People arrive bundled up in winter layers. Dark jackets, gloves and scarves that stretch up to their chins. As they stand around chatting, I realise I will soon be naked among these strangers.
When the clock hits 9pm, the group moves from the lobby to the sauna’s changing area. It seems silly to use a cubicle to remove my clothes, but the act of undressing feels private, even if my body isn’t about to be.
Peeling off my socks, I can see bums, thighs and bellies, through the crack of the cubicle’s saloon door, as people happily remove their clothes in the open, stashing them away.
I’m joining a clothing-optional session at The Barrel sauna in Dundrum in Dublin. It’s open to anyone, but three of the four saunas are rented by the Irish Naturist Association (INA), a members-only group that comes together regularly to practice social nudity in a non-sexual environment.
RM Block
Irish attitudes to naturism are still muted in comparison to many of our European neighbours, but our laws on nudity are perhaps surprisingly liberal. As long as there is no intention to cause fear, distress or alarm by exposing yourself, public nudity is legal.
Tonight, three women, including me, and 20 or so men have come to sweat.
Carefully folding the clothes that I usually scrunch into my bag, I delay my entrance into the unknown. Can I wrap a towel around me or not? Is it against the naturist’s ethos to be covered? Will I make other people uncomfortable if I’m not bare?
As the chatter outside dies down and people head for the heat, I dredge up some courage and join them.
The sauna seats 10 people along two benches that directly face each other. Spreading my towel down across the last free space, I pull my legs to my chest and clench into a cannonball.
The men in the sauna are at ease, legs swinging, sweat pouring, chatting about a naked hike they’re organising to Slieve Bloom, the recent success of a naked yoga session and how to avoid swingers at naturist holiday resorts. The INA has been running for more than 50 years, and with 800 paying members, the group has never been bigger.
“Weightless” is how one man describes the feeling of coming to the sauna and cold-plunging naked. But for all its efforts to have regular events, it’s a relatively private group, he says, because people don’t want others to know that they are naturists for fear of being blacklisted from work or social opportunities.
Another man talks about how he got into naturism three years ago, after falling in love with skinny dipping on holidays. “It’s not rocket science,” he says. “It just feels good.”
I’m trying to listen, but my mind is nearly entirely occupied trying to learn this dance of mixed-gender social nudity. It may not require a degree in aerospace engineering to know the steps, but it is demanding the erasure of a lifetime of restrictions around men’s bodies and my own to be here.
I counter the very real urge to look around by closing my eyes for long stretches and wonder if, by being all curled up, I am refusing to comply with the contract of trust they have all agreed with one another.
I stay in the sauna longer than I normally would, pushing through that first, second, and third urge to leave because I don’t want to deal with navigating the outside space, showering naked in front of the men outside, who are cooling down. No matter how nice everyone is, no matter that no one has shown any particular interest in me, I just can’t relax.
I’m nearing 25 minutes of heat when someone mentions that journalists don’t usually partake when they write about naturist activities. This had never even occurred to me.
I first fell in love with the ancient practice of sweat-bathing in Ribersborgs Kallbadhus, a 100-year-old wooden bathhouse jutting out from the Swedish coastline. The saunas and sea-bathing pools of Ribersborgs are gender-segregated, and swimwear is prohibited for hygiene reasons.
The Swedes, like other Scandi and Nordic countries, believe swimwear interferes with the body’s ability to heat evenly in the sauna and clean itself through sweat. There are cultural reasons for nudity too, as sauna is traditionally a place of spiritual connection, and not covering parts of your body can allow for a deeper experience.
As I moved between the heat of the sauna and the cold of the Oresund Strait, the sliver of sea separating Sweden and Denmark, I felt free. Stripped of clothes, jewellery, all signifiers of status, I lost interest in whether the rolls of my belly were offensive to others, or if people noticed the brown moles protruding from my back. Exposing my naked self felt like a rebellion against the daily contortions of trying to be beautiful.
