My pool employs a rotating cast of dreamy lifeguards hailing from faraway countries. When you first walk in, their deep accents beckon you to sign a form that indemnifies them in case you drown in the three feet of water. Most people, including me, stay fully clothed for this part. I usually strip down to my swimsuit later, huddled under a towel.

Scott compares pool lifeguards to wardens in Foucault’s Panopticon tower, set apart from the nearly naked riffraff:

Lifeguards…must maintain a delicate balance between appearing vigilant in watching over the swimmers and demonstrating that their gaze is nonsexual.…Lifeguards wear a uniform that strips them of their individuality and defines them by their role: like doctors wearing white coats, they show that they are present in a professional capacity and have no other interest in the proceedings.

Then there are the norms related to actually submerging oneself. At my pool, few people go in the water, despite wearing outfits designed expressly for this purpose. Meanwhile, some women do go in the water, but they keep their shorts on, even though they billow up around them like Ursula’s tentacles.

One day, a woman at my pool was wearing a slinky bikini top, which, as the day wore on, strained against the weight of its cargo. As she embarked on a mission toward the beer cooler, one of her agents, perhaps expectedly, went rogue. Everyone stopped and stared at it, even the heretofore-disinterested lifeguard. We then quickly whipped our heads away and pretended to examine the pool water. (To stare longer, as Scott points out, would be to bring “the discreditable stigma of nudity to bear on the individual’s social face.”)

The woman stopped, tucked her boob back in, shrugged, and kept walking. Janet Jackson was pilloried for less, but the pool’s norms are singular, and they contain nipples.

One day recently, my friend got a Groupon for a Korean spa that’s in a local strip mall among karaoke joints and dim sum. The spa is a hidden gem of Asian Northern Virginia, a place where forty dollars buys you up to twelve hours of sweating near strangers.

The thing about this spa is that you are fully naked for part of it. I texted my friend to make sure she knew this, since if this information is sprung on you, it can be jarring. My only experience with public nudity at that point had been in middle school, when I changed in the locker room without a bra on, since I didn’t wear a bra, since I didn’t grow breasts until well into my third decade. Middle school opprobrium ensued, and I haven’t quite felt free to let it all hang out since. I was worried my friend of fifteen years with whom I’ve talked at length about the virtues of the male form would suddenly think I was a lesbian.