The naked bathhouse
Exploding head emoji
The naked Swedish bathhouse sits at the end of a long, weathered, wooden pier, which juts out into the Øresund Straight, where the North Sea meets the Baltic.
The water is frigid, still, and uncannily clear all the way to the tawny sea floor. Occasional swirls of black seaweed sway beneath the surface. The sea is blue-black as it extends to the flat horizon.
Inside the naked bathhouse is, first, a café. There is cake. There are tiny mint-scented shampoos for purchase. There are people having an afternoon fika with perfect little cappuccinos. There are Swedish teenagers, the ubiquitous Swedish teenagers working the hot dog stands and coffee carts along this beach, each about a foot taller than me, laughing and joking and saying “My English is not so good,” when in fact it is impeccable as a starched sheet. I pay $7 for me and $7 for Elena for entry into the bathhouse. “Ready?” I ask, and my child, who has been happiest in the nude since she was a small child and who has to be reminded every so often to maybe not say “vagina” quite so loudly in the line at Panera and who cannot get enough of books about how babies are born, is as ready as she has ever been.
Then we open the door to the women’s side and her mind pretty much explodes on the spot. She becomes a physical, embodied version of the head-exploding emoji. There are naked ladies everywhere. There are naked ladies lounging on every available inch of wooden pier, face up, face down, on towels, reading, chatting, rubbing on lotion, eating lentils out of Tupperware. There are naked ladies walking around with everything just out there, wide open, getting sun and air, and there are naked ladies emerging dripping with sweat from the sauna and climbing up ladders out of the sea. There are bodies with hundreds of wrinkles and folds, bodies we never see, with shriveled boobs and big bellies, and there are the taut and tan and pert bodies of women who might be on magazine covers, and there are all manner of curves, shapes, complexions, dimensions, so many iterations of the human female form they all seem to blur together into one body.
We get naked in a wooden dressing room the size of a phone booth and then step outside. The bathhouse is made up of two open-air pools – essentially squares of ocean demarcated by raised wooden pathways – and two long piers at the end that lead to staircases, each of which plunges straight into the sea. Inside is a sauna with a wall of windows giving onto the Øresund Straight, as well as showers and mirrors and bathrooms and the like.
It is peak summer and there’s a heat wave – meaning it’s reached nearly 75 degrees in Malmö. The wooden platforms and pier are so packed with female flesh that there is almost nowhere to sit, so we lay one towel against the side of the furthest end of the pier, and then wait in line at the staircase to take a dip.
One by one women descend. It feels like a ritual. Some dive, some slip in with a little gasp or an “ah,” absorbed by the clear blue sea. They join the loose congregation of floating, swimming, female bodies. I go first and shriek in a definitive non-Swedish way at the ice-cold water. Elena is tougher: a swimmer at heart, in her element, she glides in like a seal pup. Together, we stroke out into the open ocean. It is delightful, a million icy slivers on the skin saying wake up wake up wake up. I realize I have never swum naked before. My body feels strangely light and airy, completely exposed to the sky, lapped by the salt water, open in a way it hasn’t been since childbirth.
Elena and I go under and dolphin around, rise and float on our backs. We laugh. A few women smile at us in a way that seems to say, See? It feels like liberation. The female bodies. The corporeal solidarity and togetherness. The wildness: salt and sun and cold and skin splayed, all of it, without restraint, without withholding. The total lack of inhibition climbing up the stairs, dripping, tingling, delighted.
Elena and I sunbathe together on our towel. It is quiet: the women who chat do so in muted tones, respecting the shared space. There is a sense of reverence. Our whole bodies, laid out, as if to say, okay, here we are. Here we are.
It feels like a prayer. So rarely do we pray of the body, from the body, as if the body itself were the highest expression of blessedness. Of course, we are animals: made of the earth, returning to it, but how much we forget this fact in the dogged, often inhuman machinery of our lives. How essential it was to remember it, in solidarity with so many other women, in a celebration of hips, bellies, boobs, bums, thighs, feet, eyelids, feeling and receiving without regard to age, status, or story, just the basic elements of salt, water, and heart.
We stayed all the way to closing time, and then we showered and put our clothes back on and re-emerged into the café and then the pier: everyone covered up now, everyone bustling along, purposefully carrying things and heading places. We went to my brother’s apartment and ate Swedish meatballs and drank wine. Then, the next day, we went back, and the next: it got so that Jorge, who’d been desperate for some time to wander around Europe by himself photographing, would suggest each morning around 10, “Don’t you want to go to the naked bathhouse?” And lo and behold, we did. We learned from an American woman living in Malmö that it was possible to stay 15, 20 minutes past closing time – an unheard-of defiance of community norms in Scandinavia! – and sneak out through the kitchen door. We brought snacks. We sweated in the silent sauna. We swam. We read. We became accustomed to nakedness the way one becomes accustomed to warmth, to love, to the feel of a just-right pillow snugged to the back. We met a baby. We screeched when the seaweed tickled our legs. We dangled our feet from the wooden pier and let them swish, swish, swish through salty air. We prayed.
Recommendations:
The latest Gabor Maté book is so so good, and while I find him to be a big dogmatic about certain things, I think his perspective is such a necessary and profound counterweight to, well, everything we take to be normal. I loved this Rachel Aviv book of interconnected essays/reported stories just as much as I thought I would. No one is writing about mental illness like her. This podcast will really make your brain explode in a not happy – but important – way! Please forgive me because I rarely recommend products here but these journals are actually really lovely and make great Christmas gifts.
Feedback, please!
Friends! I have been completely, almost maniacally immersed in a new writing project over the last six months (!!!) and am just peeking my head out now. I love writing this newsletter and really want to make it a more central part of my life in the coming year. Considering just how huge of an impact mindfulness and meditation have had on my life, I would love to focus more of my newsletter energy there. I have come to believe that much of the change we so desperately need in this world – for our planet, its many life forms, and each other – begins within us. And I know how grateful I am in my own life for the daily practices that deepen my compassion, self-love, and awareness. So I have a question for you, dear readers, about what you’d like to see in the coming year! Please take the poll below and let me know what you’d like to see on Terms of Endearment. If there’s something not listed here that you’re hankering for, please drop me a note and let me know! And any other feedback is much appreciated as I envision new projects for this coming year. Many thanks!
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I've missed your newsletter! Excited for your project and happy to have you in my inbox:)
The Swedish bathhouse sounds so lovely! Are you ready to share more info about your new writing project?