It was the first time in my life I had been in the company of nude women, and it occurred to me how very few naked bodies I have seen in real life and how freeing it might have been to grow up seeing scars, wrinkles, hair, weight on bones, as marks of the living, not the failing.
This feeling is backed up by research led by Keon West, a social psychologist at Goldsmiths University of London, who found that seeing real bodies, unaltered by technology, unfiltered through screens, helps to counter the negative effects of our visual culture, which advertises artificially altered bodies as the norm.
Yet there is inevitable tension telling anyone that I like to sauna without clothes; I feel it even while writing this sentence. It’s not normal, and so it is strange. People sometimes cite “Catholic guilt” as the reason they could never try it, yet Ireland’s own indigenous practice of sweat-bathing is a naked one.
Until the turn of the 20th century, neighbours, friends and spouses would strip off in fields and by rivers to crawl naked into stone sweathouses in search of cures from medical ailments. More than 300 of these sweathouses, or “teach allais”, are still standing around the country. They were part of people’s community infrastructure, and in the many recorded folklore accounts of people using sweathouses, nudity is not understood as transgressive but necessary to enter into these dark chambers.
There are now more than 150 sauna operators across Ireland, and a few of them have begun to offer clothing-optional or textile-free sessions. Most of these saunas do so quietly, promoting them to regulars, or through specific networks, not wanting to invite trouble.
Hot Rocks sauna in Armagh, co-owned by husband and wife Jacek and Andrea Ramus, offer monthly textile-free sessions. “People come because they like it, they’re not naturists, they’re not doing any other kind of activities, but they’re just finding that sauna without any clothes is something they really enjoy,” Andrea Ramus says. Her husband is from Poland, where nude saunas are the norm, and she says that he was adamant when they set up the sauna together that customers would be able to try it out in Ireland.
“There’s no sexual element to it; it’s better for your skin, your body isn’t restricted, and it can heat evenly. There’s no forcing of nudity here,” Andrea Ramus says. “The only rule is that it’s no swimsuits. But you can sit there in a towel, covered as much or as little as you want.”
But while the Hot Rocks sessions are mixed gender, Andrea Ramus says they tend to be dominated by men. It’s the same with the INA sauna sessions, run by and for members in saunas across the country.
Leticia Medina is president of the INA. From her perspective, because naturism is strictly non-sexual, gendered events wouldn’t make sense. “The root of segregation is that people don’t believe in non-sexual nudity,” Medina says. “So there is no problem with us, but other people who can’t become comfortable in non-sexual nudity, they can’t become naturists.”
Still craving that feeling of liberation but unable to face the mental gymnastics of being naked around men, I go back to The Barrel sauna in Dundrum for a private women-only session.
It’s run by co-owner Laura Gunning, who has trained in the Lithuanian style of sauna called pirtis. Its focus is to bring nature inside the sauna. While some cultures forbid swimsuits for hygiene reasons, pirtis is typically nude so the body can get the full benefits of being close to nature.
The calculations that took up so much head space when I was here last time have evaporated. My body no longer feels burdened with the potential to offend. I strip off and head straight for the sauna, where Gunning covers me and two other women in birch and oak leaves, massages our limbs with sea salt flakes and rubs runny honey on to our skin to nourish it.
We are naked, but it doesn’t feel like the most important aspect of what is happening. Together, we chat with a level of intimacy that goes beyond the minutes we have known each other. Shedding fabric, being vulnerable in a safe place, seems to allow for a shedding of social barriers.
“Not wearing synthetics while you sweat. Being comfortable in your own skin and feeling safe and comfortable with other human beings of all shapes and sizes, is a real advantage of this environment,” Gunning says. “People should be given the opportunity to safely sauna in whatever format works for them. Plus, it’s just really fun.”
In one nude session, I’m reminded of why I fell for sauna.
Rosanna Cooney is author of Sweathouse: The New and the Ancient Irish Sauna Tradition, published by Irelandia Press
