The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [2]
She remembered the advertising campaigns, launched by razor manufacturers, inculcating the novel idea that women’s hairy legs and underarms were bad and, in the case of underarms, encouraged body odour. She remembered when she first heard of a newfangled product known as deodorant and when she realized that something called shampoo worked better than the boiled-down soap her mother produced for washing hair. She never wore perfume because, as she liked to say, “That’s what Europeans use instead of soap.” (Not that perfume had ever touched her no-nonsense mother’s body.) Her own regime involved plenty of soap and Mitchum’s, a clinically packaged deodorant “for problem perspiration.”
In my generation, standards reached more absurd levels. The idea of a body ready to betray me at any turn filled the magazine ads I pored over in Seventeen and in Mademoiselle in the late 1950s and early ’60s. The lovely-looking girls in those pages were regularly baffled by their single state or their failure to get a second date or their general unpopularity, and all because their breath, their hair, their underarms or—the worst—their private parts were not “fresh.” A long-running series of cartoon-style ads for Kotex sanitary napkins alerted me to the impressive horrors of menstrual blood, which apparently could announce its presence to an entire high school.
The most menacing aspect of the smells that came with poor-to-middling hygiene was that, as we were constantly warned, we could be guilty of them without even knowing it! There was no way we could ever rest assured that we were clean enough. For me, the epitome of feminine daintiness was the model who posed on the cover of a Kotex pamphlet about menstruation, titled You’re a Young Lady Now. This paragon, a blue-eyed blonde wearing a pageboy hairdo and a pale blue shirtwaist dress, had clearly never had a single extraneous hair on her body and smelled permanently of baby powder. I knew I could never live up to her immaculate blondness, but much of my world was telling me I had to try.
While ads for men told them they would not advance at the office without soap and deodorant, women fretted that no one would want to have sex with them unless their bodies were impeccably clean. No doubt that’s why the second-most-frequent question I heard during the writing of this book—almost always from women—was a rhetorical “How could they bear to have sex with each other?” In fact, there’s no evidence that the birth rate ever fell because people were too smelly for copulation. And although modern people have a hard time accepting it, at least in public, the relationship between sex and odourless cleanliness is neither constant nor predictable. The ancient Egyptians went to great lengths to be clean, but both sexes anointed their genitals with perfumes designed to deepen and exaggerate their natural aroma. Most ancient civilizations matter-of-factly acknowledged that, in the right circumstances, a gamy, earthy body odour can be a powerful aphrodisiac. Napoleon and Josephine were fastidious for their time in that they both took a long, hot, daily bath. But Napoleon wrote Josephine from a campaign, “I will return to Paris tomorrow evening. Don’t wash.”
Early in my reading about the history of cleanliness, I began talking one day at a lunch about some of the extremes, in both directions, that I was discovering. Another guest, a journalist, was astonished. “I just assume everyone is like me,” she said, “showering every single day, no more, no less.” Her assumption, even