Good Riddance to "Pampering"

I teach a course on the Sociology of the Body with graduate and undergraduate students. Students write a lot in the class, and that gives me a window into the zeitgeist when it comes to thinking about the body. Students reveal what is taken-for-granted about the body in the current moment in our society, and it is always shifting over time. This can be fascinating! For example, I've watched the language of "body positivity" replace the norm of self-shaming, over the 20 years I've been teaching the class--while, tellingly and fascinatingly, the amount of shame and insecurity students express about their own bodies has not decreased in the least. Students today just feel embarrassed by experiencing that shame. For students in an earlier period, expressing contempt for their bodies was experienced as a moral obligation, whereas now it seems to feel more to students like a failure of selfconfidence.

But that's not what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about something I recently realized, and that is how a language that was pervasive in the years before the pandemic disappeared suddenly when the lockdowns hit, and has not--as of yet, anyway--sprung back.

It is the language of "pampering."

According to dictionary.com, to pamper is "to treat or gratify with extreme or excessive indulgence, kindness, or care." Interestingly, its eytmological origin is in the Medieval English "pamperen," "to cram with food," as over-tender parents were believed to overfill a willful child.

"Pamper" is a judgy word. It evokes spoiling a child with too much care, or overindulging the self. It is not a word with a history of positive associations in a culture that has long associated indulging the pleasures of the flesh with sin.

And yet, in the years leading up to the Covid pandemic, the language of pampering was ubiquitous when it came to talking about body products marketed to women and femmes. You saw it everywhere in ads, and it popped up constantly in my students' essays as something to which they aspired. 

Here's an image from a marketing website from a couple of years before the pandemic, entitled "Pamper Yourself":

Like so many images, it features baskets of lotions, oils, and masks; tools and polishes for manicures; bath products; candles; an eye pillow; a book or magazine one could imagine reading while relaxing; and pajamas or robes or lingerie. Beauty, relaxation, and hygiene are all linked, and presented as producing a rejuvenated femininity. Buy these products! You will look younger! You will feel refreshed! You will be relaxed! In fact, those were the multiple R-words that appeared over and over in the narrative of pampering, like some kind of incantation: be refreshed, be relaxed, be rejuvenated. 

The most iconic representation of the Pampered Person was of a young femme in a bath (still wearing makeup). The same tropes appear over and over: a luxury bathtub, the water covered in bubbles or petals or both; candles lighting the room; a bath tray filled with scented beauty products for scrubbing and hydrating; a glass of wine. 

The images all blur together, conveying the same gestalt: a woman in an expensive bathroom, with a pile of products, so intensively relaxed as to appear postorgasmic. This is the promise of the "home spa night." It's orgiastic--but not because there's a bunch of people in the bath with our protagonist, the Pampered Person. In fact, central to her pleasure is the absence of others. The pampering bath is described over and over as an escape: from other people, from work, from responsibilities. No, what keeps the Pampered Person company and brings them bliss are all the spa products--the bubbles and candles and sugar scrubs and unguents. 

I can tell you that lots of my students were enamored of the language of pampering. They talked about how they worked so hard, and really deserved the luxury of an hour to themselves, to soak, and treat their skin and hair, and enjoy beautiful scented candles and oils, so that they could arise relaxed and refreshed to face the grind once more with rejuvenated energies.

And hey, I'm not here to knock the pleasures of a nice bath! But I did devote class time to helping students deconstruct the pampering narrative, and see how it relates to capitalism and consumerism. The premise of the pampering narrative is that everyone is inevitably overworked and overstressed--that that is necessary to getting ahead, or at least not falling behind, in today's economy. Feeling constantly exhausted and anxious is unpleasant, and could lead people to critique an economic system that produces wealth, but chews up employees. The pampering narrative, however, rechannels people's reaction to their distress, away from resistance and into consumerism. 

The promise of the narrative is that a Pampered Person will be made whole again, their suffering all washed away, because the Pampered Person has wisely made the right investments. In fact, they'll be able to treat a week of exhaustion and stress and anxiety in just one hour of intensive relaxation! All they need to do to achieve that is to check off a long list of consumer purchases: the upgraded tub; the bathtub tray; the bubblebath and petals; the salon-quality shampoo and conditioner; the face mask; the body scrub; the oils and milks and unguents; the wine and special glass; the candles, etc.. 

