Cleanliness

Episode 128 – Cleanliness

How often should you shower to remain ‘clean’? How many times can you re-wear your jeans before they are considered ‘dirty’? In episode 128 of Overthink, Ellie and David take a look at cleanliness. They get into how humans have turned cleanliness into an art, and maybe even an obsession. Why are we so bothered by dirt? What is dirt, anyways? How are notions of dirtiness and cleanliness even into our symbolic systems, including language and religion? And what is up with TikTok’s obsession with the Clean Girl Aesthetic? As they tackle these questions, your hosts also explore the historical weaponisation of the concept of cleanliness against marginalised groups, such as queer people and people of color. In the bonus, Ellie and David discuss cleanliness as a social construct, the link between it and isolation, and Michel Serres’s ‘excremental theory’ of private property.

Works Discussed:
Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance
Dana Berthold, “Tidy Whiteness: A Genealogy of Race, Purity, and Hygiene”
L’Oreal Blackett, “In The “Hygiene Olympics” Black Folks Always Win — But Aren’t We Tired?”
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger
Virginia Smith, Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity

Transcript

David: 0:14

Hello, and welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:16

The podcast where your two favorite philosophy professors. We hope trace big ideas in our everyday life and the history of philosophy.

David: 0:24

I am Dr. David Pena Guzman.

Ellie: 0:25

And I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.

David: 0:28

Ellie, as you know, I go to one of the gayest gyms in the world.

Ellie: 0:34

Do I know this? Is it an Equinox?

David: 0:35

Uh, It's not Equinox, that's like the boujiest one. I go to the gayest one. It's a gym in the center of the Castro District in San Francisco that is frequented primarily by gay men.

Ellie: 0:45

Let's be honest. The Venn diagram of bougie and gay in major cities is sometimes a circle.

David: 0:51

it is very much a circle in some cases.

Ellie: 0:54

Anyway, sorry, go ahead. So you're in the Castro.

David: 0:56

Yeah, I'm in the Castro at the center of this circle that is a Venn diagram, and there is a guy that frequents this gym that a lot of other people know about because this guy smells horribly. Everybody kind of scurries away when he arrives to work out next to them.

Ellie: 1:17

Better or worse than that one guy in grad school

David: 1:19

Wait, what guy?

Ellie: 1:21

Name redacted.

David: 1:25

Way worse. Way worse. Yeah. Yeah cause this guy, people

Ellie: 1:29

wouldn't really wanna sit next to at the seminar table.

David: 1:30

Yeah, no, no. This is a guy whom I've since learned since encountering him that this is his kink. He has a sexual relationship to body odors, and he really likes to cultivate his own. So he goes to the gym without showering before or after. And you know, like I don't wanna yuck anybody's yum, but it is a specific kind of kink that in this case, does affect other people in the same aerial vicinity.

Ellie: 2:02

I mean, he is yucking everybody else's yum through what he finds. Yummy. Wow.

David: 2:08

Well, so anyways, there are a number of people who have complained about this guy to the people who run the gym, and I recently was at the gym and I heard these other two guys talking about that guy who smells. And one of those guys was telling the other one a story about how he complained to the management and the management approached the smelly workout jock and then the jock confronted the guy who complained about him and he found out that the guy who complained is a straight guy who goes to this gym and then told the straight guy, yes, there are some straight guys that love the gay attention and get plenty of it at this gym and. The gay guy confronted the straight guy and said, the following, you are being homophobic by complaining about my smell because this stench is a kink and it is therefore a part of my gay culture. And so this straight guy was running the story by a gay guy that is his workout partner and I'm overhearing the story and he just wanted confirmation from this other gay guy that he was not, in fact, being homophobic by having complained about this guy's stench.

Ellie: 3:22

Okay, wait, so this guy has a personal kink. Again, we don't wanna yuck anyone's yum there. But it's not everyone's yum.

David: 3:29

It's my yuck actually.

Ellie: 3:31

And he's saying his personal stink is attributable to his sexuality and it is therefore like part of a protected identity and he should not be shamed for it. If anything, this guy is acting problematically, let's potentially say discriminatorily by saying that he shouldn't

David: 3:50

be I.

Ellie: 3:50

smelly in the gym.

