Treadmill Lobotomy, Naked Sauna

I belong to a fitness club--a gym of sorts, housing many square feet of devices designed to help one do unnaturally, what the human species should do naturally.

The bulk of the inventory is comprised of an assortment of electronic apparatuses like treadmills, stationary cycling machines, elliptic peddling stations, and cross-trainers. In and unto themselves, they are not particularly offensive. After all, who has time to walk across country naturally, and where in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, can a person find hills of any stature? Nowhere, that's where.

But there's something more sinister going on here at the prototypical American fitness center. Atop every single solitary exercise machine there is a small TV monitor, and I find this alarming on many levels. By signing the binding-till-death fitness contract, we've already agreed to trade natural locomotion for stationary locomotion (an oxymoron if ever there was one), and on TOP of that, we have tacitly agreed to relinquish control of mental faculties and further to feed directly into a personal boob tube. And it's not optional either. Larger mounted TVs are scattered around the premises, and continuously blast MTV and Fox News programming through the atmosphere. There's no escaping it. Nowhere. Not even in the locker room, where additional TVs are mounted high on the walls, volume set to decibel 10, and channel set to a place that will appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Yesterday, after spending some time on the cross-trainer, staring inanely at the countdown timer and listening to some Fox News commentary promoting witch trials and stockades, I wafted back to the women's locker room, peeled off my sweat saturated exer-uniform and stepped into the sauna. I use the sauna quite frequently, but have never, ever seen another living soul in there. This is a little piece of heaven for me. It is a room devoted to the pursuit of heat. Its sole purpose is, in fact, to project heat. And yet, I never see anyone else in the room. This is fine with me, because in addition to the gym being a kind of media router cum stationary exercise center, it is also a sanctioned community for puritanical notions about nudity--even in the sexually segregated locker rooms. When changing, women huddle down with nun-like modesty and perform impossible maneuvers like removing garments while positioned inside of towels, and I have NEVER, the 2 years I've belonged to this club, seen a set of female buttocks or breasts, or any other portion of the body the moral majority deem unfit for public consumption.

What's going on here? This attitude about nudity is in stark contrast to many spas and facilities I frequented in Europe (the Germans in particular were pro- in the buff) where women folk let it all hang out behind the iron curtain of our women only domain. After all, we are all anatomically the same, aren't we? Is there something different about the American women? Do some possess anomalies? Third breasts? Oddly shaped belly buttons? WHAT?

I don't know. But since I always have the sauna to myself, I can let it all hang out. Here, I can let my towel fall open and bask in the heat until the sweat and toxins pour out of my body. It is a singularly wonderful feeling. I can barely hear the mindless drone of the television while I'm in the sauna, and the only sound capable of drawing me out of my heat worship reverie, is a neurotic motion detector paper towel dispenser which, upon ejecting paper, makes a loud noise that sounds for all the world like someone screaming as they fall off a cliff (complete with doppler effect). But it's not enough to keep me from enjoying my little piece of puritan free and naked nirvana.