In my recent blog about Roman Baths in Britain and beyond, I wrote about how communal baths would be a place of both relaxation and socialization for the ancient Romans.
Fagan explores how modern forms of public bathing still exist today amongst the Finns, who frequent saunas with their friends and families, as well as the Islamic Hammams, which also allow a space for women to interact with one another in a predominantly female space.
My own experience with public baths came when I was interrailing through Europe with my friends in summer 2018 and we spent a few days in Budapest, Hungary. If you didn't know, Budapest is famous for its Thermal Baths. They're not Roman baths, necessarily, the one we went to was built in 1913, and was distinctly neo-baroque in design. Nevertheless, it was the closest I've ever been to the Ancient Roman bathing practice, and it was brilliant. Most of us said it was the highlight of our few days in Budapest, with some saying it was the highlight of our whole trip.
There were outdoor, thermal pools - think having a bath with warm water that never gets cold, except its a giant pool and you're swimming around with your friends. There were saunas, with varying degrees of heat, (me and my friend lasted about 20 seconds in the hottest one before scampering off.) There were steamrooms, ice baths and ordinary pools that had aqua-aerobics class too. In short, it was great experience, and unlike anything I've really seen before. I'd always thought saunas were places for prideful old men and women who had long eroded their self-consciousness. Admirable, yes, but in a very distant, 'good for them' sort of way.
My 'oma', or Dutch grandmother, would always try get me to go to the Sauna with her, but I would always say no. To her, it was like asking me to play tennis, or go to the supermarket, saunas are quite popular in Holland. Yet the prospect of being surrounded with naked men and women completely in the nude was absolutely baffling, I could barely change in the changing rooms at my school without feeling self-conscious, let alone sit naked on a bench with strangers.
I can say what I want about how much I enjoyed the Budapest baths, but I was traipsing around in swimsuits like it was community pool, and no one was walking around in the nude or anything, even in the saunas. What is it about nakedness that scares us so much? It must be an element of evolutionary instinct, if you really want to you can trace it back to the birth of sin too. But why do we attach such shame to our own bodies?
Susan Kraus has a really good travel blog about her trip to Germany and the town of Baden-Baden, where public 'bathing' is a quiet, deliberate ritual, and also, a naked one too. She does mention how it is easy to get naked with strangers, but other than that, she soon gets used to nakedness:
Can the Romans conception towards nudity help us frame our own idea of it in our own lives? If Kraus was able to re-think her own ideas of shame and nakedness by going abroad and experiencing it in another country, why can't we do the same with the cultures that have come before us? In Bill Beck's Eidolon article on 'The Measure of The Man', in which he explores Classical penises in Classical Art and our own modern fragility, he makes a point that resonated with me:
What’s weird is how sensitive (we think) we are to the role of ideology in shaping the aesthetics of others and how unreflective we are about its role in shaping ours.
We are products of numerous ideologies in our lives, be it the religion of capitalistic growth or that of catholic conservatism. Only in examining how these ideologies have influenced our lives and continue to do so, can we hope to move forward with new ideas and new ideologies.
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