Adventures at Midlife

The Times Online has an excerpt from a new book by Katherine Ashenburg about, well, being smelly — or not. (Via.)

Even more than in the eye or the nose, cleanliness exists in the mind of the beholder. Every culture defines it for itself, choosing what it sees as the perfect point between squalid and over-fastidious… To modern Westerners, our definition of cleanliness seems inevitable, universal and timeless. It is none of these things, being a complicated cultural creation and a constant work in progress.

She quotes, for example, a well-known excerpt from a letter to the Empress Josephine from a war-weary Napoleon: “I will return to Paris tomorrow evening. Don’t wash.” (He clearly wanted her as she was, a cultural preference that somehow has not survived the ages —except maybe among the French.)

For most women of a certain age, body odor has been a life-long hang-up. I have vivid — and largely painful — memories of seventh-grade gym classes complicated by the lack of any kind of effective deodorant. It wasn’t that we didn’t use them. They just didn’t work. “The biggest complaint I get about seventh-grade girls,” our gym teacher said, wagging her finger at us, “is that they STINK!” I added it to my growing list of personal failures, and lived largely in shame until the advent of better-working antiperspirants in the Seventies.

And there were other sources of shame. I also remember spending hours in my father’s pharmacy wrapping boxes of sanitary napkins in plain white paper so that the women (and the occasional brave man) who bought them wouldn’t be, um, embarrassed at purchasing such an intimate product. Ashenberg felt my pain:

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.

Being “dirty” and “guilty” are so embedded in the modern psyche that they have almost merged. The unfortunate Gov. Elliott Spitzer is only the latest public figure to have revealed a dark and dirty side to his carefully scrubbed public image.

The archetypal link between dirt and guilt, and cleanliness and innocence, is built into our language… We talk about dirty jokes and laundering money. When we step too close to something morally unsavory at a business meeting or a party, we say: “I wanted to take a shower.” Pontius Pilate washed his hands after condemning Jesus to death, and Lady Macbeth claims, unconvincingly: “A little water clears us of this deed,” after persuading her husband to kill Duncan.

And, if the television commercials and menopause sites are to be believed, those of us of a certain age now face the specter of increasing body odor, and I’m not talkin’ just feet. Not only will our lined faces, expanding girth and gray hair be objects of offense, but no one will want to take a deep breath around us. It is even suggested that we end up smelling like MEN. Is there no end to our affront to society?

Better get the ice floes ready.

This entry was posted on April 10, 2008 at 3:20 pm and is filed under Books, Image, Women.