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I don’ t know who needs to hear this, but F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were closer bros than you and your friends will ever be. To wit: Scott once asked Hem to review his penis, because he was terrified it didn’t measure up. Hemingway duly complied, and reassured his companion that he was “normal.”
Of course, if Scott was smarter he’d have just visited a nude sauna, where he could have witnessed the average hang of his wang himself.
Therein lies the problem, of course. In more innocent times, people had ample opportunity to see friends, family and strangers in the nude at communal baths or in tight-knit domestic life. Nowadays, unless you frequent a particularly exhibitionist Anytime Fitness changing-room, such openness is rare. The human body has become either a visual commodity, or an embarrassment. The only junk you see is your own (from a foreshortened angle, ack!), or the monster-limbs wielded by pornstars. The taut six-packs and perfect skin confronting us on a daily basis come from perfectly sculpted influencers. New York magazine releases a cover story headlined ‘The Big Little Penis Panic’. (Accompanying social copy: “Has there ever been a more anxiety-inducing time to have a small penis?”)
Is it any wonder body dysmorphia is rife? Here’s just one stat to hammer the depressing reality home: a recent study of Australian children found almost half of them reported body dissatisfaction had embarrassed them so much, it stopped them from going to school.
Speaking of hammers: looksmaxxing has left society asking ‘darkest timeline’ questions. Like “How do we stop young men smashing themselves in the face with hammers because they think it will give them a snatched jaw?” And “Why are porcine dermal acellular matrix grafts so popular?” (I googled the procedure so you don’t have to: they take skin from a pig, slit your penile fascia and suture the porky ‘biological scaffold’ onto it, so you end up with slightly bigger genitals, albeit ones that will forever haunt your dreams.)
To repeat myself, and at the risk of landing on some sort of law enforcement registry: more people should get naked in semi-public places. More people need to visit traditional saunas.
There’s a reason getting your sweat on is an ancient and beloved part of daily life around the world. As a Swede, I grew up loving the peaceful high of basting in your own sweat. I didn’t necessarily enjoy sitting inches away from a fellow pink-roasted man or woman, seeing the sweat roll down their rolls of fat and puffy, purple nipples. But I realize now that exposure helped me grow up perfectly happy with my own sad, ever-growing, and entirely natural spectrum of flaws (TL;DR: pigeon chest, pendulous jowls, hobbit feet).
So when it comes to seeing the parade of pocket rockets out there? The beautifully weird mix of wang god gave the human race? No place better than a sauna, bro. Or a Japanese onsen. There’s one I go to where clothing isn’t just optional, it’s verboten. The first time I went, a hatchet-faced porter in traditional yukata robe handed me a tiny face towel, and a regular towel meant for the shower.
“Clothes — no,” he rasped.
“Um, so can I have a towel to wear in the sauna?” I asked.
He pointed at the palm-sized towel in my hand. “You wear this,” he sneered, “if you need.”
Now I go onsen-ing regularly and, apart from the soothing benefits of a good shvitz, I get a bonus: eyeful after eyeful of the bushiest, crookedest, palest man-meat you could ask for. And guess what? At first, it might leave you queasy and hunched in the corner, tenting your junk with clammy hands like an ill-judged game of peekaboo. But in minutes, you’re past caring how anyone looks. It’s just a body, you tell yourself. We’ve all got one.
Unsurprisingly, the Japanese have an apt term for such wellbeing; hadaka no tsukiai. Translation: naked communion, the relaxed, open feeling of social nudity, where all pretense is literally stripped away. As a Scandinavian, I prefer a Finnish credo of similar sentiment. “All people are created equal — but nowhere more so than in the sauna.” Hemingway would agree.