You can continue to serve the great god Capitalism tirelessly! All you need to do is to pour money into relaxing as efficiently as you work. That is the essence of the pampering narrative.

But why use the term "pampering"? Why not call it "power relaxing" (as in the then-popular term "power yoga")? Well, that does sound more effortful than the passive "pampering" term, and the sleight-of-hand of the consumerist ritual of the home spa bath was to erase all the hours of work that went into earning all the money needed to renovate the bathroom and buy all the body products, and frame it as effortless relaxation. 

But I think the implied judginess of the the term is key. The Pampered Person is crammed with a bathful of products in the way that the medieval child experiencing pamperen was crammed with food. This is overindulgence. Ads featuring the pampering narrative often claim "you deserve it!" Why say this over and over (it's not "you could afford this!" or "people will sneer at you if you don't do this!"). The implication is that you don't really deserve it, so the ads protest too much to try to soothe your guilt. The pampering narrative does not present any critique of the idea that the virtuous person is one who never stops hustling, working nonstop from dawn until late at night, always underslept, always stressed. The image of the ideal American remains one who experiences an entrepreneurial thrill at unending work. The spa bath night offers an hour off, into which the Pampered Person crams all their week's needs for rest and relaxation, but the price they pay is not just that of all the consumer goods. It's the price of guilt. They don't actually deserve any time off. They are being indulged. And they should feel guilty about it, while simultaneously producing the conviction that this undeserved hour off has fulfilled all their needs, leaving them refreshed, rejuvenated, and with all energies renewed for the next week's grind.

This is not a healthy approach to life.

Then the coronavirus came crashing down, and suddenly, for so many people, there was a period of lockdown that changed so much. During the period in which the majority of people were quarantining at home and so much was shut down, there was widespread acknowledgment that many people were being handed more than they could easily handle. And a narrative spread in media and social media that we needed to be as kind to ourselves as possible. Parents of young children being locked down and expected to somehow work fulltime from home while caring for their kids and supervising their education were in an impossible position. People who were quarantining by themselves were suffering an inverse problem--too much time alone--but this too was very difficult. So we needed to have compassion for ourselves.

And what did that mean? Not buying a pile of spa products. Being kind to ourselves meant relaxing our expectations of ourselves. Were we eating comfort foods, or binge-watching shows on the couch, or drinking alcohol alone, or letting the kids play video games for hours? Well, that was understandable, and we should not have unreasonable standards for ourselves.  Feeling guilty about relaxing our expectations wouldn't help anyone. Practicing self-care didn't mean loading ourselves down with checklists of health activities and requirements. It meant being gentle and kind to ourselves. Relaxing the demands we had learned to place on ourselves. Seeking to relax, period. Trying to find respite from the anxiety and stress, and remember what matters most. Loved ones. Health. Peace.

That is, in fact, a much healthier approach to life.

So I appreciated it when the pampering narrative immediately fell out of fashion with the onset of the pandemic. And I approved of its replacement with exhortations to wellness and selfcare. Unfortunately, as lockdowns ended for more and more people, institutional wellness programs and media wellness stories became more and more problematic. The language of selfcare remained, but the wellness activity recommendations morphed into the familiar old checklists of exercise programs and approved diets and limiting screentime that we were supposed to achieve via selfdiscipline (or feel ashamed). The compassion component has been fading away. People's hours spent sleeping have slid down to where they were before the pandemic, giving up the added hour people were able to take when locked down.

That's all disappointing to me. But there remains an increased level of talk of resistance to being forced to accept overwork as employees under capitalism. And I suspect that this explains why the pampering narrative has not rebounded to where it was before Covid struck. To be sure, a lot of companies now just call the body products they market "good for selfcare" instead of "pampering," and that's not a big difference. 

But the symbolic difference is there. We're not constantly being told that we don't actually deserve to relax or care for ourselves. And that is a good thing.