The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [93]
—American novelist Sinclair Lewis
By the late 1930s and the ’40s, millions of Americans had a healthy respect for the evils of malodorous mouths, underarms, feet and genital areas. They knew about the products that promised to solve those problems. Movie stars, from Bette Davis to Joan Crawford to Rosemary Clooney, recommended soap (“9 out of 10 Screen Stars are Lux Girls”) as the way to lovelier skin. Dewy-looking brides, who had realized every woman’s ambition, vouched for the efficacy of Listerine (“Till BREATH do us part”), soap (“Skin that says ‘I do!’”), and deodorant (“You can say ‘yes’ to Romance because Veto says ‘no’ to Offending!”). The advertisers had largely succeeded in what they liked to think of as their educational mission. What could they do next?
THE HOUSEHOLD SHRINE
1950 TO THE PRESENT
In 1956, a University of Michigan professor named Horace Miner published a paper in the American Anthropologist called “Body Ritual among the Nacirema.” A little—studied group, the Nacirema had a sophisticated market economy but were most notable for their extraordinary focus on their health and appearance. Their fundamental belief, Miner wrote, is “that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease.” Imprisoned in these treacherous bodies, the Nacirema resorted to elaborate rituals and extreme behaviours that took place in a household shrine or shrines.
“The more powerful individuals in the society have several shrines in their houses,” Miner reported, “and, in fact, the opulence of a house is often referred to in terms of the number of such ritual centers it possesses.” The centre of the shrine was a chest built into the wall, full of charms and potions. Underneath this charm box was a small font, into which flowed holy waters whose purity was guarded by a priestly class. The Nacirema entered the shrine daily, one by one, bowing the head before the charm box and performing a brief ablution ritual. These practices, although critically important to them, were enacted not as a family but privately and surreptitiously: “The rites are normally only discussed with children,” Miner wrote, “and then only during the period when they are being initiated into these mysteries.”
“America is the only country that passed from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.”
—Oscar Wilde
Nacirema, of course, spells “American” backwards, and Miner’s classic spoof is still taught in universities as a satire aimed at anthropological method and Western condescension toward the “others” they study. Miner devoted much of his attention to the Nacirema’s masochistic faith in dentists and hospitals, but it is his description of the household shrine, the bathroom, that is most prophetic. As with Brave New World, reality has overtaken the satirical fantasy, and if Miner were writing today, half a century later, he would have to describe the shrine as a far more excessive site of luxury, complicated rituals and miracle-working potions.
The phenomenon Miner noted, that the Nacirema gauged the magnificence of a house by the number of its ritual shrines, or bathrooms, has recently reached new extremes. In January 2006, the New York Times Magazine ran an advertisement for the luxurious apartments being built in the Stanhope Hotel, across Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan Museum. An eight-bedroom apartment has no fewer than eleven bathrooms, including two for the master bedroom. At the Stanhope, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s futuristic dream of a bathroom for every two or three inhabitants has nearly been turned on its head: this apartment could well accommodate an inhabitant for every two or three bathrooms. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bathrooms were rarely built on the first floor of a house because no lady wanted to be seen entering one. Now, if we can afford it, bathrooms are ubiquitous, and our idea of delicacy has gone in a different direction: ideally, as at the Stanhope, no one would ever have to share a bathroom, even a married couple.
An apartment at the Stanhope