In the midst of the turbulence of the pandemic, I managed to make life even more difficult for myself by moving hemispheres and starting a master’s degree. This time last year, I was meeting with a lawyer in a stylish office in Melbourne, Australia, to discuss applying for a permanent work visa. As I write this now, I’m sitting in the spare bedroom of my family’s house in a small village in the north of England. I’ve swapped pencil skirts and weekend trips to the beach for permanent joggers and going absolutely nowhere. I’m also sharing the little house with my mum and stepdad, both of them teachers, all three of us working from different rooms. The sounds of their lessons drift through the walls: Art and philosophy. My mum is teaching a module on Judaism.
So where can you escape to, when you can’t go anywhere? After a tense day spent switching between screens of various sizes, trapped inside and soaking up the stress of the unfolding global catastrophe, I slip into the bath.
My ritual begins as I close down my laptop and put my phone on charge. I take a book, a proper paperback—and not one of the classics I’d made myself read in the first lockdown. I’m re-reading old favourites like Terry Pratchett’s Witches and Guards series. I carefully double cleanse with K and J beauty products as the bath fills with boiling hot water and the bathroom mirror softly fogs up. I pour in a “bath honey”—some kind of expensive bubble bath—that smells of rose and frankincense, which my mum bought me for Christmas. I light scented candles around the room. I climb in and soak a washcloth in the hot water, then place it over my face.
“The male gaze has subverted the core pleasure of bathing, which is to be in a space of self-care and intimacy.”
The image of a woman bathing in candlelight is pretty familiar to us all. Scenes of bathing women are ubiquitous in art, from Roman mosaics to group scenes in Japanese onsen to the steamy, intimate portraits by impressionists like Renoir or Degas. The painting of Ophelia by Milllais (while not bathing, but depicting a drowning) is iconic; fewer people know that the model, Lizzie Siddal, caught pneumonia while lying in cold bath water as she posed for the painting. Since most of the celebrated artists through time have been straight men, and since their patrons were also for the most part straight men, these works are framed for the male gaze. The male gaze projects heterosexual lust onto women’s body. In these artistic depictions, bathing isn’t a private or intimate moment: It is a lascivious one, arranged for the male painter and male viewer. There’s a theory that the male gaze is so pervasive across time and media—from mosaics to film to video games—that women have internalized it, and, even when entirely alone, still view their own body through the male gaze. This subverts the core pleasure of bathing, which is to be in a space of self-care and intimacy; the joy of solo or group bathing is the pleasure of being partially or wholly unobserved in the steam.
So how do we fight back against the male gaze? Perhaps by queering spaces and activities traditionally co-opted by men, such as bathhouses. While much has been written and celebrated about the history of bathhouses as a place for men to meet men, less has been said about women’s queer experiences with these places. In a 2009 paper, Corie Hammers examines Canada’s sapphic bathing culture, focusing on events held at male bathhouses for women—a deliberate re-coding of a traditionally masculine space into one free from the male gaze. In her own 2009 paper on lesbian bathhouses, Davina Cooper explores the key element of care in women’s queer spaces and sexuality. This concept of creating spaces for women and femme people to be shielded intimately from the outside world, safe to relax, to care for ourselves or for others, is something we can apply at home in our own bathrooms and bedrooms.
“My little bathroom has become a personal retreat, a liminal space where the sadness and stress of life under lockdown can be suspended.”
The first time I was naked with another woman, it was in a hotel sauna in Japan. It wasn’t a sexual moment, but it was intimate. I felt like I could relax and belong as we sat in silence, two women caring for our weary bodies. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my life was about to change dramatically. It was two months before COVID-19 was identified in China. It was one month before I’d break things off with my partner. After a gorgeous break in Tokyo, I returned to my home in Melbourne. Once I was single, I was finally ready to wear the label of bisexual—I knew I wanted to date people of all genders. As a teenager I’d crushed on and kissed a range of people, but as I grew up, I’d had a series of tiring, sad relationships with cis men. I started 2020 in pursuit of a queer path for myself, living permanently in Australia—but the pandemic had other plans. As the jobs I needed for my work visa disappeared, my options ran out. The city I loved was shuttered to protect lives. I eventually made the difficult decision to return to the U.K., which is where I’m sheltering in my fourth lockdown.
My little bathroom has become a personal retreat, a liminal space where the sadness and stress of life under lockdown can be suspended. My mum’s lessons about Judaism echo around my head; the monthly ritual of mikveh, or ritual bathing, that Jewish women go through makes more sense to me now. While mikveh is usually taken after a period or childbirth, I feel I need purifying—not from my bodily functions, but from the toxicity of the world around me. This year hasn’t only been hard because of the pandemic. The volume of online hatred is staggering; the increases in transphobia, racism and anti-Semitism have been intense. The rise of fascism—online, in attempted uprisings and in the rhetoric of politicians and journalists—is frightening. In the U.K., we seem to have become inured to the loss of people to COVID-19: More than 120,000 are dead, thousands are suffering with long-COVID and the U.K. officially has the highest per capita death toll in the world. The hate and the grief sicken and weary me by the end of every day. But warm and cosseted in my bath, I feel like I can soak some of it away for a while and wash off some of the sadness. In my luxurious, solitary, hour-long baths, I can find a place of escape and retreat. One day, we will all be able to go out once more into the world and find adventure and each other. But for now, I can shut out the world and escape into my bath.
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