At New York, Emily Nussbaum has a disturbingly entrancing piece on the mainstreaming of the spa industry. Probably the creepiest angle is the way urban cred seems to require group collaboration in the control of individual bodies for sexually aesthetic purposes. One of the nicer angles is the way Nussbaum seems to suggest that we wouldn't fix the problem by just making sure that 'everyone' got 'the kind of spa treatment only the rich can afford'. There's something apparently irreducibly awkward and uncontrollable about the whole thing. I'm of the mind that our capacity for enduring anxious awkwardness is naturally high and artificially climbing. Confession used to be more of a great purge of agony, but it's still indispensable now, even if we confess to New York writers instead of God. The note I'd end this post on is hit well enough in the piece by Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hoschchild:
At 67, Hochschild has noticed the way these treatments have gone from being “a luxury to a tentative necessity; it’s a redefinition of needs.” And she wonders aloud about what all this means. “Are we subtracting intimacy from other areas of life, in order to get it in this controlled and titrated, professionalized way?” asks Hochschild. “Is there a subtraction, as well as an addition? That would be the question I would ask. Are the women who go to salons just not getting it anywhere, in which case, they’re getting it here? I think we all need a kind of a connection, we need to be touched. But that we’re getting touched for money, in a medicalized, spiritualized way, seems to me something as a culture we could be thinking about. I don’t want to go the route of moralizing this; I think it’s good to be touched, to relax, to be stress free. But it does seem like a symptom that something’s amiss that people actually pay for this.”
And pay, increasingly, under the cultivated impression that there's no good alternative.
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