The Room Where The Body Is Ordinary
I have been to saunas in Sydney and in Athens, and neither of them was what the Finnish tradition would recognise as a sauna. This is not a criticism of either place. It is an observation about what arrives when a northern European institution is transplanted into a different climate, a different social context, and a very different relationship to the unclothed male body. What arrives is recognisably related to the original and also, in various ways, something else entirely.
The Sydney sauna I am thinking of was a gay venue in the inner city. The Athens one was similar—a men’s sauna in a part of the city where such places had existed, apparently, for some decades, in a culture with its own complicated relationship to the male body and its display. In both places, towels were issued at the door.
In both places, most men kept the towels on for most of the time they were there. This detail interests me more than anything else about either venue, because the towel is doing something that a towel in a Finnish sauna does not do. In Finland, you sit on the towel. You do not wear it. The distinction is not small.
What I have read about the Finnish sauna suggests a tradition that is two thousand years old, in which from an early age, many Finns become used to seeing all types and sizes of bodies in the sauna without evaluating or comparing them. Finns find the conflation of sauna nudity with sexuality genuinely bewildering. The nudity in a Finnish sauna is the default condition of the space—unremarkable, pre-negotiated, built into the social architecture of the room before anyone arrives. You know, going in, that the body is present and that this is simply the situation.
What I found in the Sydney and Athens venues was a different situation, and the towel was its most accurate symbol. The men in those rooms had arrived wearing clothes from the ordinary world and were in the process of deciding, at various speeds and to various degrees, how much of the ordinary world’s conventions to carry with them into the space. The towel was the visible form of that decision, held in reserve—the body present but managed, available but not yet declared. Some men dropped the towel quickly and moved through the venue with a quality of ease that I found genuinely interesting. Others kept it on with a grip that suggested they had not quite arrived at being in the room they were in.
I noticed, over the visits I made to these places, that the towel created its own social language. A towel loosely held was a different signal from a towel tightly wrapped. A towel dropped on a bench and left there was different again. Men read these signals with a precision that the towel’s apparent ordinariness might suggest was not available to it, but clearly was. The towel was not clothing but it was performing the work that clothing performs: communicating something about the person’s relationship to the situation, managing the distance between the private self and the social self, marking where a boundary currently sat.
The Finnish tradition does not need this language because the boundary has already been settled before anyone arrives. Generations of men have gone to the sauna and the sauna has always been this—the same heat, the same benches, the same quiet company. In Germany’s extensive Therme, nudity is not just accepted—it’s often required. Mixed-gender nude bathing is standard, and wearing a swimsuit in the sauna area is typically prohibited. The rule in those places is the reverse of what operates in the venues I visited: in a German Therme, the swimsuit is the aberration that requires explanation. The nude body is the correct condition of the space, and to arrive wearing anything is to have misunderstood where you are.
In the Sydney and Athens saunas I visited, the nude body was the destination rather than the default. You arrived clothed, you deposited your belongings, you received your towel, and you moved through a series of spaces—the steam room, the hot pool, the dark corridor, the seating area—with the understanding that the towel was gradually becoming less necessary and that at some point it would be less present. The architecture of the venues was designed around this gradual transition rather than around an arrived-at nakedness. The darkness in certain rooms was not for atmosphere. It was to provide cover for the transition, to allow the body to become less managed without anyone being required to witness the management.
I am not criticising this arrangement. I am noting what it reveals about the cultural condition it emerged from. The gay sauna in Sydney or Athens was trying to solve a specific problem. How do men who have been formed by the full weight of the northern European and Anglophone tradition—the Augustinian inheritance, the advertising image, the legal framework that required parliamentary acts to permit nudity on beaches—find a space where the male body can be present without its usual apparatus of apology and assessment? The answer the venues arrived at was: gradually, in the dark, with a towel available at all times.
The hammam tradition that Athens also has access to, from its own history and from its Ottoman inheritance, operates differently. The hammam as an institution—the marble slab, the kese mitt, the attendant whose relationship to the body being worked on is that of a skilled tradesperson to material. The body in a hammam is a body to be cleaned, maintained, returned to itself. The social grammar is clear before you arrive, and the clarity of the grammar makes the nakedness straightforward. But I have not been to a hammam in Athens, and I am cautious about describing what I have not experienced.
What I can describe is what I noticed in the steam room of the Sydney venue, which is the space in both venues where something closest to the communal bathing tradition operated. The steam room was genuinely hot and genuinely dark and the men in it were, for the most part, simply there—sweating, quiet, occasionally talking in low voices. The sexual purpose of the venue was present as a possibility but was not the dominant quality of that particular room. What I noticed was that men in that room were more bodily present, in the sense I have described elsewhere, than they often were in the rooms that were more explicitly sexual. The heat and the dark and the steam seemed to do something that more direct social situations did not do. The monitoring relaxed. The body stopped performing.
This seems to me to be the thing that the communal bathing traditions of Finland, Japan, Turkey, and Korea have institutionalised in a way that the Anglophone tradition has not. Not the nudity as such, but the conditions that allow the body to stop performing—the heat, the established frame, the social permission that arrives as inherited custom rather than as individual decision. When you know what a room is for because everyone has always known what a room is for, the body can simply be in it. When you are negotiating the room’s meaning as you arrive in it, the body is occupied with the negotiation.
Finnish workplace culture uses the sauna for meetings that build trust and candour that formal office settings cannot replicate. The mechanism, as I understand it, is exactly this: the sauna removes the markers of status and role that formal settings require the body to carry, and in their absence a different kind of conversation becomes possible. The body without its signifiers is the person without their position, and the person without their position can say things the position would not permit.
I found something related in the steam room of the Sydney venue, and I found it consistently enough over multiple visits that I stopped thinking of it as incidental. Men talked in there in a way they did not talk in the rest of the building. Not more intimately, necessarily, but more directly—more willing to be in the conversation they were actually in rather than the conversation the situation seemed to call for. The heat and the dark and the steam were doing what heat and dark and steam do, which is to make the usual performance less sustainable. The body sweating cannot maintain the same relationship to its own presentation as the body clothed and upright in the ordinary world.
What the gay sauna offers—in Sydney, in Athens, in the other cities where these venues exist—is a partial version of this. Partial because the venue’s primary purpose is sexual and the sexual purpose shapes everything else about the space. Partial because the towel at the door announces, before anything has happened, that the body’s transition will be managed rather than assumed. And partial because the men who arrive are arriving from the full inheritance of a culture that has not provided them with a room where the body is simply ordinary—where the nakedness is as unremarkable as the shoes you left at the door.
The Finnish room seems to me to be something that has no precise equivalent in the cultures I have worked and lived in. I cannot speak to it from experience. What I can speak to is its absence—the gap where such a room would be, visible in the men who came to me over thirty years, in the way they arrived and the way they left and the particular quality of apology they brought with them, which was the apology of someone who had never been in a room where the body was ordinary and therefore did not know how to be ordinary in it.
The Athens steam room. The Sydney heat. The towels held in various ways by various men at various stages of their own negotiation with the space. These are the rooms I have been to. They were not the Finnish sauna. They were doing their best, in different conditions, with different histories, toward something adjacent. I am not sure how close they got.
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