“We don’t pal around in the nip together enough”

A FRIEND of mine — a strapping man even at his leanest — announces recently that he’s put on the bones of a stone.

Pulling up his t-shirt, he grabs his stomach affectionately in both hands, saying ‘woo-hoooo!’ while he wiggles it about. After yanking it up, down and side to side for a while, he says distractedly, ‘must tackle that,’ before tucking himself back in. Then he pats his stomach twice- again fondly — and offers me a glass of wine.

It strikes me (a) that a stone is a conservative estimate, (b) that I — and any other woman I know — would never be so sanguine about putting on a space-hopper-shaped amount of fat unless there was a baby inside it, and (c) that if I did, I’d never, under any circumstances, bar my life depending on it, pull out fistfuls of this fat and display them.

My point is, generally speaking, men are far more upbeat about their physical shortcomings than women. On the whole, they’re less neurotic, phobic, irrational, anxious, hung-up and disturbed; basically, in other words, less monomaniacally fixated on their bodies. One simple reason is that the popular media’s scrutiny of women is neurotic, phobic, irrational, anxious, hung-up and disturbed; basically, in other words, fixated on women’s bodies.

Images of female bottoms and breasts are burnt into our consciousness every day. Thousands of women (wearing clothes of which the overall effect is: no trousers) are offered up for our inspection from sun-up to sun-down and so we’ve got used to Studying Form (an un-technical comparative process, which involves looking at the bodies and deciding where to place them on the Sexy Scale eg. ‘hmmm, arse: tick, breasts, tick… bit of a muffin-top going on there… shame about that… lawd have mercy on my soul — is that bra-bulge I can see?’)

There’s no escape from the media’s monomaniacal fixation and this will mess with your head. When the female body is always about Form, rather than Function, it makes the business of feeling kindly disposed towards our bodies more difficult.

So that, as far as I’m concerned, is that. Except… perhaps another reason why women are so tough on themselves is the fact that we simply don’t pal around together in the nip enough. Like the boys, I mean, who are always stripping off, lathering up and chatting, post-match.

I only say this because a while back, I found myself out of my clothes — and my comfort zone- in a Turkish bath house — or hammam — and It Was Something of A Revelation.

“You are going to feel so euphoric,” my friend — a hammam aficionado — enthuses from the cubicle next to mine, into which I have been marched and stripped by a stout, elderly woman, who is wearing no clothes.

Now naked, I’m ordered into a circular, stone room, and led to a raised plinth in the centre of the room. I have just enough time to tell my friend that she can feck off with her euphoric before an attendant hurls a bucket of water at me and begins to scour my body (every bit of it, they do not allow for prim) until my eyes water. I catch my breath and look about.

There are 60 or so naked women sitting on a bench that follows the perimeter of the room, dousing themselves with warm spa-water, which pours from wall-mounted spouts.

“So many women,” I observe, while I am having the backs of my knees scrubbed “and all in the nip”. There are thin ones, fat ones, firm ones, soft ones. There are tall ones, small ones and women whose bodies play different halves of the same game: with tiny tops and big bottoms and other women where this principle works in reverse. There are apple shapes, pears, plums and willows. Lots and lots of body parts put together in unique configurations, lathering up and chatting.

Women’s bodies, I muse, but no Sexy Scale. No ticks or loaded sound-bites framing arguments around these bodies, and while my feet are being pumiced pink, it strikes me that all this is about Function, not Form… just bodies being bodies. I make my way to the bench and sit there.

I’m finding it tricky to put a finger on how I’m feeling... but I have to admit it’s close to euphoric.