Clothing Optional

Visiting a Turkish bathhouse is like briefly inhabiting the life of the richest sultan that ever ruled, if that sultan shared his bathhouses with the entire local populace. Still, as you walk through the steam filled rooms, over beautifully tiled floors to the baths filled with hot mineral water from underground thermal vents you can't help but feel like royalty. Ever since visiting a Turkish bathhouse in Budapest, I had been longing to go back

So, when our professor explained to my study abroad group that Morocco also has a bathhouse tradition, it was just about all I could do to keep my mind focused for the rest of the class period. The first month of my semester in Morocco had been tough and a sauna was just what my tense body needed. My professor explained the hammam is an important and unique aspect of Moroccan community life and the best way to understand exactly how one works was to visit. I was sold. With visions of steamy baths flooding my head, I asked my homestay mother, Farida, if we could take a trip to the local hammam.

It took a few days for Farida to find the time. Morocco is still a very patriarchal society and the majority of my homestay mother's day was spent cooking, cleaning, serving, or shopping for her husband and two children. If anyone needed something to eat Farida made it. If someone needed something washed Farida cleaned it. If someone got sick Farida cared for him. In addition to her own family, she also spent a good deal of time visiting and helping her mother who was widowed. Somehow she managed to fit in her five daily prayers and that was about the only personal time she got. A trip to the hammam is a welcome break from her daily routine. The first afternoon she had available, Farida, her three-year-old daughter, Samira, and I loaded up buckets with soaps, shampoo, razors, washcloths and headed down the street to the local hammam.

The beautiful, steam-filled Turkish bathhouse I had been imagining is in fact related to a Moroccan hammam only as its polar opposite. Moroccan hammams are not Turkish baths. The hammam was definitely not built over thermal springs. There were no beautiful tile mosaics beneath my feet. The hammam had no pools or saunas, just a brown tile floor, concrete walls, and faucets built into the walls. Instead of marble benches along the wall, people dropped their small plastic stools or rubber mats on the floor and proceeded to wash, shave, color their hair, and socialize. Imagine being told you're getting a dream vacation to a tropical island, -- the ultimate in luxury -- and then plane tickets to Alcatraz show up in your mailbox.

The single greatest difference between the bathhouse in Budapest and the hammam was their dress codes. The Budapest bathhouse had one. The Moroccan hammam did not. And, to my very great surprise and horror, while the plastic stool is a necessity in the hammam, clothing is optional. On the afternoon I went, most of the women were opting out. The bright, tropical print bikini I was wearing could not have been more inappropriate. Having just walk off a street where the majority of women were meticulously covered from the neck down, I didn't expect to step into a room full of uninhibited, naked women.

Through the most awesome display of self-control I have ever exhibited, I kept my facial expression under control as I confronted the most nakedness I have ever experienced in my life. A few women had on white cotton underwear but they were the minority. As I followed Farida into the next room, I observed the naked bodies ranged in age from those that toddled to those that stooped and they all seemed to be enjoying themselves.
The same could not be said of me. I was not enjoying myself. I had seen a naked person before.

I just hadn't seen thirty of them in the same room. Back in my high school gym class, changing into a sports bra had taken a series of body contortions that could have put us all in Cirque du Soleil just so we wouldn't have to take our shirts off. Even if we had all changed freely in class, it would not have prepared me for the hammam. At the gym, clothes come off and go right back on. In the hammam, we all sat together in a big communal bath. I wondered if the men were as familiar with each other over in their hammam.

Because I was the only foreigner in the place, every single pair of eyes watched my family and me come in and pick a place on the floor. I began to mechanically unpack my bucket while keeping my stomach sucked in and clenched. I figured there was no reason to look terrified and fat. I was fully aware I was being scrutinized, and for this reason I struggled to keep my lips from curling in disgust as I realized we were going to be sitting in a giant Petri dish. The water that had rinsed the dirt, henna, and hair off of every woman in the room covered the floor under our bare feet. The only thing between colonies of bacteria I imagined spreading across the floor and me was a tiny plastic mat and stool about six inches off the floor.

