The sanctity of the female changing room
... Because I am coming to believe that nowhere on this planet can a more naturally compassionate and intuitively kind space be found, where, hidden from the male gaze, women are freed.
It’s January and I’m back at the gym.
Which means I’m back in the ladies changing room. It isn’t a fancy gym, it’s part of the local leisure centre, so the changing rooms are also for everyone coming to the local swimming pool.
I’m lucky because it’s a brand new venue; the showers and saunas are all spanking clean. The hairdryers work and the toilets have yet to grow worms of damp paper that snake up those untouchable areas at the base, where they’re destined to dry out and die, stains slowly fading … I know you know what I mean.
But I’m also lucky because this is a communal changing room in the real sense of the word, and all day long a wide variety of women, girls, small shy boys, babies and tiny tots pass through.
There’s a lot written right now about the need to protect female only spaces. Quite rightly as far as I’m concerned. But these five minute reads are not the space. Perhaps one day they will be, but not yet. Twitter is where you’ll find me talking about this.
What I want to talk about here is the unique atmosphere of the women’s changing room. Because I am coming to believe that nowhere on this planet can a more naturally compassionate and intuitively kind space be found, where, hidden from the male gaze, women are freed.
I go early, which means I’m there with the pensioners. Which means that often, my fifty-five year old body, with its pot-belly and knobbly knees and puckered thighs, is the most youthful specimen on display. And when I look around at the older women, the 70+ and 80+ ladies, it isn’t their age that is visible. It is their experience. I don’t see old people, I see battle scarred survivors. The tired wrinkled breasts, the hunched and worn shoulders. Bellies that never lost the swell of pregnancy, though the child they carried is grown and gone, stick-thin arms, liver spots, sparse grey pubic hair, buttocks that lie in ruined folds like piles of un-ironed laundry. And the scars. Of childbirth and illness.
And it’s wonderful, because it really does seem to me that, beautifully ironic as it is, only in their nakedness do these women shed the cruel anonymity old age confers. Shorn of shopping bags and sensible shoes, loose jumpers and shapeless coats, in their nakedness they reclaim both their femininity and their identity. The curves are there, sunken and shrunken, but there. Do your worst, their bodies seem to say. It fills me with compassion and awe.
And this is cyclical. Because when I’m done in the gym and the older ladies are done with their gentle laps in the pool, the changing room is filling with young mothers. Tots having loud, uninhibited conversations with their naked reflections, babies staring from the swaddled warmth of winter layers. Now the compassion runs in a different direction. Naked grandmothers lead perfect tiny naked grandchildren into showers, silver-bobbed octogenarians, tip toe around babies, laid out on the floor, vulnerable as upturned ants.
And all of us, always, making it as easy as possible for the other. Holding doors, smiling at a fractious child, stooping to pick up a dropped hairband, swimsuit, glove. I love these places.
There is, of course, an exception that proves this unspoken rule of compassion.
Because early mornings are also a time for elite swimmers. Teenage girls, drying hair and applying a depth of foundation I didn’t even use to see in a change of century. They’re as lithe and strong and supple as the goddess Athena herself. And they are wholly and utterly self-absorbed. Hogging the hairdryer, spreading the contents of make-up bags across the shelf, blithely unware of anyone, or anything else. They’re on their way to school, and then life. At that unavoidable stage, when most of their unconscious decisions are determined by the biological drive to find a mate. In time, the spotlight of their focus will begin to turn outward, which is all good and natural because no one ever got happy gazing at their belly button for life.
We know this, all of us watching, and it’s from this well of knowledge that I believe the sanctity of these spaces arises. Not only are we freed from the male gaze, we’re at that stage of life where we’re freed from the need of a male gaze.
We totter around quite happily with our gnarled joints and our layers of fat, content in ourselves, and doubly contented by the company we find ourselves in.
Until next time,
Cary
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FINALLY … you may not know this, but I’m a Writing for Wellness practitioner, and as a part of this free subscription I’m going to be offering a monthly online Writing for Wellness workshop. Yes - FREE. Consider it a taster. You may then want to continue with an introductory course, or you may think what a load of rubbish and never bother again. Have a quick read of my website https://writingforwellness.se/ to find out more about this gentle and (for want of a better word) extraordinarily beneficial form of ‘self-care’ . Then, please let me know in the comments below if you’re interested. Time to be arranged, numbers capped at ten.