When a nude is an ordeal

One summer five years ago I signed up for an aquagym class at a municipal swimming pool.

You know, that exercise that they take out in the movies to laugh a little at the loss of psychomotricity of older women.

I swallowed a lot of water because my companions, tanned and strong, stroked like mad.

When the class finished, I went after them, dizzy from exhaustion, to the changing rooms where, with an enviable naturalness, they took off their swimsuits and made a gathering as God brought them into the world.

Those women, already lost the narrowness of the waist, exhibiting sagging breasts due to childbirth and the years, located all the fat in the upper body and giving themselves the air of happy hens, made cultural and gastronomic plans, they smeared cream now on their ass, pray in the belly, with energy and skill.

I watched modestly

from my half-open box office, what was undoubtedly a memorable spectacle, because if it is true that literature and cinema always place the pensive woman in front of a mirror, here, in this scene of the municipal locker room, sociability eliminated any trace of self-absorption or self-pity.

It was appreciated that the gathering had been placed with their backs to the large mirror, irrefutable proof that they had overcome that stage of observing their own bodies and those of others, which so absurdly makes life bitter for us.

I see this week the full nude of Emma Thompson in

.

I see it and read the column by Cristina Fallarás, to whom that nudity causes concern.

Me too.

What little delicacy of the director when portraying her.

I am irritated by the hypocrisy of the film industry that, on the one hand, pulls the job of "intimacy coordinator" out of its sleeve to fussily negotiate each shot in which a naked woman (fundamentally young) has to appear and, on the other hand, he considers it courageous that a 63-year-old actress appears in front of the mirror with the face of, “ladies and gentlemen, this is the worst moment of my life”.

And it is that, in the case that concerns us, it was not the character who was shown to us, but the actress herself, to whom the sight of her nudity has always caused anguish.

We live in such a strange moment regarding the exhibition of the body,

that we can go from extreme prudery to an impudent delivery of the most intimate.

I can't understand that getting naked publicly is liberating if you don't enjoy doing it.

It is not Thompson's body that is disturbing, but her face, the face of a woman who is ashamed of her figure

Brave, brave, brave! They have cheered her on.

I wonder what that courage is for, and why it is liberating to cross the barrier of legitimate modesty to appear before others in an act of sacrifice.

It is not Thompson's body that is unsettling, but her face, the face of a woman who is ashamed of her aging figure and tries to gain some kind of recognition for daring to acknowledge her apprehension.

I would like to take her by the hand, her and others, those young girls who are anguished by the irrelevant orange peel skin, myself, and take her, take us, to that women's locker room of a municipal swimming pool where a gang of women, courageous, horny, happy, uninhibited without knowing it, unaware of the applause for a heroism that they do not contemplate, so that they would teach us the best life lesson:

that perhaps luck is reaching a certain age while being healthy and victory overcoming the years of apprehension.

It is possible that we were taught to comment on the milestones and failures of sexual life with irony, without the matter always reaching elements of victimhood and melodrama.

As for the character in the film, what can I say, it occurs to me that, since the lady in the story is only about five years older than me, it is sad that she has never enjoyed an orgasm, and that if she has, it is not just clumsiness of the man, but an incompetence of two, or of her alone, because the women of that generation already knew what the fingers of the hand are for.

It also seems to me a typically masculine dream that of alleviating sexual frustration by resorting to a prostitute who handles the love arts and is understanding: this is how the old masculine literature used to describe good whores.

Own and sad things of this time of extreme exhibition in which everything is naked and confession, even at the cost of showing what we would like to hide.

Perhaps the only secret to mitigate anxiety is, even if it costs us, to look at ourselves one damn time less in the mirror.

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