I exposed myself in a sauna last week. It was an impulsive, almost unintentional action, largely influenced by the heat of the moment which, I know, isn’t much of an excuse in a 200-degree hotbox.
I open with this tawdry hook and inadvisable telling-not-showing declaration of setting because the peculiar environment of the sauna contributed to what happened.
Why peculiar? Well, for one, everyone is mostly naked. While this alone isn’t so odd—a beach or a pool is also a place where strangers congregate unclothed—a sauna is a confined place. Even on a crowded beach, there’s breathing room between the masses of exposed flesh. In a crowded sauna, there are mere inches of separation.
Then there’s the sweating. Heavy sweating. That’s the point, after all. The sauna may be the only place where someone will willfully—perhaps even gratefully if it’s busy enough—plonk down into a puddle of ass sweat.
Very good. So far, we have advanced stages of undress in close quarters and heavy sweating. The latter, of course, is due to the sauna’s defining feature: the high temperature. It’s a dry heat, but if a ladle and bucket are provided for dumping water over the hot stones, there will also be intermittent bursts of steaminess. If you dislike that sizzling surge of evaporation hitting your face, you dislike saunas.
Though the heat of a sauna is initially welcome, the longer you stay, the more uncomfortable—and beneficial, up to a point—that stay becomes (if you want to geek out, as I did last year, on the health benefits of and physiology behind heat exposure, check out this Huberman Lab podcast). Hence the flushed faces, the pools of perspiration, the strained exhalations, the closed eyes, the heads thrown back against the wall in sufferance. It’s a fine sweaty line between pleasure and pain.
But while a sauna may superficially share characteristics with a BDSM chamber—the partial nudity, the forced confinement, the application of heat to the body, the perseverance through discomfort—a sauna is a more self-conscious place. Not to say that anyone chained up and ball-gagged in a dungeon doesn’t feel a degree of self-consciousness too, but one assumes that once the revelry begins, the imperatives of the body kick in to override the restless mind.
Less so for a sauna, where a heating body doesn’t equate to a cooling mind. Instead, everyone sits in silence, gazes fixed on the wall or their feet, in a physical immobility that belies the darting chatter inside their heads.
(This dissonance between outward stillness and inner agitation is precisely what advertisers and B-movie writers exploit in the oft-recycled elevator action trope where two impassive strangers, typically in a corporate high-rise setting, steal glances between floors until the elevator empties and the doors close, whereupon they whirl and pounce on each other.)
Saunas tend to be silent places as there’s no way to have a private conversation in them, at least when they’re crowded. Your words will be scrutinized by a random sampling of inquisitive primates who have nothing better to do after being denuded of their phones but sweat and eavesdrop. Unlike your curated social media feed, which has been algorithmically purged of those you’ve been conditioned to view as heretics or deplorables, the perspiring strangers around you may lie on the other side of the political abyss. They may find your humor offensive or, worse, your grievances laughable.
Whoever breaks this weighty silence enters the spotlight. There are few more unfortunate places to telegraph a fart than in a sauna or elevator. For the person who loses control, it’s a tragedy. For everyone else, it’s a comedy. (Then, moments later, a tragedy too.)
This explains why conversations in saunas often take place in hushed tones. The courageous, though often obnoxious, participant is the one who not only breaks the silence but also acknowledges the public stage. Best to embrace the theatricality and involve everyone in your discussion. And once the spell of artificial staidness and self-possession is broken, a cheerful cacophony of cross-chatter often blooms.
Unless you prefer a meditative atmosphere, this is the ideal in the sauna. Friendly banter. A releasing of the mind’s pressure valve. Of course, sometimes it just doesn’t play out this way. Which brings me to last week. Let me cue up the moment for you:
Wednesday afternoon. I’m sitting with my friend Zac in the University of Maine Rec Center sauna. There are six or seven others in there, mostly undergrads.
Another undergrad comes in. Blonde, buff. He has a tattoo on his chest. It consists of longitude and latitude coordinates over some Hebrew print. After some time, the undergrad sitting next to him says, “What does your tattoo say?”
He looks down at his chest and then over at her. “It’s Hebrew.” He pauses. “Do you know Hebrew?”
“No,” she says.
He remains silent. The rest of us wait dutifully, thirsty eavesdroppers that we are, but the answer doesn’t come.
“So what does it say?” she presses.
Before he can answer, I turn to her and blurt out, “It says ‘Fuck Off.’”
There is no laughter. It’s quiet enough to discern a bead of sweat plopping on the wood. Smiling, but with waning confidence, I turn to Zac, but his eyes are shut, his head pressed back against the wall, shaking his head.
Why did I say that? Because it popped into my head, and I have a loose tongue. I’m the kind of person who does things without thinking only to overthink them afterwards (which is also why I’m the kind of person who writes).1
That said, I’m not sure I’d have opened my mouth elsewhere. I was just trying to lighten the atmosphere, to put us all into that aforementioned ideal state of chummy crossfire.
But a sauna, alas, is not a stand-up comedy club. These patrons had not paid to laugh at jokes. They had paid to sweat. Which I was now doing inside as well as out.
I gave no thought to my utterance. As fast as the words entered my head, so too did they exit my mouth. It wasn’t just a cheap lure (though it mostly was) when I opened by claiming I exposed myself in the sauna. I had exposed the inside of my head.
Not that much was going on in there. I certainly hadn’t given his tattoo any thought. For example, I hadn’t considered, as Zac did, that the location of the tattoo over the heart (for me it was just his pec) was deliberate, maybe due to the loss of a family member.
I hadn’t considered that his caginess may have merely been discomfort over sharing something personal.
I also hadn’t considered that his asking her if she knew Hebrew may not have been smugness over his tattoo’s linguistic exoticism (at least by Maine standards) but instead a lead-in to its cultural or religious significance.
Even worse, I hadn’t considered at the time, as Zac later pointed out and was likely thinking as he sighed and shook his head, that my response may have been taken as some broader denunciation regarding Israel and Gaza, maybe even an anti-Semitic one. Anyone who knows me knows that politics is rarely far from my mind, but it was then. It goes to show how easily misinterpretations arise.
I tried to rectify the situation. Upon seeing that my quip hadn’t landed, I announced to the room that I’d been merely joking (something no one who is actually funny would ever do). “No, that was great,” said the co-ed who’d asked him the question. That perked me up a bit.
But the guy, true to form, didn’t say anything. He just sat a little longer, then got up and, well, fucked off.
Touché, sir. Touché.
I suppose this makes me—and it’s not often I can say this—a moderate. On the extremes are the people who, on the one hand, act thoughtlessly and never self-reflect, and on the other, overthink their way into paralysis and then overanalyze their inaction.
I’ve been thinking about trying to get into a rhythm of saunas. Just haven’t gotten there yet.
Great story. I too often find myself with something humorous that comes out that isn’t always thought through 😂
So great! Please tell me this happened at the Bathhouse in Greenpoint!