Whiteladying wellness

with self-care wine and equity cookies

Not long ago I was asked to be a speaker at a daylong “wellness retreat” my friend was putting on at her home. She had followed via social media my story, the version I had chosen to present, about some major changes I had made in my life. She thought I could inspire her friends, I guess, to become their true selves, or something. This event was sponsored by her multilevel marketing cosmetic business and so there were free giveaways and energy-fizz taste tests and later, journaling and yoga because apparently cosmetics also includes nutrition, reflection, and bodywork. Add some crystals and cannabis, and that’s the wellness industry.

I’m being unnecessarily snarky — it was a nice event, all the Whiteladies¹ very friendly, and I gave a decent talk entitled “Do What Scares You Most.” This unoriginal idea was directly inspired by² my undergraduate commencement speaker Deborah Tannen, and came into focus for me as I thought of all the ways I had done what scared me³ most throughout my life. Stories for another newsletter. Mostly I want to discuss wellness, self-care, and specifically the Whitelady provenance of this industry. 

Let’s just get this out of the way: The wellness industry is overwhelmingly dominated by White people, mainly women. This piece called Wellness Doesn’t Belong to White Women describes the way women of color are treated when they are brought into wellness companies as diversity emblems. Here’s a personal blog post titled How the Wellness Movement Ostracizes Women of Color. Self.com, a self-described “mass-media wellness brand,” published the following editorial: Wellness Has a Race Problem. The Washington Post wrote about it. I mean, you cannot pretend wellness isn’t primarily a Whitelady thing in this country, even though it shouldn’t be.

---

How big is this industry? It’s huge! This is a total side note, but indulge me. It’s funny that I started to look into this at the same time that I was reading Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe about the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma’s role in the opioid epidemic. I’ve been wanting to write about that as well, the absolutely staggering tragedy fueled by nothing but rapacious greed on the part of this company and the family that ran it. Purdue contracted McKinsey & Company to help guide them through the PR minefield surrounding their horrific sales strategies in order to continue profiting off addiction and death in this country.⁴ So I began to research wellness industry statistics and whose website did I encounter first? McKinsey & Company.

I guess they know what they’re doing or they wouldn’t have had to settle for almost $600M, so here’s what they said about wellness a couple of years ago: The wellness market is estimated at $1.5 trillion⁵ with a 5-10% annual growth. That is a fuck-ton of energy-fizz packets.

But it’s not just products. In 2021, their research demonstrated that a large portion, at least 30%, of the market was driven by services, like personal trainers and nutritionists, consultants, spiritual guides and, increasingly, apps.⁶

Who’s doing all the spending on this stuff? Here’s how M&C described the shoppers:

Wellness enthusiasts are high-income consumers who actively follow brands on social media, track new-product launches, and are excited about innovations. The socially responsible prefer (and are willing to pay more for) brands that are environmentally sustainable and with clean/natural ingredients. Price-conscious consumers believe wellness products are important but meticulously compare features and benefits before purchasing to get the best deal.  

According to this report, wellness enthusiasts and socially responsible consumers are the biggest spenders. Naturally, just endlessly buying so much crap.

The podcaster Jane Marie from the podcast The Dream⁷ clarified in an interview with HealthyWomen.org:

So much of wellness isn't about health at all. There's a section of wellness, like vitamins, that are supposedly about health care but the vast majority of wellness procedures, services, and products are leisure activities for people of means, and I think that's where it stops being about health. It's about wealth.

Obviously. And it’s nearly all targeted at women and our insecurities that are perpetuated by the system we are in. Feeling old? Use this cream. Feeling old and tired? Try some yoga. Feeling old, tired, and down? Take this vitamin supplement.

Besides the products made for wealthy people, and the services made for wealthy people, how about them retreats? Wealthy Whiteladies Whiteladying all weekend long! Search one of these things and you will find it menu’ed up with sound baths and curated wellness walks and nourishment opportunities. There is a whole lingo that, for this GenXer, brings back the ‘80s when I used to buy crystals at the beach and pretend like I believed in Ouija boards. It just sounds like someone 30 years older is writing the stuff. Example: here’s an itinerary I found for a wellness retreat just this month near Walden Pond.

