The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [97]
Tolaas has various stratagems for destabilizing our normal expectations and educating our olfactory illiteracy. Having synthesized the rank sweat of nine men with intense phobias, she chose one and wore it, along with her party clothes, to a reception given by the Brazilian ambassador in Berlin. As Tolaas hoped, confusion ensued, “because the way I looked and the way I smelled did not fit at all.” Last year, she impregnated nine walls in the art centre at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with her synthetic sweat smells; in a unique scratch-and-sniff experience, the gallery-goers activated the pungent odours by touching the walls.
In addition to her art pieces, Tolaas’s hopes for more intelligent smelling hinge on her educational work with children in elementary school, where she encourages them to talk about, draw and dramatize their reactions to odours. The more words and spontaneous, unsocialized associations they have for smells, she believes, the less vulnerable they’ll be to advertising for cover-ups. This kind of rethinking is easier in Europe, according to Tolaas, where Europeans are used to crossing a border and encountering a different language and culture. “Europe is more open,” she says, “more tolerant of individuality and differences.”
Tolaas may be idealizing European tolerance, but it is true that Europeans as a whole have resisted any headlong rush into over-cleanliness. At the same time, they have travelled a long way since 1954, when only one French dwelling in ten had a shower or bathtub. The percentage of houses and apartments with a bath or shower is now very high in western Europe: 100 per cent in the Netherlands, Sweden and Malta and percentages in the high 90s in most other western European countries. (The anomaly is Portugal, with only 65 per cent in 2001.) In some of the countries in the former Soviet bloc, full bathrooms are still relatively rare, with Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia all reporting percentages in the 60s in the early years of this century.
Sissel Tolaas, at work in her Berlin office.
How much use those baths and showers see is another question. As always, mentality is more important than plumbing, and an anecdote reported by Antoine Prost in A History of Private Life underscores the longevity of traditional French attitudes. Just before the Second World War, when a school principal in Chartres suggested to a working-class mother that her teenaged daughter was now menstruating and that her personal hygiene needed improvement, the incensed mother replied, “I am fifty years old, Madame, and I have never washed down there!” It does not sound as if an available bath or shower would have made a great difference to this woman’s frame of mind, and she was probably typical of her class and generation.
Seven hundred new antibacterial products were launched in the United States between 1992 and 1998. One of them was the “oral-care strip,” pieces of anti-microbial tape designed to be stuck to the tongue.
Still, habits were gradually changing. When North Americans in the 1960s and ’70s returned from European trips, they were almost guaranteed to have a wide-eyed story or two about strange encounters with middle-class Europeans whose hair was greasy and whose underarms were stinky. Those encounters are far less frequent today. In 1998, Francoscopie, a French publication that reports social trends, claimed that the average French