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e so they wou 
By reessjersey1 on Jan 06, 2014 03:58 AM
stinking truth


How cleanliness has changed in the West is the engrossing (and sometimes gross) subject of Katherine Ashenburg Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History, which skates merrily from ancient frolics at the public baths to today obsession with hand sanitizer and teeth whitening strips. Ashenburg, whose previous book was a popular history of grief called Mourner Dance: What We Do When People Die, argues that contemporary cleanliness has more to do with appearances than hygiene. Considering our relative lack of physical exertion compared with our ancestors, why do we consider a daily shower an ideal, anyway? Apparently, the less we sweat, the more we clean. But our very fear of dirt may actually be making us sick.

Salon spoke with Ashenburg by phone from her office in Toronto.

What did clean mean in ancient Rome?


You never used any soap, and it was all done in public. If you were just a normal person, you probably spend a couple of hours every day in the bathhouse, where you could get wine, food, sex, a medical treatment, a haircut. You could have a depilator pluck the hair in your armpits.

Why wasn soap popular?

Soap was a combination of animal fat and lye. The Egyptians went to great lengths to make a soap that was mild enough to use on bodies, but many cultures, including the Romans and Greeks, didn really. So they scraped themselves. Basically, it was a kind of drastic exfoliation. They probably got as clean as soap makes you. Most people, except very rich people, didn use soap until about the second half of the 19th century.

Why did public baths go out of fashion?

They went out of fashion because the infrastructure to run them the mechanisms that brought them water, that heated their water, that separated out the different heats of the various pools required an enormously sophisticated and complicated infrastructure, which the Roman Empire had. But when the empire started to fall apart, people couldn maintain that, and the invading barbarians disabled the aqueducts. There was never an empire large enough to support that again.


They haven changed much. One of the most wonderful, long lasting, historical continuities is the people who support cold water bathing, who think it virile and virtuous, versus the people who want to bathe in warm or hot water. They don attach any moral significance to their choice of warm or hot water. They just think it way more comfortable, and easier, to clean yourself in warm or hot water. There a German expression, Warmduscher, showerer, which is one of the ways you describe a man who is short on masculinity. I just love it that these two camps have been going for centuries.

We all know the saying, is next to Godliness, but there was a time when quite the opposite was true. Could you talk about that?

Christianity turns out to be the only great world religion great in the sense of widespread and influential Jimmy Graham Jersey Black that had no teaching or interest in hygiene. In the early years of the church, the holier you were, the less you wanted to be clean. Cleanliness was kind of a luxury, like food, drink and sex, because cleanliness was comfortable and attractive. The holier you were and this really applied to monks and hermits and saints the less you would wash. And the more you smelled, the closer to God people thought you were.

So then did Buddhists and Muslims think Christians were filthy?

Absolutely. And they were right, too.

And didn Westerners have a Womens Jimmy Graham Jersey reputation among Asians for being filthy?





So they must have smelled terrible.

They must have smelled terrible. But the ocean in which they swam was the odor of rank sweat, or fresh sweat. So I think they were quite used to it. In the Middle Ages, St. Bernard said, all stink. No one smells. I think that sums up their tolerance for it.


What was the role of perfume?

During the 17th century, which I think was probably the dirtiest century in Western history, people put on perfume so they wouldn smell their neighbors. For example, Madame de Montespan, one of Louis XIV mistresses, swathed herself in clouds of self defensive perfume so that she wouldn smell the king halitosis. She didn like the way he smelled, and he www.saintsonlineofficialstore.com/WOMENS-JIMMY-GRAHAM-JERSEY.html hated the way she smelled, because perfume gave him headaches. They had a great big fight about it one day in his coach, where they were also accompanied by his queen, his legal wife, and this was recorded by one of his memoirists.
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