Nudity: the great equalizer

A man crossed the street in front of my car yesterday. Since I was hiding behind my windshield, I had a rare opportunity to stare at him without the possibility of awkward accidental eye contact. He had what some call a FUPA, or Fat Upper Pussy/Penis Area.  It was as if he had a monster truck tire strapped into his underwear, and he had to hobble across the street with a cane in order to carry all that extra weight. I stared without shame and followed his body from the very bottom of his ankles up. And at the top, I saw his face (Obviously. If his face weren’t there, I would have screamed). His huge bottom lip sagged down as if it were pulled by the extra weight of his FUPA. His mouth hung open, surely sloshing fellow pedestrians with uncontrollable drool.

I wanted to run out of my car and talk to this man. I wanted to know what it’s like to grow up with such a FUPA and such an uncontrollable bottom lip. Maybe one day I’ll have a bloated upper pussy area, but today I can frolic joyfully and cane-free through crosswalks and sprinklers. What’s it like not to be able to stand up at will or not drool while walking? What is it like to shop for huge underwear and not be able to go on roller coasters?

And then I thought: Holy shit. Humans are all so different. Here we are, all living these intertwining lives but experiencing such different existences. If I walked with this man around the city and stopped to buy a top hat and a croissant, we’d each come away with such unique experiences even though we bought the exact same hat.

I thought about this all day long.

And then I went to the Korean spa. It’s less of a spa and more of a haven for bodies. It’s where people go to rest their limbs and wash away their sins. Or maybe just their eczema.

The first step at the spa is: get nekked. All naked. Lots of naked.

I LOVE being naked. I prefer to sleep naked. I hate waistbands. I’ve spent entire meetings imagining how much better they would be if I were naked. One day, I will probably be a nudist. But, I wasn’t such a fan of the birthday suit until recently.  I spent plenty of my childhood hating my body and hiding it in sweatpants. I had bow-legged bird legs, but I thought I was fat. I just knew I had cellulite in places I couldn’t see. I wouldn’t say I had an eating disorder, BUT I did weigh my pasta and only eat fat-free devil’s food cakes from Healthy Choice. Remember those? 50 calories each! Maybe I had a slight eating disorder.

In junior high, I would never have imagined I’d be stripping down to prance around with my titties out in front of Korean strangers. I also would never have imagined I’d be living a life that didn’t require inch-long fake nails.

But there I was. Real nails, nude, and soaking in hot, bubbling water with other women whose tits were out– whose everything was out. I marveled at the variety of pubic hair. I marveled at the body sizes and shapes, not one like any body in any magazine. Just real beautiful bodies. Wide bodies. Skinny bodies. Dark bodies. Peachy bodies. Misshapen bodies. Bodies with random hairs in weird places. Bodies with scars. Bodies with boulder boobies. Bodies with crater titties.

A tiny older woman wearing granny panties and a bra (employees get to cover their vaginas) poked out of a hole in the wall and called my number.

My turn.

I lay naked on a padded slab while this woman put on abrasive gloves and scrubbed every inch of my body. Every inch. I’m talkin butt crack. Armpits. The strange unnamed area between my crotch and my leg. She got it. She scrubbed for a good forty minutes, occasionally dousing me with warm water to wash away the mounds of skin that had piled up on the table.

I cannot begin to describe my pride as I lay there with everything out for the world to see. I was proud that I have reached a point where I am not ashamed of my body. And I was proud of how relaxed I was. I could relax! Last year, I could get naked, but I would still have worried about whether or not the employee was judging my leg stubble or staring at the dirt in my bellybutton (I can’t get it out! Not my fault.). I have come a long way. This time, I was so relaxed that I scared myself. I thought it slightly dangerous to lie there so open, so naked, so loose. I imagined all of my organs  falling out through my vagina. Could that happen? Had anyone ever experienced this much naked relaxation before? Maybe I was the first and all my organs would plop right out onto the table. Would the woman just scrub them?

While she loofah-ed my one-day-FUPA area, I stared at all those ladies parading around in their personal glories. I realized that nudity is the great equalizer. I couldn’t tell anyone apart. That is not an Asian joke. Without clothes or phones or cars or ideas to define us, we all look the same. I couldn’t even tell if anyone had a FUPA. We all think our bodies are too fat or too thin or too weird, but when they’re all just chilling together, they’re all the damn same. We are all the same.

Perhaps we’re having slightly different experiences, but I’m pretty sure those experiences are mainly just variations of the same thing. We all want to be loved. We all spend our lives doing things we love and things we don’t love. We suffer. We laugh. We fear. We squeal with joy. We learn stuff, fail, hate ourselves, and hopefully one day learn to love ourselves no matter what. Whether we have a FUPA or a crater tit.

All the same.

[photo credit: Spencer Tunick]