Spas: The Harem of the Aughts

A spa carries a certain exotic charm. Spas pride themselves on their strangest looking flowers, the amount of little waterfalls in their lobbies and the array of foreign teas in their selection. The feeling of a spa must have an exclusive eroticism while being inclusive to anyone willing or worthy of a treatment that will better them mentally and physically. Spas were originally the baths of the Romans or the saunas of the Finnish, among other cultures that sought spas as a medical treatment, there is an interesting juxtaposition where spas are not only places to become physically well, but becoming instantly more beautiful. In a time when people only acknowledge instant results, spas seem to have become more repair places than places of healing.

On my way to The Elizabeth Arden Red Door Salon on 5th Ave in midtown Manhattan an orchid petal lay on the crosshatching of the subway stairs. The Red Door Spa has recently celebrated its 100th anniversary. I was beginning to wonder if the flower would be a symbol of the skewed sense of beauty I was about to see. The secretary, with a beautiful maquillaged face was animate about the amount of celebrities whom they service. The place had a pristine red and white color scheme. The colors emulated a kind of feminine eroticism and purity all at once. Ironically, the only women there were over 60 and botoxed. "We do a lot of sessions outside of our spa." The Secretary added, "for- privacy reasons." She emphasized the word privacy and smiled. The place was pretentiously both welcoming to me- a young lady who obviously did not have the money to spend there and utterly secretive. Most of the doors were closed. Though they were happy to welcome me around their four floor establishment there was little room for exploration. I left with the place still a mystery to me, the hallways of rooms, caverns of mysterious goings on. The way to beauty, it seemed to say, is a magically exotic secret.

Why do women feel as though they need to spa? Spas are different from salons in that they offer a wider selection of services. People are expected to stay longer in spa, which offer entire days their clients to whom they may offer champagne or food. It is important to regard the different between a day spa and a salon because they have different intentions, while a day spa offers an apparently more “medical” day, the salon just offers beauty treatments. A spa day is a "me" day, it is a day to nurture the self, to come in a mess and leave cleansed. With the naked women lounging in the California spa that my mother took me to when I was 13, I could not help but remember the paintings of the harem women of Delacroix and Ingres. The spa was a place to me that was exclusive to women, and women who wanted to become beautiful. The services within spas have changed over centuries, where the first spas were mineral baths, they have expanded to doing services like botox and anal bleaching. Returning to my memory of the spa in California, I cannot help but think that spas have developed from the Orientalist art of the 17th century. Within the spa, like within the harem, things go on that are forbidden, private and mysterious. A woman can come into a spa one person and, rather than leaving in a cleansed spiritual state, they are leaving in a physically altered state, a physically "perfected" state. In the same way the women of the harem were owned by the men, these women coming to spas, to "treat themselves" are coming to change their bodies to become more aesthetically pleasing to men. The treatments that spas offer now cater to our need for instantaneous gratification. The treatment within the spas have the same mystique, the same decor, even: erotic and secretive. And though women are "doing it for themselves" they come out more reformed to a male gaze Spas will never leave existence, and, what spas where and what they offer is for the most part healthy and important to society. People must be healed through massage and baths. A spa is not something that should offer the instant gratification of transforming oneself physically. If there is confusion between turning a person physically into something that they are not and making them feel as though they are being healed through that process, then we have a problem. Beauty is health, beauty is not the beauty of what the male eye sees peaking through the keyhole of the harem. And spas are right in the sense that beauty must be found within, and the insides of people are very magical and cavernous places.