Jenna Muirhead Warren

Everybody smells, sometimes — author Katherine Ashenburg

Are you clean? Do you bathe each morning, slathering yourself with lotions and coating your armpits with deodorant?

If you do (and let’s be honest — if you consider your sense of cleanliness to be subpar, you’re not going to tell anyone), you’ll think twice about those obsessive daily ablutions after reading Katherine Ashenburg’s The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History (Knopf Canada, 368 pp.).

The history of cleanliness — and just what that means, if anything — is a complicated history of fears, disease and dirt. Our societal obsessions with health and beauty are relatively new, as is our presumably correct prescriptions of how to stay clean. Would it surprise you to learn that 50 years ago, less than one in 10 French homes had a bathroom? That people thought drinking sea water was good for you? During the era of the Black Death, which killed one in three Europeans, physicians thought that not bathing and keeping one’s pores clogged would protect you. Unfortunately, those dirty conditions created the swarms of fleas that spread the disease. “Doctors made some of the worst mistakes,” says Ashenburg. “Some of the advice they gave was just tragic.”

In our hyper-clean culture, it’s hard to imagine just how… pungent the world smelled, even a century ago. We might not have to endure the stench of hundreds of sweaty bodies, dead flesh ravaged by the plague, or clothes unchanged for years, but it’s given us what “odour artist” Sissel Tolaas calls “olfactory illiteracy.” “Our ancestors relied on smell more than anything else,” says Ashenburg. “It was our intuition. Now that we interpret things viscerally, those other senses have become devalued.”

How do we add a little more smell in our lives? “With work and cars, we’re more sedentary than ever,” says Ashenburg. “We’ve never had less of a need to wash, and we’re very unaware of other ways to be clean. We wash all of the natural oils out of our hair, and then use products to put them back in. I’ve nothing against recreational bathing — I’ve had more hot baths in the last four years than ever before.”

As well, Ashenburg mentions what is being referred to as the “hygiene hypothesis,” where many believe our sanitized culture is leading to more allergies and illness. “We’re depriving our immune system,” she says. “It’s a teeter-totter — the side that gives us allergies is balanced by our body’s ability to naturally defend itself.”

Ashenburg also discusses our modern distaste with a woman’s natural odour. When asked, until the latter half of the 20th century, she couldn’t recall a period of history where both men and women were as paranoid or offended. “Older cultures were aware of, if not the word, then the presence of pheromones,” she says. “The ancient Egyptians would put ointments on their genitals to enhance their natural odours. I grew up in the ’50s reading Seventeen, and was horrified to think that I was inside this body that was ready to betray me. There’s this need to be emotionally and physically clean there, so we wash off all of our odours and replace them with other scents.”

She mentions a quote in the book from Napoleon, who, returning from battle, asked Josephine not to bathe before he came home — he wanted her natural scent. “If people from the 17th century saw our clean habits, they’d say we’re abnormally, masochistically oversensitive.”

Further, feminine hygiene products, from menstrual pads to douches, were made popular through 20th century advertising. It wasn’t even 100 years ago that, instead of pads and tampons, says Ashenburg, “women used old rags, bleached and reused them. It was more sanitary and environmentally sensitive.” Doctors and nurses in the First World War, as a way of sopping up blood from soldiers’ wounds, used what became Kotex pads. It was a short leap to seeing menstrual blood as disgusting, and a woman’s “smell” as unacceptable. One bizarre experiment in the book describes a group of Alberto-Culver researchers testing FDS (“feminine deodorant spray”), designed to eliminate a woman’s genital odour. The scientists hooked up facemasks to a group of women’s vaginas that they would periodically smell throughout the day to see if the spray worked.

Will we ever see an age of grand public baths, where people commune and intermingle with each other’s sweat and smell? “The more highly a culture prizes individuality, the more privacy,” she says. “When (members of) the Finnish government couldn’t agree on something, they’d go to the baths. Could you imagine our government doing that?”