David: 3:52

Yes. And then the gay guy reassured the straight guy, look, no, this is not homophobic. A lot of us have had issues with this guy. Because honestly, Ellie, his smell is, it's really, really intense.

Ellie: 4:05

Can you describe it for us?

David: 4:07

No, because smell is the strongest memory sense. And I will relive the stench if I describe it. But it is strong enough that when he's working out next to me, I have to move machines because it unsettles me at my core. It disturbs everything about me.

Ellie: 4:26

I'm just wondering if it's of like the cat pee variety, the musty variety, the acid variety, the meaty

David: 4:32

No, it's the must. It's the must. It's workout sweat from six days in a row.

Ellie: 4:40

I mean, I know, I know all these scents deeply myself as somebody who very often forgets to wear deodorant and is known by at least one of my loved ones as a crust punk. Not necessarily. I'm not this guy's level, but yeah, no, I know firsthand

David: 4:54

what the

Ellie: 4:55

body can smell like if you don't clean it as much as you might.

David: 4:58

Yeah no. And so this gay guy was telling this straight guy, look, no, you're fine. And then I got to thinking about this while I'm doing my like workout routine next to them, overhearing their private conversation and taking a lot of pleasure in it. Just how complicated actually the question of whether this guy is objectionably unclean in a public space because there is also a history of the concept of cleanliness being weaponized against queer individuals. including a history of queer people using that term against other queer people, especially by describing themselves when they are HIV negative as being clean. So for example, on online dating apps, often people will say I'm, clean to mean they are seronegative, which by extension implies that people who are seropositive are somehow dirty or polluted. And so what started for me as a funny experience of overhearing this conversation quickly turned into me reflecting upon how complicated that interaction actually is given the force that accusations of un cleanliness have when they are made, especially against people from minority communities.

Ellie: 6:11

Yeah. It brings me back to some of the stuff we talked about in our disgust episode, which is still one of my favorite ever overthink episodes

David: 6:17

Oh, yay, me too.

Ellie: 6:18

Yeah, it's, it was so fun to research that episode. I loved what we talked about, in part because disgust and cleanliness, they exist at the intersection of aesthetics and social normativity, let's say, or yeah, social norms. I mean, we could just say that can be leveraged in order to enforce a social and even political status quo, and also to oppress people, and at the same time, they can also just be wielded as descriptive aesthetic categories.

David: 6:45

Yeah. And on top of that, because categories around discussed and cleanliness center on the body, typically they have to do with bodily functions, bodily secretions with how the body is perceived by other bodies in public space. It also goes to the very heart of our identities, right? I don't think there is a harsher criticism that you can make of somebody, well, I mean, I can't think of other ones, but like it is a really harsh criticism. Yeah. To say you are dirty, right? It's something that really pulls the rug out from people's feet, and it makes them no longer able to know how to engage you in that moment and how they are projecting themselves onto public space.

Ellie: 7:25

Well, as somebody who was called smelly Ellie incessantly during my middle school years by an evil bully, and then decided to bathe every single morning in seventh grade as a result of this, because I was so worried that I was smelly. I know this all too well.

David: 7:39

Oh cleanliness, anxiety. Ellie, I don't think you're smelly. I just think you're disgusting.

Ellie: 7:50

Today we are talking about cleanliness.

David: 7:53

Why are humans so obsessed with being clean?

Ellie: 7:57

How have racial stereotypes about dirtiness informed social behaviors today?

David: 8:02

And what is the relationship between cleanliness, purity, and power? I wanna begin today with the following quote from the scholar, Dana Berthold, who writes about the history of the politics of cleanliness. She writes, Americans are excessively, needlessly even recklessly clean. Our stores carry whole aisles full of brightly packaged cleaning and hygiene products. We are offered antibacterial, writing utensils, toothbrush holders, and shopping cart wipes. We bathe more often and consume more detergents, disinfectants, and deodorants than any other identifiable group on the planet. People who do not shower at least once a day can be considered dirty. This is outlandish by just about any other historical or cultural standard.

Ellie: 9:00

Hmm. So we have higher standards for cleanliness than any other culture ever on Earth, according to Berthold.

