Bathing Beauties

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Early in the morning or late at night there might be only two or three showerers in the BIK, but at rush hours like right before Shabbat or just after swim, there's hardly standing room. The building is intended for use by campers 12 or 13 and older, but as the single-shower stalls in the younger kids' bunks inevitably break and flood, they often use the BIK regularly, too.

In the BIK, a 10-year-old camper rinsing off after a swim might suddenly find herself in a room full of naked singing 15-year-olds and counselors -- and maybe a nurse or lifeguard or two -- every one of them exhibiting an impressive ease with exposing their differently shaped bodies. "It's like the Great Equalizer," said Toni through a mouthful of Cheerios, "a place where you see all these differently shaped bodies that make you realize how ridiculous it would be to spend every minute of every day miserable about how you look."

"And when you're 8 or 10 or 12," someone else chimed in, "and you see all the older girls you completely idolize having very not ideal bodies, but they're singing and chatting and doing the naked hokey-pokey, discussing what kind of potato chip they like, you see that they're 100 percent comfortable being naked, and you want to have that comfort, too."

The lessons we learned at the BIK are profound (and extremely countercultural). Here are six properties that I think made the BIK work for us:

It requires an initial leap of faith. When a girl first steps into the BIK naked (a lot of girls start out showering in their bathing suits, and then there's that day when they "take it all off"), it's scary. You have to pretend you feel fine when you really don't, hoping that pretending turns into the real thing. It does.

There's a culture of support. The larger culture makes you feel inadequate, and the truth is that the constant competition is exhausting. The BIK is a relief from that. Everyone who steps into the BIK is affirming an implicit covenant: We support one another. Being naked was (or is) difficult for every single one of us -- and that creates a feeling of safety.

It's multigenerational. The larger culture is pretty age-segregated, so the 8-to-25-year-old population of the BIK is unique. For younger girls, being able to identify with older females is a source of pride. The older girls and counselors, for their part, know that they are role models for the young showerers, and having that "responsibility" provides a potent incentive to be, as one counselor told me, "positive and open and free about our bodies."

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