The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [134]
Nowadays not many people take bubble baths. They say they don’t have the time, but they make time to watch American Idol, right? They are not sufficiently interested in rehearsing the bubble-bath symbology. Advertisers claim their soaps make so much lather that a shower can have the same prestige as the soapy bath. The image of the blissful shower is not about cleanliness. It is about opulence and leisure. By pretending the bubbles were the bliss, instead of the long soak, modern advertisers try to transfer the mythic bliss of the long bath—through the bubbles—to the shower! It works because, though soap is not expensive and leisure is, soap bubbles have come to symbolize the wealth of leisure and can now bring a certain amount of happiness to the ablutory event, even without the leisure. The suds also don’t do their job of enclosing the body when you are standing in a shower, so just being able to create them on a sponge is not that gratifying. Still, the shower has its own pleasures. As humanity has noticed over history, water feels nice. In the shower, the noise of the falling water gives us a moment away from family, phone, and e-mail. As we saw in The Women, the bubble bath hid your body, so that people came in and talked to you, even fought with you.
The shower means a moment of privacy. Advertisers of shower products should shut up about suds and their attendant meanings of luxury, sexiness, and protection and instead remind shoppers to take showers because they feel good, they drown out all our electric bells and beepers, and you get to be alone. If I wanted to make money on shower products, I’d think of something to make you stay in there longer—tingling after-scrub shower lotion, perhaps—and I’d show a model in the shower daydreaming and absentmindedly applying the product while outside the bathroom door her kids holler, dogs bark, phones ring, and e-mail messages chime their arrival. In the 1970s it might have seemed like a good idea to hurry out of the shower and back to the fun, but these days the fun has gotten ubiquitous and overbearing, and we need a break. You can keep your combination shampoo and conditioner. Soap moguls: don’t give them less to do in there; give them more. It is the most peaceful spot in modern life. For many women and men it is also the most private time of their day. Only the car affords them so much privacy, and there the blind but watchful eyes of all the other commuters come in and out of focus with the speed of traffic. Only in the shower is there a total reprieve.
Along with water treatments, spas have often had some kind of program of self-denial built into them. There was indulgence in treatments, but spas were advertised as a place to become healthy, and if you are going to charge someone for something as amorphous as that, you’d better do something to them. It is also true that self-denial works. Often physically and psychologically painful at first, a self-denial routine can come to feel very good—bracing, clear, and bright; it’s often described as feeling as though you had “broken through” to a new place. Even to the extent that self-denial stays painful, it can be very distracting, and sometimes people need distraction. Further, in the past and today, many denial regimes come with a lot of community. In a community of a given regime, the regime puts everyone in a similar mood, and you support one another in the catechism of the doctrine. In general life, in any century, it is not at all obvious how to be virtuous. In a dedicated community, it is clearer; indeed, you can be otherwise