The 'Dirt on Clean' in an Oversanitized World
Americans are obsessed with odor and washing, Ashenburg writes. Magazine ads from the 1930s warned women that they could be spinsters forever if they had body odor. The market is full of products to keep Americans germ-free, including padded covers designed to keep babies' hands off germ-laden supermarket carts. Modern irrigation and rainfall have allowed Americans to enjoy showers once a day, but climate change could alter bathing habits, Ashenburg warns.
Chapter 1
For the modern, middle-class North American, "clean" means that you shower and apply deodorant each and every day without fail. For the aristocratic seventeenth-century Frenchman, it meant that he changed his linen shirt daily and dabbled his hands in water but never touched the rest of his body with water or soap. For the Roman in the first century, it involved two or more hours of splashing, soaking and steaming the body in water of various temperatures, raking off sweat and oil with a metal scraper, and giving himself a final oiling — all done daily, in company and without soap.
Why Do Americans Cherish Cleanliess? Look to War and Advertising - NYTimes.com
Those ideas drew 19th-century Americans to cleanliness, but it was advertising that kept them interested. Body soap first became widely available in the late 19th-century, around the birth of modern advertising. Since there was little to distinguish one soap from another, advertising and soap grew up together. All the gambits later used for a variety of products – celebrity testimonials, prizes, slogans and jingles – made their first appearances in ads for soap. By the end of the 19th-century, advertising’s biggest customers were patent medicines and soaps.
The great successes of the first generation of soap advertising, such as "
It floats" and "
99 and 44/100% pure" for Ivory soap, were at least guilt-free. But by the 1920s, as men and women worked closely together in crowded offices and factories, personal fastidiousness became an American obsession – and a way to win friends, influence people and find a man.
Advertising created a morbid worry about "offending," and more soaps, deodorants and mouthwashes (use Listerine and you would avoid the fate of being "
often a bridesmaid but never a bride") rushed in to assuage that anxiety. In the 1970s, it was advertising that created the short-lived but strikingly successful campaign for feminine hygiene sprays.
In the 21st-century, although evidence mounts that Americans are washing themselves to an unhealthy extent and
Europeans continue to smile at our compulsive over-cleanliness, little has changed. Soaps proliferate, the "intimate hygiene" products multiply and our goal seems to be to eradicate every natural smell from our bodies and then apply tropical aromas like vanilla and melon. In the 1948, film "
A Foreign Affair," Marlene Dietrich bade a scornful farewell to an American lover, saying, "So you fly off back home. Wash your hands. Why, surely. You’ve got so much soap in the United States."
The problem is that many Americans have become hyper-obsessed with cleanliness and germs, without totally understanding the implications. Taking your hygiene a little too seriously
can actually be harmful, not to mention expensive -- these "necessities" pad Americans' toiletry bills each month, even though they're more of a (potentially) harmful luxury than a necessity.
... and so forth. This is not just me recognizing this...
