The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [95]
“As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder. Dirt offends against order.”
—anthropologist Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, 1966
Miner singled out a part of the body that particularly worried the Nacirema. They had “an almost pathological horror of and fascination with the mouth,” he wrote, “the condition of which is believed to have a supernatural influence on all social relationships. Were it not for the rituals of the mouth, they believe that their teeth would fall out, their gums bleed, their jaws shrink, their friends desert them, and their lovers reject them.” Miner was prescient, but again, the ante has been upped significantly since 1956. In the eighteenth century, Lord Chesterfield wanted his son to preserve his own teeth into old age and not offend others with his bad breath. Twenty—first—century North Americans would consider that a ludicrously meagre demand: now teeth must be perfectly straight, even and preternaturally white. (Even prosperous Britons and Europeans do not share this obsession, and the easiest way to pick out the non-American actors in a movie with an international cast is to look at their teeth.)
Many of the potions used by the twenty—first—century Nacirema to forestall the toothless, shrunken—jawed, friendless and loveless fate they fear would look familiar to their grandparents, although the toothpastes, brushes, dental flosses and mouthwashes have diversified into a bewilderment of choices. Forget mint and spearmint toothpaste; some of the flavours for Crest sound like sorbets—Lemon Ice, Cinnamon Ice and Refreshing Vanilla Mint. Dental floss, which also offers a range of flavours, comes in waxed, unwaxed and “whitening.”
Since floss goes between the teeth, it doesn’t sound as if much of that whitening would be visible, but whitening is the current sine qua non in the Nacirema’s oral obsession. Even battery-operated power brushes promise a “whitening bristle system.” The bandwagon these products are hoping to mount dates from 2002, when Crest Whitestrips, an expensive ($50-plus) collection of strips impregnated with hydrogen peroxide or a peroxide-type chemical, appeared on drugstore shelves. Delighted retailers saw sales in the powder-polish-whitener category shoot up 263 per cent in that year alone, and by 2005, whitening strips had become a $500-million industry. Dentists repeat that our teeth are not intended to be bright white, but ivory or cream or even—yes—yellow-white, and that repeated use of the whiteners may damage the gums as well as enamel. But sales continue to boom, and dentists are seeing increasing numbers of patients who overuse the strips because their teeth are never “white enough.” They liken the fad to anorexia, where the patient is never “thin enough,” and predict that this compulsion could end in every tooth needing a crown.
If paper-white teeth are the latest necessity, that does not mean that previous hygienic goals have become irrelevant. New demands are added on constantly, without subtracting anything. For more than a century, cleanliness has been a definitive part of the American way, and a signal divider between those who belonged and those who didn’t. At the time of the Civil War, dirty faces and hands and dingy collars and cuffs indicated that you were a farmer, a manual worker or simply poor. By the twentieth century, the visual evidence of dirtiness was rare, and smell became the telltale sign. As marketers and advertisers of soaps and deodorizers refined their skills and drove hygienic standards upwards, their messages fell on constantly fertile ground. Smelling someone’s real body or allowing your own real body to be smelled has become an intrusion, a breach of a crucial boundary.
CLEANING UP THE PENIS: NON-RITUAL CIRCUMCISION
The cultures that ritually circumcised their males—Jews, Muslims, Australian aborigines, various African tribes—thought of it as a purification rite, or as a sign of their covenant with