Public bathing has a long history. Although the ancient Greek men practiced nudity in the Gymnasium, it was not acceptable for the women to view the men naked nor for the women to participate in social nudity, even among themselves. Even the original, nude Olympic games were only attended by men.

During the Ottoman Empire, public baths were established and widely used. The baths had both a religious and popular origin deriving from the Koran (ablutions ritual) and the use of steamrooms by the Turks and the Mongols.

In The Book of the Bath, Françoise de Bonneville wrote, "The history of public baths begins in Greece in the sixth century B.C.," where men and women washed in basins near places of exercise, physical and intellectual. Later gymnasia had indoor basins set overhead, the open maws of marble lions offering showers, and circular pools with tiers of steps for lounging.

Bathing was ritualized, becoming an art -- of cleansing sands, hot water, hot air in dark vaulted "vapor baths," a cooling plunge, a rubdown with aromatic oils. Cities all over Ancient Greece honored sites where "young ephebes stood and splashed water over their bodies."

Romans adopted this Greek model of "warmth and conviviality," if with their usual excess. The first public thermae of 19 BC had a rotunda 25 meters across, circled by small rooms, set in a park with artificial river and pool. By 300 AD the Baths of Diocletian would cover 1.5 million square feet, soaring granite and porphry sheltering 3,000 bathers a day.

Roman baths became "something like a cross between an acquacentre and a theme park," with pools, game rooms, gardens, even libraries and theatres.

Men and women had mixed freely at the Baths of Caracalla; "licentiousness" (mixed and otherwise) soon brought laws to suppress it. Few worked. In 320 AD women were barred from the thermae. At the end of that century St John Chrysostom, Patriarch of Constantinople, banned baths altogether.

In Japan, nude communal bathing for men, women and children at the local public bath, or sento, was a daily fact of life until the mid-1800s and an increase in Western influences.

Public baths today

Public baths survive today in a number of countries. For example, most Westerners probably assume that the Muslim woman's prim public persona carries over into her private life. Despite the outward conservatism and plainness of dress, a woman may wear perfume, makeup, and even heels under the burkha. (A Muslim woman does not wear the hijab in the company of her husband, family, or other intimates, or necessarily when solely in the company of other women.) Because of the social restrictions placed on women in Muslim society, the Muslim bathhouse or hammam serves as a public bath and social center in many communities where families don't have showers or tubs at home.

The Muslim faith includes ritual purification, usually in the local hammam. There are typically separate baths for men and women, or, when there is only one bathhouse in the town, different days or times of day are allocated for men and women.

For a Westerner unused to the experience of social nudity, they may be surprised at the lack of self-conciousness about bodies and nakedness among the women or men within the hammas. A Westerner visiting a Muslim bathhouse will see that these conservative people are very much at ease with their bodies, much more so than the supposedly more liberal western visitors.

Individuals entering a hammas strip down to their briefs and begin a five-step process. The hammas usually has three rooms: the 'Istraha' is the rest salon, where visitors are received and are un-robed.

Then you enter a temperate bath to help your body begin adjusting to the heat ahead. That is followed by a steamroom, which is heated by a stream of heated water circulating under the stone slabs or floor.

Once you have achieved a good sweat, you then proceed on to another warm room, where the Hamami greets you. Having paid a fee, this is the person who gives you a vigorous massage, usually including moving the body through some extreme manipulations. For the massage, individuals lay down on a heated, raised stone slab or on the hot floor itself. This is followed by a scrubbing with a stiff brush that literally removes the outer layer of skin.

Traditionally, when baths were infrequent in hot climates, body hair contributed to body odor. After the scrubbing, the attendant uses an exfoliating soap and further scrubbing to remove all body hair. For those unused to naked genitals, the hair removal can be a shock. This is followed by further soaping and rinsing. Finally, you move to a cooler room and sip tea, water or juice, relaxing before you step back into the real world.

In the Western world, the difference between United States, European, and Middle-eastern attitudes towards women's bodies, nudity and sexuality in general are quite extreme. For example, an Arabic women of one culture would experience greater shame in having her face seen unveiled than her breasts or even her pubic region exposed. Meanwhile, in most western European countries, females often and routinely go topless at beaches and public bathing facilities. In some locations in Germany, Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands, public nudity is socially acceptable at beaches, lakes, and pools.

Bodily perfection and self-consciousness

In what some see as the prudish United States, women strive to achieve a bodily perfection yet are often uncomfortable in situations requiring nudity, like the shower at the local gym. For Muslim women, not usually seen in public, the hammam is a social center where they feel no self-consciousness about their bodies and where they can catch up on each other's lives and socialize.

Public baths do not exist per se in United States today, except in certain resorts and isolated locations. For example, Esalen on the Big Sur coast of California is famous for its cliff-side hot springs. At Esalen, the baths are only open to guests during the day, but in the early morning hours the baths are open to the public and coed for all. Tassajara Zen Center, inland from Esalen, has baths that are open to practitioners during the winter and to paying day and overnight guests during the summer. These are segregated during the day, and the men's bath is coed in the evening. Like the hammam, these resorts require you to shower first. There are numerous hot springs, developed and undeveloped, around the United States. At some developed resorts, like Harbin Hot Springs in Northern California, all of the guests in the coed baths are nude.

In Germany, public baths have been a developed institution for many years. Even the repressive East German government permitted social nudity during its years in power.