Bodies, Bodies, Bodies (In Heat)

How to be naked among other people in the sauna.

By Selma White-Pascual

Illustration by Jacqueline Subkhanberdina

Red curtains swing open, and I see a long wooden bench, lit by soft yellow lights. A dense fog smothers the stage and unfurls toward the audience.

A breath: Ahhhhhhhh.

Then, a recorded chorus of grunts, gasps, and groans begins. Two women enter from either side of the stage, wearing only towels and nude shorts. Their feet drag along the floor, their movements sticky and viscous. The room pulsates with anticipation as they get closer and closer and closer.

We can barely breathe. 

Their hands touch. A thumping percussion begins. Their bodies twist into a series of acrobatic impossibilities, skin sparkling with perspiration. I sit, eating my popcorn, enraptured by The Box’s sauna-themed cabaret. 

Three years before, I also sat watching fog, sweat, and bodies, but this time in a small theater in suburban Finland. It was November 2023, and The Smoke Sauna Sisterhood was on a festival tour. Female bodies emerged from the darkness of wooden cabins, first accompanied by chants: “become, become mighty; become, become powerful,” and then the harsh sounds of scrubbing, branch-whipping, and steam hissing. 

I am rewatching the movie now, and this is what sticks out: the fleshiness of bodies, light hitting cellulite, sweat trickling down the nose. These images show something wholly material: a breast on screen represents a breast. Nothing like the cabaret, where the breast on stage represents the host of taboos which compel someone to pay thousands for a front table. I wondered if the dancers’ bodies can be divorced from the taboo sexuality that the exhibitionist character of the stage and voyeur audience inscribe on them. It’s a sexuality that, in its flattening and commodification of these bodies for the audience’s satisfaction, feels explicitly pornographic. Why does Smoke Sauna instead evoke a free-body spirit, even though its naked bodies are also shown to a paying audience? 

The saunas in the two mediums were completely different. At The Box, the sauna became a hot, wet fantasy, detached from any sweat culture practice. It thrived on the mystery provided by the steam—and perhaps, Snoop Dog’s “Sensual Seduction” that had preceded it. For the writer Craig Mod, the sauna has the opposite effect: “The public bath demystifies. Any weirdness we may have felt about our own nakedness could have been so easily and readily erased with a single communal dunk.” The difference between the club and the movie seems to be between the excitement and habituation of the naked body. Or, it is something more than habituation, for a body does not become nonsexual just because it is naked more often, just as a body on stage is not automatically erotic. The difference between the two saunas lies in the web of relationships between the body, the space, and the people looking at it. In short, it is the cultural practice that teaches us how to make sense of these bodies. 

Sweat culture in the U.S. is still nascent, unlike the centuries-old Estonian one in Smoke Sauna, and thus, as Kristy Alpert proposes in her The New York Times article “The Europeans Have Some Notes About American Sauna Culture,” is still subject to the American tyranny of “optimization and performance.” The performance of the sauna becomes twofold: a performance of the optimized self, where the body is hyperanalysed through health, endurance, and self-discipline, and a performance of the naked body, whose sexuality is enhanced, not erased, by the communal space. 

So, to see if this dual performance is present in the American sweat culture closest to us, I talked to those who frequent Columbia’s saunas, nestled at the back of the locker rooms in Dodge Fitness Center. What is the mystery, the rituals of performance of our campus sauna? 

To enter a sauna, there are certain rules of behavior. When I asked about those rules, Noelle Perry, CC ’26, answered, “I think you should be showered, and no shoes or socks. I think only a towel or naked.” She then recounted a time when these conditions were not met: a person had entered in their workout clothes and then proceeded to exercise. “Isn’t that crazy?” She laughed. “It was so wack, so don’t go to the Columbia sauna.” 

The conduct Noelle proposed was similar to Alpert’s. Was the person in Noelle’s story so wrong for not meeting these expectations? While “wrong” is maybe too strong a word, it certainly did not accord with the tradition of the sauna as a place of relaxation. Here, there was an interest in using the heat to maximize athletic output. But, when the body becomes invested in performance, it becomes something to be shaped toward an ideal form. Much like the sexual body, it transforms into an object whose movements can be measured and calibrated to suit its user’s preferences. I am tempted to say this particular body appeared in a Riefenstahl-esque way: less like a human, and more like an object to be worshipped, angled to achieve peak physical gratification. In some ways, it became much like a sex toy—not because athletic performance is sexual, but because the body becomes a means through which desire is repeatedly produced and satisfied. In other words, it was not resting. 

