I’m in the area just outside of the sauna and bathing pools, where women come to towel off, dry their hair, and put on makeup. I’m trying to work my way through something on my mind, but I keep getting distracted by the woman next to me, who is putting on lotion loudly and deliberately. She begins with her stomach. It is the stomach of a woman who has birthed children — filled out, lined, round, and wide — and with her open hands, she starts from the sides, slapping the lotion on and pushing the flesh up, momentarily smoothing her skin and waist, fighting the toll of years and gravity. She works on this area for a while, molding and pulling and shaping, all while studying herself in the mirror with, I think, satisfaction.

The patting, slapping, and kneading keep pulling me from my thoughts, punctuating them with irregular bursts of sound and motion. I watch her, trying to pinpoint the source of my annoyance — everyone is working through their body rituals here, putting themselves together before heading back out into the world. She makes more noise than the others; her gestures are more dramatic. The performance strikes me as self-indulgent and vain.

And yet I also admire her. If I had a daughter, I would want her to see this. I would want her to be here with me, looking at the women in this room: young girls at the brink of puberty, their breasts just starting to round, old women with skin hanging about them like folds of drapery, stooped and walking gingerly on the damp floor. Their bodies provide a record of their lives: scars of surgery or injury, calloused hands, and muscled arms, breasts, and hips transformed through childbearing and nursing.

If I had a daughter, I would monitor and manipulate the demographics of her visual space. I wouldn’t want her to associate women’s bodies with Britney’s latest panty-less flash or the bony stares of supermodels or Girls Gone Wild. I would want her to have a good sense of the life-cycle of the human body. Here in the bath she could get a more accurate picture of the range of the normal.

The nudity of the women in the bath isn’t in the service of provocation, seduction, or titillation. I’m happy that women are free to be sexual beings, but what happened to the rest of it? I would want to shape the boundaries of my daughter’s visual environment, hoping to influence the way she sees her own body as something that exists, not just to court someone else’s gaze. As Lance Mannion once wrote, “The constant fetishization and eroticization of female beauty in magazines and on TV teaches many women to fetishize their own bodies.”

The woman next to me has moved on to her thighs. I admire her skin; it looks soft, smooth, and well cared for. She bends down and grunts a little as she wrangles the flesh of her upper legs, massaging as she goes. The flesh on her back and arms is pink from scrubbing. She turns to her face, applying toner and various lotions in well-practiced order, smoothing her skin from neck to chin and from jaw-line to cheekbone, always up up up, a mini massage facelift. She watches herself in the mirror, focused although the motions look automatic, perfected over years of repetition of this ritual.

Americans obsess over our bodies, but we’re not supposed to seem obsessed. We each have our own rituals — masks, manicures, diets, medications — but they are not public, they are secret, undercover. There is a publicness about the body here in the bath which both repels and fascinates me.

Standing there, looking at my own collection of lotions and potions, I try to unpack the meaning of this woman’s gestures, to imagine myself into her head. She watches herself in the mirror, seeming unaware of me watching although I don’t discount the idea that she may be performing for some imagined audience. She carefully sculpts herself, tracing the contours of the body she has and wants, reacquainting herself with the creases and surfaces. These are my thighs, this is my stomach, this is the shape of my bottom, this is what my skin feels like. This is a ritual re-making of her body. By lavishing attention upon herself, she declares her ownership and control. Deliberately tending to her body and unashamedly spending time on it speaks to her sense of care-taking, cultivation, and transformation.

There’s a pleasure in her movements. I pause, thinking of my hypothetical daughter, wishing to retrieve for her the full range of bodily pleasure. Sexual pleasure, of course. Having come from the kind of cold day when the wind seems to cut through my coat, the pleasure of sinking into a pool of hot water. The feeling of letting a good piece of chocolate dissolve around my tongue. The pleasure of cuddling a chubby three-year-old who loves me above all. The relief of someone scratching my back exactly where it itches. The permeating heavy lightness of laying down in my own bed after a long day. The pleasant kind of soreness I experience after a good workout that allows me to feel and appreciate every different muscle. The exhilaration of running really fast, of feeling my body and breath find its own harmonic rhythm, of moving through space with what I imagine to be grace and agility, if only for a short time.

The pleasure I take in performing feats of athleticism, in the feeling of physical power, is not so different from this woman’s pleasure, I think in a flash. Maybe this woman would find me grotesque, the way I walk fast, arriving places sweaty and slightly disheveled. The way I take the stairs two at a time and throw cartwheels in the playground. Maybe she would think of me disgustingly and dramatically physical, indelicate, unfeminine. But walking fast and taking the steps are the way I worship myself, the way I remind myself of the enjoyment of being embodied and healthy and alive.

I stand there and dry my hair, untangling the strands, remembering a Bitch PhD post I read years ago describing a trip to the locker room. Many commenters spoke about the difficulty of feeling attractive and comfortable with one’s body as it ages. I remember thinking that feeling attractive and comfortable were not necessarily related. One may influence the other, but perhaps part of being comfortable is inhabiting the body without feeling that the body’s sole purpose is to attract. Perhaps the power and pleasure of the women’s after-bath ritual and my own quick stride come because I am aging, and I sense my body changing under my fingertips. One could, I suppose, read this woman’s dogged massaging as evidence of dissatisfaction. I don’t remember even paying much attention to my skin or my hands until I started to realize that both were changing, losing elasticity, wrinkling, and spotting. As my friend Ming once observed, “The older I get, the more different types of lotion I own.” I don’t remember if I felt such joy at the ability of my muscles to remember how to jump when jumping was so easy — then, I was just hungry for the next accomplishment. Now I appreciate the ability to lift off this earth even though returning with a thud makes my knees ache.

Perhaps it is the silent threat of age and entropy that makes me imagine having a daughter when I come here. I look around and see my past and my future; the body in front of me in the mirror is not the same as it will be tomorrow. The woman next to me is putting her belongings back in the carrying case, ready to return to her locker and get dressed. I loop my key around my wrist, having completely forgotten whatever it was I was trying to concentrate on before.