David: 9:07

That's right. We could describe them as higher than, but it seems like they're also more irrational than according to Berthold. And so as I was reading the article from which this quote is taken, I really started wondering, where does this anxiety come from? Obviously we could say that it's for health reasons, right? Like we want to be healthy, we want to keep disease at bay. But part of Berthold's argument is that a lot of this is morally motivated because we often treat physical cleanliness as a gauge for moral purity. And it made me think about that expression that you so often hear, cleanliness is next to godliness, as if being physically clean and having a clean environment somehow ratio on a scale of value and make you closer to the divine. And so it seems like we conflate a descriptive notion of purity with a normative one.

Ellie: 10:05

It's funny because even though I'm not a particularly clean person, I do find that there's a real appeal to the clean and times when I'm really attracted to cleanliness. Like for instance, spring cleaning. This idea that during the spring you kind of clean out your house, maybe you clean out your closet, you know, you dust under the all the places that you don't usually dust under. We'll talk a little bit later about the Clean Girl aesthetic and beauty cosmetics definitely appeals to this idea of clean as both an aesthetic and a normative category. Well, I guess aesthetic is already in the realm of the normative, but let's say an aesthetic and a moral category, and. It's so funny because I was thinking about the arbitrariness of some of our ideas around cleanliness recently when a friend talked to me about double standards that a lot of our friend group has around humans versus pets. Okay. As many of our listeners might know, I'll own up to it, I'm not a huge fan of pets. It's very uncommon to own up to the fact that you're not a huge fan of pets. But do have one other acquaintance who is not a huge fan of pets and who recently knowing that I was in the same boat said the following to me. He was like, look, isn't it so weird that a lot of our friends ask us to take our shoes off at the door of their homes? But then they have these dogs who are running all over the place, including on the couches.

David: 11:27

Yes.

Ellie: 11:29

The dogs aren't taking their shoes off at the door. Those dogs are bringing in who knows what, especially if they have outdoor cats. Same thing. And so there's just a real double standard around. The expectation that humans should take shoes off and the presence of a dog in the home. And he was like, he was really going for it. He was like, people who have pets, their home smell, blah, blah. And I don't know that I necessarily feel that strongly about it because I don't care about cleanliness as much as he does. But I think this is a good example of what you're talking about.

David: 11:58

Yeah, no, so this is a really good example because as you know, obviously I work on animals and sometimes I have this shame about telling people in that field of philosophy that one of the reasons I don't have pets. In fact, it might be the number one is because I don't like the dirtiness of the space that they create. I don't want fur, I don't want saliva. And it makes me feel like it violates some of my ethical commitments to living in conjunction with the more than human world. But yeah, it highlights this arbitrariness, and I see it that arbitrariness also in the different views that different people have about for how long you can wear certain pieces of clothing before you wash them. You know, like especially pants. There's a lot of divergence out there. There are people that I know that wash their pants after one use, including jeans, and who think that me wearing jeans five times before washing them is kind of disgusting. Whereas I think it's perfectly normal not to wash your pants every time you wear them.

Ellie: 13:00

You are actually supposed to wash your jeans once every 10 times maybe. And at that inside out, speaking from a fashion girly, are you the kind of person who thinks that you have to take off your plain clothes when you get off an airplane and you can't wear those again on a trip? I.

David: 13:13

No, but I'm dating one of those people.

Ellie: 13:15

Okay, so I am not one of those people. I think the whole point of creating a capsule wardrobe on a trip is so that I can rewear things multiple times, and usually if I'm on a plane, I'm wearing a shirt that doesn't have tight armpit holes, for instance, because then maybe I'll like stink it up and not be able to wear it again on the trip. But you better believe. I'm gonna wear that outfit more than once on the trip often, maybe still that same day. And I had an experience recently where I was staying with a friend in New Jersey. When I got off the plane, I was wearing a cute outfit. I'd chosen it on purpose for my day in New Jersey. But because I had come all the way from LA and taken a plane, she thought it was super gross that I didn't change. I was like, no, no. This is just my outfit the day. I was just sitting. I mean, yeah, I was in the presence of other people, but the sheer presence of a crowd doesn't gross me out. It doesn't make me think that I need to change my clothes.

