Growing up in the UK, I’m with the crowd that would is not a fan of being naked in public and the idea of having a naked sauna with boss and colleagues is simply mortifying.
I know Germans/Finns have a very different take on sauna culture. What about in French and German speaking parts of Switzerland?
For young kids, I find it pretty normal that they are running around naked, esp. in summer when they are playing in/with water. But I was surprised to see some French parents really stopping their kids from being fully naked and playing along. I wonder whether in France there is also a more prudish attitude to nakedness?
Not sure this scenario wouldn’t sit well with anyone, even those accustomed to regular visits to the sauna in the buff. Being there with people you are usually sitting around with in office clothes discussing profit and loss is perhaps a bit weird?
Somehow I have no issue when it’s a sauna with strangers. I have crappy eye-sight so, without my glasses or contact lenses, everyone else is softly filtered anyway.
I can only tell about the sauna in the gym in Aargau I used to go before covid.
Every week, there was 1 exclusive day for women, 1 exclusive day for men and the other 5 days it was mixed. More or less everyone used 2 towels. One towel to sit, second towel to cover our bits. Very few guys did the remove the towel to lie on it. And when people did remove the towel, it was a quick movement, not a look at me movement. Overall, the sauna was not the place that would trigger a reflection about attitudes to being naked. The showers and the changing room triggered that.
For example, I’d take a shower, and then 2 guys arrive and talk to each other while showering, with me in the middle. One time I joked that they should point their thing in other direction. Other times I was just tying my shoes in the changing room and someone comes walking from the shower while drying their hair with the towel, I rise my head only to find something a bit too close for comfort.
I do like going to a local lake with an area designated to FKK.
It’s quite nice to jump in cool water in summer and feel the water flow around ones goolies. It doesn’t take long and you dont notice the other pink and plump dad and mom bodies around you.
Well, I think I’m safe - we have a mixed international group in the company so I don’t think a sauna will be on the cards. Ever.
If push came to shove, I would probably go to a sauna with the same colleagues that I go for a drink after work with. We’re pretty close and are used to having a laugh together.
One requirement for the sauna here CH is silence, Ruhezone. Unless you’re only with friends/colleagues and no one else in there.
But, 60-80°C are not exactly the greatest environment for any meaningful conversation. Maybe i need to visit a Finish sauna to listen to all the talking happening in there.
When I first joined my husband in Basel I took out a gym membership, but I have to say I wasn’t particularly comfortable in a changing room full of women walking around naked.
It’s no doubt to do with upbringing, my mother was born in 1919 and in her 40s when she had me. She didn’t like girls showing too much and used to tell my older sister off for wearing her skirts too short in the late 60s/early 70s. I suppose it has had an effect on my own standard of dress over the years, even when I was in my teens and 20s I never wore anything short, low cut or revealing. I’ve only ever worn a bikini once in my life, when I was 17 and have never worn a swimsuit since as I don’t sunbathe or go swimming.
I know, what a saddo lol
Naked outside is fully legal in CH. But the Swiss etc cannot get past the psychosis that it has something to do with sex. They dont see the body in its entirety. They only see a cock or a pussy or whatever.
Ridiculous thing is my maternal granny was expecting at 15 and had to get married, she went on to have 8 more kids. I think every time her husband hung his trousers up she got pregnant. It makes me wonder where my mother’s prudish attitude came from
I think it was more to do with no TV or contraception in my grandparents case. All of their 9 children survived, even the ones who went off to WW2. The one son who died in early adulthood was killed in an RAF accident in 1950 when he was 18.
Interesting what you say though, there is an old cemetery at Dean Village in Edinburgh I sometimes walk through. When you look at the stones dating back to the 17 and 1800s there was an awful lot of infant mortality going on. It’s quite sad reading the ages on the family headstones actually.
I am comfortable naked in a sauna or in a changing room shower. As most other people I don’t flaunt my bits but use a towel.
My last radiotherapy sessions was on my chest (lung) and they offered me a hospital gown for the 10m walk from the changing room to the machine. I declined, baring my bare chest for the two technicians. Ho-hum. If they were doing my testicles I’d do the same.
I was lucky when I had radiotherapy for breast cancer I Edinburgh years ago, there was a private changing area behind the radiotherapy room. I did get fed up of all the examinations but it was more to do with being poked and prodded than being topless. It also doesn’t bother me when doctors need to look at my foo foo, but I don’t want to be showing it to anyone else (I’ve never even shown my breast scars to my sister, I just accept their part of me so it’s nobody else’s business really).
One of the times I was in a “naked” spa - in Zermatt, people were sitting on their towels but absolutely no one was covering themselves with them, male or female.
To be honest, I think I would have felt more uncomfortable wearing swim shorts if everyone else was naked.
Saunas/spas I’ve been to in other parts of Switzerland , and in Sweden, were clothed.
There were a few threads on EF where people proclaimed that they were horrified by nakedness and one mother (from the US, I think) wouldn’t let her two young daughters get undressed in front of each other at home.
