Locker Room Nudity and America’s Fear of Being Naked

I lived in Reykjavík for a year in 2011, doing fieldwork for my PhD. The best thing about living there—better than the Northern Lights, better than the glaciers and volcanoes, better even than the fact that nobody locks their doors—was the public pools. They’re geothermally heated and open all winter, with ice coating the decks and steam rising off the water like the River Styx with lap lanes. The smell of sulphur rises with the steam. It seeps up from where the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is slowly splitting the island in two.

The Icelanders don’t put any chemicals in their pools. So in order to protect them from the hundreds of thousands of tourists, a sundlaugarvörður—literally “swimming-pool guard” in Icelandic—stands outside the locker room to make sure everyone showers naked before they get in the water. In the summer, when tourists outnumber the locals two to one, I’d hear her shouting, always in Icelandic, usually at some American trying to sneak past with dry hair.

I used to go to these pools every day before work. One morning I walked out onto the deck when, suddenly, one of the older guards started shouting at me. Confused, and a little irritated—I wasn’t a tourist, I’d been coming to this pool for months—I pointed at my wet hair. When that didn’t seem to help, I held up my goggles to show her I was ready to do my laps. I’d left them behind in the locker room so many times that I decided if it wasn’t about the showers, it had to be about the goggles: I have my fucking goggles, Gudrun! It took a full minute of her yelling in Icelandic and me flailing my arms around indignantly before I noticed a half-dozen people staring at me from the edge of the pool.

Then I looked down and realised I was standing on the deck completely naked. I’d got so used to being undressed in the locker room and the communal showers that I’d forgotten to put my bathing suit back on.

Even in a Nordic country where everyone was comfortable being naked, this was a bit much. Still, compared to America, Iceland might as well have been a nudist colony.

When did Americans get so uncomfortable being naked in front of each other? In the eighties most kids who went to public school had to take a shower after gym. I was born in 1969, and most men my age have some story about a kid who supposedly got a boner in the communal showers or locker room. I remember a friend of mine in seventh grade looking over at me and smiling as he pissed on the back of the kid showering next to him.