David: 14:01

No, I, so I agree that we tend to sweat more than we realize on the plane, but that doesn't change the fact that you have your outfit for the day. It's like if you were in a crowded space or if you had to like rush to catch the bus and you sweat it a little bit, you're not suddenly going to change. And actually, it's really funny that you mentioned this example because my first experience of relationship shock with my partner was when we were in our first or so year of dating. And one day, this was in Paris, I came home, I took the bus home and I got into the house and I sat down on the couch and my partner looked at me and he's like. Oh, are you gonna sit down with your bus clothes? And it was like, what do you mean bus clothes? And so it was similar to the airplane thing, but in his mind, because he was raised in a somewhat germophobic household, in his mind, once your clothes touch a public space, like the bus, once you go into the house, you do need to change into a new outfit. And so thankfully I've broken him out of that, and so he's now happily living with my piggy self in harmony. But th this was actually an early moment of can this relationship work? Even though it seems like a small thing, if neither person was willing to budge, it would've become a big thing.

Ellie: 15:20

And I know we'll talk a little bit later about the anthropological theory around why some things are considered clean versus dirty, but as we're thinking about examples here, one of the things that I think does divide a lot of people is the shoes on versus off in the house choice and. I am a shoes on person. I come from a shoes on household, but because I have some Asian family members and I've spent a good amount of time in Scandinavia, where generally speaking, people usually take their shoes off the moment they enter the house. I've had to kind of adapt to it, but I always have cold feet, and so I'm just like, I'd rather have warm feet and have my shoes on in the house, then have cold feet and have my shoes off. But it's so obvious I feel like every time I go into somebody's house, especially because like, even if they're not Asian or Scandinavian, or coming from a culture where shoes off is the norm, I think a lot of people, our age in America have started to adopt the shoes off norm in the house. Anytime I enter somebody's house, I'm kind of like looking to see, are they waiting for me to take my shoes off or not? But then I'm disappointed when the answer is yes, I want you to take your shoes off. Sorry if you're one of my friends who's a shoes off person and take off my shoes in your house.

David: 16:26

Yes. So in my relationship I won the debate over the bus clothes in the house, but I lost the debate over shoes on, shoes off. My house is shoes off.

Ellie: 16:38

David, I know this. You're a shoes off household because last time I went, I had these like rain boots

David: 16:43

and I had to take them off at the

Ellie: 16:44

base of the stairs and then walk in my

David: 16:46

stocking

Ellie: 16:46

feet up. The were like kind of slippery. It was a little scary.

David: 16:50

Well, and so to add an element to this, there is the fact that now I have become a shoes off person and I cannot go back. I actually really enjoy having very clean hardwood floors at all times, but it produces in me a lot of anxiety when people come to the house and I have to ask them just because I know a lot of people don't want to. Sometimes it's because they don't have cute socks. Some people worry about their feet smelling. Some people worry about their feet being cold, and so sometimes I just have to let people go in with their dirty shoes. Like a couple of days ago, somebody came to fix the fridge and they just came in with really muddy shoes, and then I had to like go behind them through all their stairs with like a hand towel wiping everything that they left behind.'cause I just didn't wanna make them feel uncomfortable. But it does produce a sense of enforcing something on other people that I, hated being enforced on me.

Ellie: 17:41

Yeah, I. Yeah, and it just speaks to the relativity of standards of cleanliness. It doesn't mean like I don't think I'm in the right being a shoes on person at all. It's just that that's kind of what I'm comfortable with. And you used to be comfortable with one thing you've changed in that respect as well.

I did read this book, Clean: 17:56

A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity in preparation for this episode. Or I should say I read parts of it. It was a pretty long book, so I only readsome of it, especially the stuff on ancient cultures. So I wanna talk a little bit about that. But before I say some things about that, one thing that I think about weirdly a lot is the fact that when the Spanish conquistadors came to Tenochtitlán, they were considered absolutely filthy and disgusting by the Aztecs.

David: 18:24

Oh really?

Ellie: 18:24

Aztecs had this really important robust bathing culture, and the Spaniards were just like these guys who like didn't shave, they didn't shower, and they thought the Spanish were extraordinarily uncivilized because they were so dirty.