And then, once you are inside the four corners of the sauna, there are manners of being. In some traditions, Finnish researcher Kaarina Kailo explains, the darkness of the sauna is meant to awaken other senses: the intensification of heat can go so far as to create a “heat orgasm” which one answers with cooling. How do people behave within the campus sauna? In what other ways, if any, does the body perform? 

Noelle mentioned how, instead of simply bearing the heat, people use their AirPods and phones. Upon hearing this, Maia Zasler, GS ’27, was shocked: “On the phone? And people are naked?” 

I thought Maia’s comment was particularly interesting. In an environment of constant surveillance, thanks to spontaneous texting and image sharing, the phone did more than distract a person from feeling how the heat was changing their body. It seemed to draw attention to the world outside the sauna, creating the possibility of exposure in a place that, for its communal nudity, promised a suspension of that boundary between public and private. Though there are signs around the locker rooms prohibiting phone use, students still use their phones. The body is again constrained by a performance to an outward entity. 

Sometimes, Columbia students look outside campus for their sauna experience. Maia told me how she once went to the Equinox sauna. Fortunately, the no-phones policy was taken more seriously. “It’s kind of nice; you feel your muscles relax. It’s dark, it’s quiet, it’s peaceful. It feels like a little oasis.” The setting she described appeared more similar to that in Smoke Sauna. For Maia, the sauna was not a special place of connection between herself, her body, or the others. “They’re human bodies,” she shrugged, “That’s all.” 

For others, this was not the case. When some bodies enter the sauna, they carry not just themselves, but a history of meaning. Noah McAuslin, GS, recently joined a gym in midtown and shared his feelings. “As a gay man, there is kind of an inherent eroticism associated with a place like a sauna or a steam room in gay culture. It’s interesting to intend to use it solely for relaxation, but also feel the tension of that, especially in an openly gay city like New York.” 

Noah’s thoughts complicated my understanding of the sauna’s promise of demystification. Smoke Sauna director Anna Hints has talked in interviews about the need to enter the sauna naked in your body, but also naked in your soul. Surely, something is stimulating about baring one’s soul to another, and bathhouses acted as decisive sanctuaries for queer men in the 20th century. I wondered if it was possible to separate the intimacy of the bathhouse from its erotic charge.

For Andrew Murgitroyd, GS ’27, that separation was precisely the point: “I do love being naked just generally, especially in a non-sexual way. The idea of desexualizing the body is cool.” 

Perhaps the sauna is most interesting because it cannot settle the question for us. It does not itself make the body sexual or nonsexual. Instead, it gives people different ways of experiencing the same nakedness. Noelle described how different logics of performance, the gym or the phone, were brought into the sauna and how that changed the way the body was interpreted. Maia felt largely indifferent to the bodies, any attention to them suspended. Noah and Andrew shared the different ways people encounter others’ bodies, whether the encounter is intentionally sexual or desexualized. 

I decided to visit the Columbia sauna myself, to see what meanings would arise for me.

On my venture to that little corner of Dodge, I was surrounded mostly by older women, who sat in the heat in towels. The older women, even in the locker room, embodied a bodily indifference I had yet to attain. Their nakedness was an unremarkable thing, a way of being in their skin unattached to performance. 

The feeling of the heat took me back to last winter break. I had a layover in Istanbul and decided to go into the city for a hammam. The hammam, like the sauna, is a public bathing ritual but one that includes another person who undresses, washes, and dries you. After lying on heated marble waiting for my muscles to relax, my bath attendant led me to a small room where she scrubbed the dead skin off my body with a rough mitten. She covered me in suds, and, looking up at her, I felt like a baby being washed in the sink. I was genderless again, my chest scrubbed so hard it had become flat. When I asked her if many local women do hammam, she replied, by a beautiful quirk of translation, that women, all the way back to the sultanas, did hammam. It was an odd conflux of feeling: on one hand, I was saturated with gender, through the sexed baths and gendered heritage, and on the other, I was released from the gendered body I had arrived with. But I felt no pressure to resolve that tension.

In the heat, I was allowed to surrender to all those meanings that settle onto the body, to embrace them and discard them all at once. 

Why does a breast in one context represent only a breast, while in another it carries the weight of taboo? The sauna, it seemed, does not liberate the body from those meanings, but multiplies its alternatives. The result depends on how you enter. 

I think I will return to the Columbia sauna, at least once a month. Not because it has taught me how to understand my naked body, but because, for a little while, the heat stops me from trying to solve it. For those minutes, which I promise not to measure, my body will not have to be optimized, eroticized, desexualized, or even coherent. 

It can simply sweat.