After an amazing fortnight of dance spent in Toronto, I headed straight for a spa I had heard about called Body Blitz. It is a women-only spa near Spadina and Adelaide where you can spend $38-$48 for a whole day just flitting between all the bathing pools and steam rooms for as long as you like. Treatments are extra, of course. They have a salt-water pool, a cold water pool, a pool of green tea, an infrared sauna, and a hammam. They serve you a variety of tea by the poolside and shots of healthy elixirs containing mixtures of ginseng, ginger, rosehip, wheatgrass, lavender and all manner of healthy concoctions. Needless to say, it did wonders for my well-exerted muscles and their aches.
The main thing I liked was that nudity was completely accepted and a bit encouraged. The main thing I found irksome, was that hardly anyone exercised their nudity right. What is it with women? I stuck to my guns and went fully nude, despite all the 20-something and 30-something girls who stayed in their bikinis the entire time. Only a couple of women past 40 were at the point where they didn’t care what the world thought, and happily went about nude. I was the only relatively young person in the nude in the entire spa that day. Did these young women not realize that you are more “judged” with clothing on than off? To my eyes, if a woman is in a bikini she is trying to hide faults and accentuate assets, whereas a woman wandering about nude is simply “in her skin” rather than “naked”, and therefore sexuality and the notion of body perfection fall to the side. There is nothing to hide, and suddenly one feels more relaxed.
It would be nice if our North American attitudes towards nudity were more realistic and less uptight. In Québec we’re thankfully a little more progressive in matters of the body than the rest of Canada, I’d say, but still, we could do with less nudity hangups.
(There is a very interesting entry written by The New Scrawl on when the photographer Spencer Tunick came to photograph nudes en masse in public venues that I can’t find yet).
Interesting.
In a purely sexual context, I have no reservations whatsoever – and in fact, generally speaking, in front of men I’m very much at ease in my own skin.
By contrast, I’m considerably more shy about the eyes of other women – maybe because women are far more scrutinizing and critical. A guy is amazingly forgiving: he sees curves and “jiggle”, where we would see only flab.
But you are absolutely correct in your premise that we need to have healthier relationships with our own bodies.
I can’t agree more.