David: 18:41

The dirty Civilizers. And there's obviously a very long and complicated history of the relationship between cleanliness and civilizing missions coming out of Europe that often worked the other way around, right? Where it was the European gaze that rendered other people dirty barbarians in order to justify acts of colonization. So it's funny that here, both people were looking at the other with utter disgust.

Ellie: 19:07

Well, but I actually don't think, I don't know that the Spanish, were looking at the Aztecs with disgust, at least not based on the stuff I've read, some of which has been fiction like You Dreamed of Empires, which is this really great novel I read last year. I mean, they were looking on them certainly as subhuman in certain ways, but I don't know if it would be discussed or something else possibly. Actually, in You Dreamed of Empires, the author does write about how the Spanish thought that the food the Aztecs ate was disgusting.

David: 19:32

Yeah, I would assume because there is a documented history of indigenous communities being seen as disgusting because of their relationship to the natural world, because of course of skin color, which is not white and also because of food choices. So I wouldn't be surprised, although, you know, this is just a speculation without any clear point of reference that that also would've happened in terms of the Spaniard perception of the Amarin Indians upon arriving in the Americas.

Ellie: 19:57

And on the point of colonization, getting into some of the research from the Smith Book, one of the things she discusses in the book Clean is how both the Greek and Roman empires highly valued cleanliness, but their cleanliness standards were in part adopted from the indigenous groups that they were colonizing. So the Roman bath culture was in part inspired by Etruscan Hot Springs culture, and the Greeks before them were likely inspired by Mesopotamian, Egyptian and or mycenaean advances in water technology. But what the Greeks did is they advanced on that previous technology by establishing public fountains, and those public fountains were an expression of Greek democracy. The Roman Empire two established a really strong tradition of public baths as part of the city's philanthropic efforts, and the quality of a Roman bath was an expression of how economically successful the city was. The Roman baths, of course, were a very popular gathering place. They were the most popular place for soldiers to gather. They were really popular, like pre-gaming spots. would go to the baths before then going out at night to dinner parties in Ancient Rome. And of course, we also know from reading Foucault and others that they were popular places for men to have sex with one another. Smith doesn't really get into that so much in her book.

David: 21:17

After working out at the gym for a few days.

Ellie: 21:20

Well, okay. Actually she talks about how the baths of caracalla in particular, which I have been to, but I don't remember seeing this, had not only all of their different baths, this giant two story grand symmetrical style of bath that had cold, hot, tepid and steam baths. And a big gym, full sports facilities, but it also had an arena for philosophical debating. Doesn't that sound amazing? I love going to the Korean spa, and I'm just picturing a Korean spa, but with the addition of a philosophical debating arena. Come on.

David: 21:50

Well, and I mean, I think it brings into focus all the social activity that happens in these spaces. It reminds me, for example, of when I went to a bathhouse where you get scrubbed up and down in Morocco and the male sociality. Yeah, hamam and the male sociality that happens there, including all the business deals, the family affairs that get worked out and just in general, right? Like dealing with daily affairs. In a space where both of you are kind of exposed and vulnerable just by virtue of the partial nakedness that rules those spaces. So all of these cleanliness spaces are performing a double function. One of those functions is tied to public health, quite literally. But then the other function has to do with creating a thriving sense of belonging to the same community. And the water fountain is a clear example of that.

Ellie: 22:39

I mean, as we're thinking, we're gonna get a little bit more into theoretical dimensions of cleanliness later in the episode, but. One thing I think we can just note here, one of the things that Smith notes in her book is that dirt is just matter out of place. So we've been talking about the relativity of what's considered clean versus dirty, and she's like, look, there's nothing that is essentially unclean, the unclean or the dirty. It's just matter rhat's not in a place where it should be. And this tracks with Plato's definition of cleanliness or katharmós in ancient Greek, where Plato describes cleansing as the science of division. Specifically the kind of division that retains what is better, but expels the worst. So cleansing is a kind of purification because it divides the clean from the dirty or here. I mean, even more generally, the better from the worst and human cleanliness has sometimes been seen as something that distinguishes us from non-human animals. Of course, non-human animals have elaborate cleansing rituals, grooming rituals specifically where they're like taking parasites out of their hide. But humans, many have suggested. Are the kinds of beings who make cleanliness into an art. We develop a whole cosmetic industry. We develop a whole bathing industry. The bathing industry, which began with hot springs, whether in the ancient Etruscan in societies or elsewhere. For sure, Japan has a really long established hot springs tradition as well. As do some of the Nordic countries. We also have a strong tradition of sweat huts or sweat lodges. And Smith says that by 3000 BCE, cleanliness had established itself as a key feature of human society. I.

