Those who have used a spa’s facilities will testify that it is healing and restful for the tired body and mind. It’s another form of bodily care for those who can afford it and it is part of a growing industry that provides jobs for many. When a spa is sexualized the problem lies not with the spa but reflects a deeper issue: the inability to perceive the sacred and healing without converting it into desire or pornification. Some critics argue that heavy exposure to pornographic scripts makes people interpret ordinary touch, care, leisure, or relationships through those scripts. This partly explains why places like spas are sometimes wrongly eroticized. Psychologists believe that those who see a spa as a sexualized space are also those most prone to watching pornography.
It’s true that spa treatments involve physical touch like massaging pressure points and partial undressing is required for this. But for a state and people steeped in a pedantic censoriousness anything involving the body and touch can get sexualized, even when it’s purely professional and therapeutic. To reduce a spa to a space for prostitution is to use hyper-ventilated moral lenses. There are hotels and salons in Shillong city that offer spa treatment to their customers but no one seems to have a problem with them. So why has the proposed spa become a target for some political parties? Also some vigilante groups seem overly concerned with sex work and tend to link everything to prostitution. A professionally run spa in the rest of the country and the world is linked to health, wellness, and relaxation – nothing more and nothing less. To stigmatize a spa is to deprive workers in the wellness industry who are doing a legitimate job since it is associated with wellness, massage, hydrotherapy, relaxation, beauty treatments, and healing.
In feminist or cultural critique, spaces that offer grooming, beauty, or body services are sometimes “objectified,” but that does not turn a spa into a sex object. For those whose minds are limited by lack of exposure anything involving the body and touch can get sexualized, even when it’s purely professional and therapeutic. Since spa workers are generally women, old stereotypes can sexualize care work itself—similar to how other feminized professions have sometimes been viewed through distorted lenses. Sometimes even non-sexual pleasure—such as rest, pampering, bodily ease—gets morally suspect or eroticized.There is such a thing as non-sexual intimacy but some people struggle to imagine touch, beauty, relaxation, affection, or sensuality outside sex. Such people have not experienced the difference between the sensual and the sexual. Sensual can mean soothing, embodied, aesthetic, pleasurable. Sexual is something else. Misogyny often defines how individuals perceive things. Misogyny insists on gate-keeping what women can and cannot do instead of allowing women the right to decide for themselves what profession to choose. In any case massage is an old Khasi livelihood where men are massaged by women masseur and no one saw anything wrong with that. Why does massage in a 5-star facility given the misogynistic twist?
