How to love your body the Danish way (hint: you'll need to get naked first)
With my arms clamped tightly to the side of my clammy swimming costume, I face the naked woman who’s gesticulating wildly and firing a torrent of Danish at me. When I haltingly ask her whether she speaks English, she barely pauses for breath before ordering me – in perfect English – to take off my costume and make my way to the communal shower, for reasons of hygiene.
In Denmark it is mandatory to sluice down naked before entering a swimming pool, and they take the rules very seriously. Judging from the streams of women relaxing in the nude, they are so body confident that they jump at any opportunity to take their clothes off anyway.
The women in Nordic-noir dramas are usually attractive, overtly sexual and self-confident, and Saga Norén, the Swedish detective in the Danish police procedural The Bridge will whip off her T-shirt in front of her hard-bitten colleagues without a second thought.
The Danes have even officially been dubbed the most shameless nation in the world, based on research by the University of Zurich. And, after two years of living here, I’ve finally been inspired to learn to love my body the Scandinavian way.
Danish body confidence begins in January. In Denmark nobody bothers to deprive themselves in the cold dark of winter. Last year, my ‘dry January’ met with baffled looks from my Danish friends as they helped themselves to the pastries their country is famous for.
Fretting about the way they look or obsessing over staying in shape isn’t something my slender Scandi friends indulge in because, fittingly for residents of the happiest nation in the world, most of them feel fine just the way they are.
This nonchalant approach spans the ages – if the group of septuagenarian Danes I see plunging naked into the icy sea on my local beach just north of Copenhagen all year around are anything to go by. When I eventually catch up with one on dry land and ask her how she plucks up the courage to bare all, she seems surprised by the stupidity of my question.
‘Have you ever tried to wear a wet swimsuit when the temperature is below five degrees Celsius?’ she asks me. ‘You would not want to!’ The study by the University of Zurich (which seems to have made Danish nudity something of a specialist subject) suggests that Danes are conditioned not to feel shame: a mere 1.62 per cent of the population suffers from gelotophobia, or fear of ridicule, the lowest figure of the any country surveyed.
Of course, Britain topped the gelotophobia charts, with a staggering 13 per cent. Put simply, Danish children don’t grow up paralysed by the fear of being laughed at the way that we do. While I spent my school career avoiding the showers after PE, in Denmark friends tell me they were made to shower together after every class, with no separate cubicles.
Which explains the convivial attitude at my local pool. I have had naked women ask me where I got my shampoo from, remark on my two-and-a-half-year-old’s absurdly curly hair and compliment me on her Danish. While some may while away hours on the treadmill, most Danes achieve their body beautiful by taking a more outdoorsy approach to fitness.
Six out of 10 don’t own cars, and in Copenhagen, where I live, there are more bicycles than people, with 45 per cent of commuterspedalling to work, on specially created, raised bike lanes. But fit or not, few seem to think twice about stripping off.
‘Foreigners often comment on how common it is to find Danes naked in the swimming pool or in the sea,’ a Danish psychologist, Pernille Ianev, tells me. ‘Danes are more liberated than their American and British counterparts. It’s rooted in their history – from the communal showers and baths to women’s liberation in the 1960s. It was quite a Danish phenomenon – camps where people got together and women showed their breasts freely. Nudity is more widely acceptable here and it’s built into the social structure.’
It might be a symptom of their famously egalitarian society, but it is also a manifestation of the Danes’ willingness to follow orders. ‘I can see how it looks to foreigners – you go to the gym and the swimming pool and we are naked, as it’s the rules,’ laughed one of my Danish friends. ‘All the way through kindergarten and grade school you take the showers and that’s just what you do. You get used to it.’
Last year I decided to join them and set myself the goal of learning to love my body Danishly. The first step, according to my friends, was to embrace nudity (while handily following the rules at the same time). My previous changing-room routine had been to wait until the coast was clear, scurry to the pool, avoiding the showers, and jump in as quickly as possible, before anyone could ascertain that my body was bone-dry on entry.
But, my challenge set, I left my British reserve in my locker and took the long walk from the changing room through the showers naked as the day I was born, pausing only to slide into my costume poolside. At first I was nervous, but it soon became liberating.
Being naked in front of other women and not feeling judged made me much more accepting of my own body. And seeing how comfortable all the Danish women were in their own skin made my hang-ups about my lack of pin-up perfection seem petty.
No longer shackled by self-loathing, I feel privileged to swim among the Danish female community at my local pool. So far, I haven’t been brave enough to bare all on the local beach, but as we are knee-deep in a Scandinavian winter, there is no need yet. But, as the days grow longer and summer appears on the horizon, perhaps one day I will take the plunge.
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