umbrella and go home (and am generally quite excited at the prospect of dinner and my slippers (Because apparently I'm a lot like that guy in Remains of the Day.)).

Obviously any self-respecting anthropologist would have been naked weeks ago. But what about me? Honestly, I’m not sure I can pull it off. Am I missing out though? What about issues of cultural understanding? Such a quandary.