#communal bathing

and I thought about the sad like water box I was standing in, positively claustrophobic, like the size of a refrigerator. I looked at my sister’s back scrubber

and I thought about communal bathing and how america is fucking missing out because we’ve decided that all nudity is sexual nudity, when the easiest way to get your backed scrubbed properly is to ask your friend and return the favor.

(source: bathing in the lake like savages, featuring my friends and I)

Combating Urban Alienation – Communal Bathing and Public Bath Houses

At first blush, it seems a bit quaint and slightly repulsive to think that a communal bathing facility would be a good thing for our society.  I do however, recognize that my initial distaste for the idea is centred on what here in the West we like to call our ‘rugged individualistic’ impulse.  But, as Jamie Mackay writes, “It is often forgotten that the Roman baths were a space where people of…

Jamie Mackay, Aeon, October 12, 2016

For most of the history of our species, in most parts of the world, bathing has been a collective act. In ancient Asia, the practice was a religious ritual believed to have medical benefits related to the purification of the soul and body. For the Greeks, the baths were associated with self-expression, song, dance, and sport, while in Rome they served as community centers, places to eat, exercise, read, and debate politics.

But communal bathing is rare in the modern world. While there are places where it remains an important part of social life--in Japan, Sweden, and Turkey, for example--for those living in major cities, particularly in the Anglosphere, the practice is virtually extinct. The vast majority of people in London, New York, and Sydney have become used to washing alone, at home, in plexi-glass containers--showering as a functional action, to clean one’s own private body in the fastest and most efficient way possible.

The eclipse of communal bathing is one symptom of a wider global transformation, away from small societies to vast urban metropolises populated by loose networks of private individuals. This movement has been accompanied by extraordinary benefits, such as the mass availability and movement of services and commodities, but it has also contributed to rampant loneliness, apathy, and the emergence of new psychological phenomena, from depression to panic and social anxiety disorders. “Urban alienation,” a term much-used by sociologists at the start of the 20th century, has become a cliché for describing today’s world.

It is difficult to imagine a more powerful counter-image to the dominant picture of modernity than the archetypal bathhouse. Of course, these spaces vary greatly. The Japanese sento, with its strict rules and fastidious emphasis on hygiene, could hardly be more different from the infamously squalid wash houses of Victorian Britain. Hungary’s vast fürdo, some of which spread over several floors, provide a different emotional experience to the intensity of the lakóta sweat-lodge of Native America. What links all these examples, however, is the role such spaces have in bringing together people who might otherwise remain separate, and placing them in a situation of direct physical contact. It is this aspect of proximity that remains significant today.

Reintroducing bathhouses with such a principle in mind could be a means of tackling the loneliness of living in contemporary megacities. These would not be the luxury spas and beauty salons that promise eternal youth for those who can afford them, nor the gay bathhouses of the world’s metropolises, but real public spaces: cheap, multi-purpose, and accessible to all.

Today, many people are turning to yoga, mindfulness, and other mind-body practices as a private means of resolving the sense of “disembodiment” that can arise from a cramped life spent in metro carriages and hunched over computer screens. The bathhouse could provide a similar space to focus on the body but it would do so at the collective level, bringing corporeality and touch back into the sphere of social interaction. The Japanese call this hadaka no tsukiai (“naked association”) or, in the words of a new generation, “skinship.”

This is a simple principle: that being physically present with one another makes us more aware of ourselves, and those around us, as biological--not purely linguistic and intellectual--organisms. The ghostly figures that slide past on trains and buses can, in such a space, cease to appear as abstract ideas or numbers and become human once again.

It is often forgotten that the Roman baths were a space where people of different social classes would wash side by side. Throughout the Empire, the bathhouse played a democratizing role in which different races and ages were brought into contact. According to the historian Mary Beard, even the emperor, admittedly protected by bodyguards and a team of slaves, would frequently bathe with the people. This naked cosmopolitanism was an important reference point for citizens and, as many histories attest, a key part of Rome’s appeal. Directly experiencing other real bodies, touching and smelling them, is also an important way of understanding our own bodies which otherwise must be interpreted through the often distorted, sanitized, and Photoshopped mirrors of advertising, film, and other media.

Living in a society where actual nudity has been eclipsed by idealized or pornographic images of it, many of us are, independently of our will, disgusted by hairy backs, flabby bellies, and “strange-looking” nipples. The relatively liberal attitude towards such issues in countries such as Denmark, where nudity in the bathhouse is the norm, exemplifies how the practice might help renormalize a basic sense of diversity and break through the rigid laws that regulate the so-called “normal body.”