"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society"...Mark Twain
Apparently, Samuel Langhorne Clemens was not familiar with the University Club, or the New York Racquet & Tennis Club...both located in Manhattan. Both clubs harbor one of the last vestiges of a blue-blood, male-bonding culture...men-only pools where skinny-dipping is the norm.
The New York Racquet and Tennis Club, located at 370 Park Ave. in Manhattan, was built in 1919 (see link). Five recommendations are needed for admission. Members include Michael Bloomberg and Henry Kravis. On the top floor is a smallish pool, where the old-boy ritual of nude swimming endures.
"If you meet someone swimming naked in a pool, surely you're going to do much better in an interview with them," says a 24-year-old bond trader. Of course.
"It's a matter of the WASP ethic. What goes on at the R.T.C. stays at the R.T.C. We don't want the general public having a peek at the last bastion of old-school pleasure, the last oasis," says an investment banker. Of course not.
The University Club, 1 West 54th Ave. in Manhattan was completed in 1899 (see link). Originally, the club was intended as a meeting place for the graduates of America's top universities. Today, it is a refuge from the hoi polloi.
"It's really meant to be a leisure pool. At boarding school everyone showers in gang showers. It was like a social occasion. It's not a far leap to make a connection between showering at prep school and naked swimming in New York."
Male nude bathing has been around since the time of ancient Greece, where older Athenian men regarding the viewing of young men undergoing physical and military training, as a spectator sport. In the early 1900's, naked swimming and nudity regained wide acceptance, after the restrictive mores of the Victorian era. Indeed, 100+ years ago, medical authorities regarded a thick dirt crust on ones own skin as the best protection against the disease and filth of the cities.
For those of you who want to read more on this topic, please refer to this article in yesterday's NYTimes, The Tao of Skinny-Dipping. For the rest of you, whose networking tastes are more plebian, stay tuned next week.
You can’t change who you are. You can only change what you know and how you apply this knowledge
Posted by: Onitsuka Tiger | February 01, 2012 at 08:54 PM