Naked Water
“The Bath is an animal instinct: and, par excellence, a human instinct; it is as much a necessity of our nature as drink. We drink because we thirst—an interior sense. We bathe because water, the material of drink, is a desire of outward man—an exterior sense.”
—Sir Erasmus Wilson
Water, too, can be naked, and we should not ignore this subtle facet of its elemental comportment. In a way, the transformation of matter from liquid to vapor mirrors the process of disrobing. Its burdens are cast off, exposing a concealed body underneath. The dense carapace gets stripped away from a wisp of flesh: like opening a milkweed pod. Steam, in its vanity, is a committed exhibitionist. Or is it that the architecture of the bathhouse is essentially voyeuristic? The chamber shelters and conceals the vapor, while bathers fix their gaze to water-in-the-nude, catching glimpses of water’s bare bottom. The appearance of steam naturally lends itself to being gazed at. It performs an enigmatic dance through the interplay of matter and spatial disclosure, folding-in on itself over and over.
We can imagine steam as autoerotic water, as water washing and caressing its own materiality, exciting itself to the point of transcendence. This is perhaps why the emission of steam generates such a universally pleasurable and comforting response in the body. The primacy of the skin in all steam cultures, from the gay bathhouse to the ritualized Turkish hamâm, and the immediate contact of the skin with the world, is derived from the eros of steam, the joyful allure it carries through sensate textures and movements.
Nowhere is the erotic image of bathing more important than for the Greeks. The gymnasion, containing at its root gymnós(meaning nudity), always poses a particular jealous worry in the mind of the older lover: that his beloved, exhibiting his boyish physique, may be seduced by the virtue and wisdom of another man. Roberto Calasso recounts this precarious state of affairs: “…his beloved will go to the gymnasium accompanied by a lynx-eyed pedagogue hired by the boy’s father precisely to prevent him from listening to the advances of any would-be lover lying in wait.” For the Greeks, the gymnasium is the ideal institution for observing the beauty of the nude male form, where young men display their physical strength and skill, where they bathe and socialize, often at the exclusion of what they saw as that more troublesome aesthetic of feminine beauty:
“Better for men the sweat and dust of the gymnasium. ‘Boys’ sweat has a finer smell than anything in a woman’s makeup box.’”
In contrast to the male body on public display, the attitudes of Greek men towards female bodies were often associated with bathing by way of privacy and intrusion. Plato notes that the unsightly nudity of women, exercising publicly alongside men at the palaestra, would certainly be met with ridicule. A sort of anxiety and confusion reigns over the Greek male’s rejection of the feminine, perhaps, as Calasso argues, a fear that womanhood might elude him.
In any case, we see in later depictions of mythology, such as Titian’s Diana and Actaeon, a definitive unease in the spectacle of the feminine, as the young hunter-turned-voyeur catches the virgin goddess by surprise while she bathes with her nymphs. But by the time bathing pools became a much more pronounced feature of city life, in ancient Rome for example, women were assigned their own pools, apart from those of men. Given the centrality of the thermae for the communal and social life of the Roman citizen, the division of men and women indicates not only a prescriptive attitude towards the relationship between sexuality and nudity, but also that this sense of community was categorically gendered. Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s painting, A Favourite Custom, faithfully reconstructs everyday life set at the Stabian Baths of Pompeii, emphasizing this communal Roman image of bathing, perhaps in contrast to the erotic masculine anxieties of the Greek gymnasium.
Another appeal to the erotic is famously made with the institution of “Adam and Eve’s Pools” in Bacon’s New Atlantis. The Jewish merchant Joabin explains that these bathing pools are used by the Bensalemites for the purpose of coupling prospective husbands and wives by allowing each gender to send a proxy voyeur in order to guarantee the other’s physical suitability prior to marriage. The allusion here to the biblical Joab and to King David, who sees the wife of Uriah the Hittite bathing in the nude, suggests a strange moral ambiguity in the institution of sexualized bathing. Like with Titian’s portrait of Actaeon the hunter encountering Diana, Bacon seems to exploit a deeply embedded historical connection between voyeurism and the private or gendered ritual cleansing of the body.
Perhaps, then, as much as the Eastern bath can be associated with community, health, and leisure, the practice of bathing in the West has been stained with these images of temptation and forbidden sexuality. The private bath is now the place to apply ointments and salves, bath salts and designer soaps, all with the eros of that same thoroughgoing self-indulgence that good marketing relies on. The television commercial is a peep-show, secretly looking in upon the young woman as she lathers a candy-scented shampoo into her hair. Unlike the bathhouse, the bathroom’s organizing principle is individualism, removing the ritual from communal space and reinventing the bathscape with the equivalent of a kind of bathing Protestantism. The expert bath attendant is replaced by total democratization: the technological apparatus is now the sole authority. And the buying and selling of cosmetic or hygienic products is proportional to the fetishization of both the bathwater and the bather.
