The Bath: A Polemic

By Jessi Klein, The New Yorker, May 23rd 2016

1 There are only a few television commercials from my childhood that remain vivid in my
2 memory. Some of them stuck because they were selling products I wanted. At the top of my list
3 was the Snoopy Sno Cone Machine: you stuffed ice in the plastic doghouse roof, then turned a
4 handle a few times, and, voilà, you got a snow cone. Other ads I remember because I was too
5 young to figure out what they were selling. Of these, the one I recall most clearly is the famous
6 spot for Calgon, in which a beautiful woman who’s seriously about to lose her shit tells us about
7 everything that is making her life unmanageable: “The traffic! [Shot of apocalyptic nineteen-
8 seventies traffic.] The boss! [Shot of bald rapey boss yelling into a telephone.] The baby! [Shot
9 of crying infant.] The dog! [Shot of an adorable sheepdog who doesn’t appear to have done
10 anything wrong but whose existence has somehow pushed her over the edge.] That does it!”
11 she declares, submitting to her nervous breakdown. “Calgon, take me away!”

12 Cut to the woman in an enormous round tub overflowing with bubbles. The set was some kind
13 of vast white space ringed with pseudo Greco-Roman columns, but it had the same feeling of
14 remoteness as the sets on “Star Trek”—as if the woman had totally left Earth behind. Even the
15 word “Calgon” seemed galactically foreign, like “Argo.” But wherever the woman was she was
16 happy. “I love it,” she reports from the space tub, finally relaxed.

17 Despite having watched this commercial hundreds of times, I was never clear on what product
18 it was selling. Was it the round tub? If it was just bubble bath, what did that have to do with the
19 dog and the boss and the baby and the traffic?

20 I now realize that I was confused because I didn’t get the notion of a bath as something
21 transporting, an escape from the overwhelming pressures of the average female life. To me a
22 bath was just a bath, and I never particularly liked taking baths. Calgon was selling the bath as
23 a solution to a problem I was too young to understand.

24 Then I grew up. I now know that there is a cottage industry connected to bathing. And although
25 it existed before Oprah, Oprah blew it way up. For years, she has championed the notion of the
26 bath as luxury, as the ultimate, deserved self-indulgence. In a recent issue of O—the magazine
27 for people who love Oprah—she wrote an article about “letting go of things” in which she
28 admitted that her most prized possession was a custom-made bathtub that was hand-carved by
29 Italian stonecutters from a single piece of onyx. She writes, “Those of you that regularly read
30 this column know that bathing is my hobby. I revel in all things that enhance the experience,
31 which is why, over the years, you’ve seen so many bath products on ‘The O List.’ … They delight
32 my senses and help soothe me, body and soul.”

33 O.K., Oprah, we got it.

34 It seems that most women agree with Oprah. They love to take baths. But I never liked to and
35 still don’t. Besides the Calgon ad, there are two other pop-culture images of women in the bath
36 that have stuck in my mind: one is Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman,” submerged in bubbles and
37 rocking out to Prince, happy in the knowledge that soon Richard Gere will buy her out of
38 prostitution. The other is of Glenn Close, at the end of “Fatal Attraction,” apparently drowned by
39 Michael Douglas but then popping up one last time with a kitchen knife before getting shot in
40 the chest and sinking back into the water. I tend to think more about Glenn Close than about
41 Julia Roberts.

42 To me, there has always been something vaguely miserable about bathing. The soaking, the
43 sitting, the water getting dirty and cold, the inevitable random hair floating up against your
44 skin, the pruning. It makes me feel as if I were stewing up the world’s saddest soup out of
45 myself. […] Because I feel less clean than when I got in, I have to take a shower afterward.
46 Ultimately, it feels like I’ve gone backward, hygiene-wise.

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47 But these are just my physical issues with bathing. My conceptual problems begin with the
48 same ideology some adman for Calgon decided to trade on forty years ago: the idea that the
49 bath is the last space a woman can escape to, like a gazelle fleeing a lion by running into water
50 up to her neck. Getting in the bath seems a kind of surrender to the idea that we can’t really
51 make it on land, that we’ve lost the fight for a bedroom corner or even just our own chair in the
52 living room. And, once the bath becomes our last resort, a Stockholm syndrome sets in. We
53 cede all other space to the husband or boyfriend or kids and then convince ourselves that the
54 bath is awesome. Yay, I’m submerged in a watery trough! This is incredible! This is my happy
55 place! I definitely wouldn’t prefer to just be lying in my own bed watching “Bachelor in
56 Paradise”! I would much rather have grainy bath crystals imprinting themselves into my butt
57 than be in my own room! What luxury! This is perfect!

58 I realize I’m being harsh. It’s just that there’s something so sad-lady about the bath to me, so
59 “Cathy”-cartoon. But there is one other point to consider: men don’t take baths. There are
60 exceptions, of course, but like all exceptions they prove the rule. I know men don’t take baths,
61 because I have never known a man who likes to take baths except in cases of extreme medical
62 need. Also, I went on Facebook and conducted a scientific poll, asking hundreds of friends if
63 they knew any men who take baths. The answer was no. Some men wrote of hating baths and
64 finding them disgusting, and being completely bewildered by women’s fascination with them.

65 I asked my husband why he thinks women are so obsessed with baths. “Maybe because women
66 like to smell good?” he said. “Or because they get to use products? Women like products. Oh,
67 or—maybe because they get to be weightless!”

68 The weightlessness was something I hadn’t considered. I remember going to the Hayden
69 Planetarium a few years ago and finding an area where you could stand on different scales to
70 see what you would weigh on other planets. I remember one woman was getting on a scale to
71 find out what she would weigh on the moon, and she handed her purse to her friend. She
72 handed her purse to her friend so that she wouldn’t throw off her weight on the moon.

73 Men do not care about being weightless. But I think there is a bigger reason that they hate
74 baths as much as women love them. I think they sense what I know: that the bath is where you
75 go when you’ve run out of options.

76 I worry that one day I will be a mother who ends up in the bath, reading a water-crinkled book
77 that I’ve been trying to finish for more than a year, squeezing the last gloops of peppermint
78 something or other from a plastic bottle into the water, wishing that there were more spaces for
79 me than this.

80 This is why Virginia Woolf stressed the importance of having a room of one’s own. If you don’t
81 fight for it, don’t insist on it, and don’t sacrifice for it, you might find yourself in that
82 increasingly tepid water, pruning and sweating while you dream of other things.

1) Provide a translation of the second paragraph (lines 12-16)

Cut to the woman in an enormous round tub overflowing with bubbles. The set was
some kind of vast white space ringed with pseudo Greco-Roman columns, but it had
the same feeling of remoteness as the sets on “Star Trek”—as if the woman had
totally left Earth behind. Even the word “Calgon” seemed galactically foreign, like
“Argo.” But wherever the woman was she was happy. “I love it,” she reports from the
space tub, finally relaxed.
2) Comment on the linguistic resources used to describe the Calgon commercial in
lines 5-16.
3) Explain the meaning and morphology of these words as used in the text:
submitting (line 11), revel (30), pruning (44) sets in (52), weightlessness (68)
4) Comment on the use of pronouns in the last paragraph (lines 80-82)
5) Briefly explain the intentionality of the text.
6) Provide a text analysis indicating text-type, genre and linguistic functions.

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