“Literary Apothecary” made me fall out of my chair.

Am I horrified and incredulous simply because I’ve never participated in a wellness retreat like this and I don’t know what I’m missing? I won’t reject the possibility. But maybe I’ve never participated in one because it sounds like a lot of bullshitty made-up words that I wouldn’t be caught dead uttering or participating in. “WONDERment Silent Retreat Time: Slow-Reading/Self-Care Practices” would consist of me avoiding everyone, definitely not writing in my “woodland artisan writing tablet” and scowling as much as possible. I don’t need to pay $900 for that opportunity.⁸

This is fact: wellness and self-care like this are not available to all people. If you are working 3+ jobs to support yourself and your family, and maybe you’re the only one who cooks and you do all the shopping and errands, you have rent and car payments, you do not have time to journal your way out of your funk. You can’t buy a pedicure to pep up your mood. Energy-fizz packets do not exist in your cupboard for an afternoon pick-me-up. Let’s stop throwing around this “Oh, you’re feeling down? Just take care of yourself!” Even my Saturday all-day retreaters lounging in their joggers, journal in hand, were privileged to some degree, being able to take a Saturday away from work, kids, home, whatever, so they could drive out to our friend’s pretty house in the woods to be inspired by me.

---

So all this tangentially relates to a UM campus event for women that I recently attended. I liked the idea of meeting and convening with other women working on campus, and overall it wasn’t terrible. I basically only talked to my two colleagues but witnessing the female camaraderie all around us was nice. But then the presentation began, and it was sorta kinda about equity for women? Unclear. Then all this vague blather about the importance of self-care gushed forth from the speaker. I rolled my eyes. After the event, we received a survey asking about next steps. And I wrote “I am fine with my own self-care. I want to know if this group is going to do anything to assist other women in our small city who are not fine with their own self care.” I mean it’s one thing to prop yourself up when you’re already able to do it. It’s another thing to prop someone else up, someone who wants and needs propping. That’s actually moving toward equity, and I’m here for it. But nobody followed up and I have no idea what happened after that. I presume nothing.⁹

Plus this event had these awful cookies. I couldn’t believe it when I saw a whole tray of them. And then I tried to eat one and it was bar none the worst sugar cookie I’ve ever sampled.

Poor taste.

The cookie is comic relief, except it’s also the perfect metaphor for this wellness horseshit, which is nothing more than an empty idea overlaid on a fancy product handed out to privileged Whiteladies¹⁰ so they feel like their lives are more livable. Simply, I believe wellness only has value if it helps other people too, especially if we are already privileged Whiteladies. It takes a communal effort to make a better world.

Of course the root problem is capitalism, which is hell-bent on profiting off people’s needs and feelings. If in our attempts at enhancing “wellness” we are just buying ourselves some shit, drinking another glass of self-care wine, and eating an equity cookie, let’s just chomp off the E and the Y and fucking quit.

1. Am I completely sure all the attendees were Whiteladies? No, I am not. But I’m retaining this characterization because even if inaccurate for that one day, it’s not inaccurate overall.

2. stolen from

3. and my mother

4. McKinsey & Company ended up paying $573 million for its role. Read more here and if paywalled, I can send you a copy.

5. In the podcast The Dream, mentioned a couple of paragraphs below, Jane Marie says it is a FIVE trillion dollar industry. So, you know. Some trillions.

6. Have you noticed that your weight-monitoring app also asks you to journal, or that your step-counter is asking about your sleep? Those things.

7. Season 1 was about multilevel marketing and was brilliant, season 2 is about the wellness industry. Check it out here.

8. There’s a man version of this too. Here is the worst example I can find. Never mind. I can’t even bring myself to link it. Just trust me. It’s everywhere. 

9. I have wondered if this whole event were secretly part of some maneuvering from campus “leadership” to try mitigating some reputational landmines the University of Montana has stepped on recently. See this news story for an example. Let me know if you get paywalled and want to read more.

10. I include myself