In order to take my mind off the fungus I believed was now spreading underneath my toenails, I took my first good look around the room. There was a group of teenagers in one corner, heads bowed, engaged in an intense gossip session. There were families, mothers bathing their young daughters, and several groups of older women engaged in less boisterous but equally intense gossip. Looking at the older women, I concluded under-wire was the greatest invention ever. I also realized that one advantage of not having much for the under-wire to lift in the first place means less for gravity to pull down later. I might not be able to fill bikinis now but at least I won't have my chest resting at my waist line later.
One of these older women sitting near us, leaned over, and began talking to Farida. She gestured to me and I heard my mom say I was taking Arabic classes.

This prompted the woman to turn and, in Arabic, ask where I was from. My immediate reaction was that of a cornered animal. I was sitting in a room full of nakedness, speaking to a woman whose naked breasts grazed the tops of her knees and she wanted me to conjugate verbs in Arabic? I couldn't do it. Even after witnessing gay pride parades in Dupont Circle and buying every Michael Moore movie, I was really only a pair of buckle shoes away from being a Puritan whose eyes burned at the sight of so much nudity. Trying to speak in Arabic was the last straw and this Puritan was ready to take her bonnet and go.

My discomfort had by this point turned into full-blown panic. I could feel the adrenaline send blood pulsing to my head as my fight or flight instinct kicked in. Since I wasn't going to body slam the old woman for asking a simple question, I considered a full retreat to the safety of the locker room. I considered -- but only for a moment. I had chosen to study in Morocco as opposed to, say, England precisely because it would be more challenging. I wanted to be pushed out of my comfort zone and understand things that had previously been foreign to me. Running out of the hammam would constitute a major defeat in my eyes. I was embarrassed and uncomfortable. I was not in physical danger. Fleeing because of discomfort would make me a bit of a coward and a really big hypocrite. I would not be chased away by a pair of saggy breasts.

Since I was going to stay, I decided I might as well enjoy getting to bathe with hot water. I still hadn't quite mastered the luke-warm bucket bath over the toilet in my family's house and had several weeks' worth of unrinsed conditioner coating my hair. I turned my attention to bathing and shampooing, two things I had considered myself proficient at for some time. My Moroccan mom disagreed. When I finished rinsing the conditioner out of my hair and sat back clean and more than ready to leave, she stopped scrubbing Samira and looked me over from head to toe. She asked me if I was finished. When I said yes she shook her head, poured some soap like substance into her hand, and proceeded to rub it all over me.

If the nakedness had made me uncomfortable, the nakedness plus the manhandling made me want to jump out of my skin. Farida must have sensed this and wanted to help because when she finished with the soap she picked up what felt like the Moroccan equivalent of a Brillow pad and proceeded to scrub my skin off. I think I would have been mortified if my attention had not been diverted by raw pain. Believe me, having the top six layers of your skin scrubbed off with steel wool will effectively distract you from just about any emotional discomfort you might be experiencing.

With raw nerves and now, raw skin, I was done with the hammam. Farida and Samira were not. We stayed an additional two and a half hours. As Samira played in the buckets of water, and Farida talked to another mom, I tried to keep any part of my body from making direct contact with the floor, I figured out why we weren't leaving right away. In all the places I had been in Morocco, other than the kitchen, this was the one place where women were free to set their own rules.

In Morocco, men control the streets, offices, even the majority of rooms in the home. For women, the hammam is an oasis in the midst of strict patriarchy. Here they don't have to worry about getting harassed or tending to the needs of everyone else. For women who used the hijab, the hammam is also the only public venue where they can literally let their hair down. In the end, I had to concede that, while the hammam had nearly given me an anxiety attack, everyone else seemed to be enjoying herself. In all likelihood, if I had to live here and follow the same gender norms, I probably would never leave the hammam.
But the truth is, on future trips to Morocco I won't be going back to any hammams. When it comes to being scrubbed with steel wool by a naked woman I barely know, once is enough for me. I do, however, understand why many Moroccan women keep going back. For me a large communal bath is a mild form of purgatory but for the other women in the hammam, it is a sanctuary. And even I can agree that everyone needs a sanctuary.