That's not a tattoo.

Everyone has a breaking point. Mine came when a friend asked me if I had a tattoo on my ankle.

I do not have a tattoo on my ankle.

What appeared to be a tattoo was actually a large circle of dirt and dust that refused to be scrubbed away in the shower, despite numerous, vigorous attempts on my part to make it disappear.

While I’m used to getting a little dirty in the United States, it’s easy to make myself as good as new with a hot shower. Here, the dirt permeates my entire being; it’s difficult to distinguish my feet from my tan sandals and a layer of dust covers exposed skin almost immediately after venturing outside. Attacking this level of filth with a regular shower is completely and utterly futile.

This is where hammams enter the picture. Hammams are communal saunas, and they are a staple of Moroccan life. While I didn’t go to the hammam when I studied abroad here two years ago, this time around it’s completely necessary. Maybe it’s because Fes’s climate is more arid, or maybe it’s because I’m doing more walking this time around, but I’m way dirtier here that I ever was in Rabat. Whatever the reason, it was more than necessary for me to hit the hammam.

The hammam is a social activity as well as a hygienic one, so I made my first trip with my friends Megan and Stephanie. Armed with our hammam gear (a large plastic bucket, small plastic bowl, loofah, shampoo, and a change of clothes), we walked down Talaa Kaber, one of the main arteries of the Fes medina, to our chosen hammam.

18th and 19th century European art is fascinated with the Middle East; more often than not, this art depicts life in the Muslim world as exotic and sensual. This exotic lens is especially noticeable when these artists show women-only settings, such as bath houses and harems. In the eyes of these artists, Middle Eastern women are sensual, passive, and sexually uninhibited.

Of course, I’d always assumed that this depiction was ridiculous, a product of Orientalism and patriarchal times. My theory was proved correct immediately after I entered the hammam, and, by the time I left the building more than an hour later, I couldn’t help but think of this art as completely disconnected from reality.

So, here’s how the hammam works: The first room is essentially a women-only locker room, where women of various shapes, sizes, and ages walk around in nothing but their underwear. My friends and I had opted to pay extra for a personal massage, so this was where we first met our masseuse, Chadija, a fifty-something woman with extremely hairy legs.

After we got undressed, Chadija lead us commandingly into the second room, a large, tiled steam room, where hammam-goers sat on the floor (on their mats) surrounded by buckets of water. We sat cross-legged on our mats. After a few minutes of chatting and sweating profusely, Chadija returned and sat on the floor next to me. At this point I should mention that, while this was my first time at the hammam, it was not the first time for Stephanie and Megan. And so, when Chadija yanked me over to her (I slid across the wet floor) and began to wash my hair, I was a little disgruntled that I couldn’t watch the whole experience happen to someone else before I experienced it myself.

The real fun began after Chadija washed my hair. She grabbed a loofah and aggressively scrubbed down my entire body. Dead skin was literally rolling off of me. At one point, she told me to “Shuuf!” (Look!) at a particularly disgusting hunk of grime; you know it’s bad when you’re impressing a professional with how dirty you are. After Megan and Stephanie were scrubbed off, Chadija left us again, and when she returned she gave us each an equally vigorous full-body massage. Of course, I went first again. Then, Chadija ushered us into the third and final room, where she unceremoniously dumped large buckets of water over our heads and then brought us back to the locker room, where we changed and emerged onto the street a much cleaner group of women.

I had survived my first hammam experience.

What struck me the most about my experience was how completely uninhibited the women were with each other. In the United States, women are conditioned to hate their bodies from an early age- We’re not thin enough, tall enough, our hair is too frizzy, our pores are too big, etc., etc. We’re constantly in competition with our peers to be the most “beautiful.” At the hammam, there’s no competition, no insecurity; it’s simply women enjoying an hour or two in the steam room with their friends and family. Which is why it’s completely ridiculous that artists sexualize the hammam- It’s an experience that couldn’t be less about men.

Without delving into the topic of gender roles in Morocco (I’ll save that for another day), I will say that, while the Western media loves to condemn Muslim countries for what they perceive to be oppression of women, nowhere in the United States can women feel as comfortable with each other as Moroccan women do in hammams. And maybe that speaks volumes about our own culture treats women. Just a thought.