Whether hot or cold, dry or wet, public baths are no exception. From ancient Greece to the present day, they remain popular in many countries: Turkish hammams, Japanese onsens, Finnish saunas… men and women can meet there, naked or in towels, to relax and sometimes engage in other forms of sociality, both different and similar to that of popular cafes and public squares.
While public baths had declined in the United States with the arrival of running water, the counterculture of the 1970s sparked a renewed interest in them, particularly in gay circles: people met there with friends, lovers and strangers, to share moments of more or less intimate intimacy. Less than a decade later, the AIDS epidemic was to curb this enthusiasm, as explained by photographer Mikkel Aaland, author of Sweatshirtan illustrated reference work on the history of the sauna.
Social welfare
Today, the sauna persists and remains, despite everything, a place for meetings, whether resolutely chaste or prodigiously sexual. In Manhattan, you just have to go up a dozen streets above the Stonewall Inn to find public bath complexes, which seek to attract new clienteles: lonely thirty-somethings, stressed executives, sportsmen on vacation, but also tourists eager to meet new people… all however equipped with a good wallet, because you will have to drop around sixty dollars (around fifty euros) to enjoy a few hours of relaxation in these establishments which focus everything on “well-being” communication.
“People may first be attracted to modern baths by health promises relayed by popular wellness figures, explains Robert Hammond, an entrepreneur whose specialty is importing European-style public baths to the United States. They think it will help them live to be 100.” Certainly, baths are good for your health, but their age-old existence cannot be explained solely in this way.
Their community dimension is indeed essential. “They perhaps come there for the well-being trend, he continues, but what makes them stay is the social aspect.”
While several of these baths offer body treatments ranging from massage to ice showers to beatings with oak branches to whip the blood, this economy of care is entirely focused on the concept of “social well-being”, which postulates that even without having direct interaction with your bath neighbors, splashing in the heat with them will give you the feeling of belonging to a community, and forgetting your solitude for a few hours.