David: 24:19

I'm glad that you're bringing in the connection to animals because of course, our clean versus dirty schema seems to match pretty well with the human non-human distinction whereby we assume that what defines humanity is our ability to clean ourselves, whereas animals are perpetually dirty precisely because they lack the concept of what it means to be free of contamination, which is interesting to think about in the context of those behaviors that seem to contradict that, right? Like the grooming behavior in apes or the self-preening behavior in birds, but there is a book called Biological Exuberance that I was reading in a completely different context that book is about animal sex and animal sexuality. But the author of that book, points out that. There actually might be reason to believe that other animals do have regimens of hygiene in the more technical sense as these kind of ritualized use of tools for separating, for doing that platonic art of division, which involves the expulsion of that which is dirty, and he points out that there are a lot of apes that use tools like twigs, sticks, leaves, rocks to clean their bodies, especially of bodily fluids, so things like semen, blood spit. Whenever it gets on their own bodies, they use these objects, inanimate objects to scrape them off almost as if they were disgusted by their own secretions, which is really interesting because then he connects it to the invention of tools, right? Like we often think about tools as things that were invented. For us to create effects on the external world. Like I use this tool to like break down a tree, but he points out that there are non-human primates who have been using tools to cause effects in their own body. So for example, using sticks to clean their own teeth to get out remnants of food and to do so also for other members of their species, even to the point where there seems to be evidence that animals have been using tools to do dental extractions on one another when a tooth is rotten. And so this really got me thinking about cleanliness from an evolutionary perspective that predates the Bronze Age that you were just mentioning.

Ellie: 26:40

Speaking of sticks, I just have to mention that I discovered in researching this episode that the ancient Romans used little wedge shaped sponges on sticks to clean their butt holes. So maybe they're a little bit more advanced than the non-human animals, but the non-human animals are already using sticks to clean themselves, at least some of them. And that's an interesting point, David, about how tools aren't just for use on the external world, but also on ourselves.

David: 27:07

Correct.

Ellie: 27:08

One thing that cleanliness brings up is a desire to control, to control our environment, and also to control ourselves. And when we can't control our environment, we can control ourselves, right? We can't control the dirt that is outside of our homes, but we can control how much of it we bring in by taking off our shoes, maybe taking off your bus clothes and sweeping. And so it makes a lot of sense to me that there would be that application of tools on the self, even among non-human animals, not because I like know anything special about non-human animal cognition. That's your domain. But because it does seem like that drive towards cleanliness, even when it's like unreflective is a drive towards control and also survival, right? We wanna control our surroundings because we wanna survive. We don't wanna have like parasites on us.

David: 27:55

I suspect that's also why that effort to control the internal environment gets intensified when we can't control the external environment. And I suspect this is why so many expressions of obsessive or compulsive behavior hinge or turn around acts of cleaning, right? Like washing your hands many times over, or cleaning various orifices, whether that's your mouth or your butthole, you know, with or without these old sticks, with sponges. And it, it suggests that that desire for cleanliness that might have perfectly reasonable, very functional evolutionary explanations can sometimes go haywire and become a kind of loop that becomes obsessive and compulsive.

Ellie: 29:02

David, it's time for a little etymology lesson on the word clean. It turns out that in old English, clean seems to have initially been used to describe dainty physical forms. So Clean was linked with littleness and clear, this is coming from old high German. Ultimately neat, delicate, fine, tiny, small, and puny. Also sweet and cute. And this brought me to something that I really wanted to talk about in this episode, which is the clean girl aesthetic. Everything comes back to TikTok folks.

David: 29:39

Yeah. I know you love the clean girl. Do you have a clean girl aesthetic? I don't think so.

Ellie: 29:44

No I'm too dirty to have a clean girl aesthetic.

David: 29:46

Well, but like the clean girl aesthetic is not about actually being clean. It's just like a look, right?

Ellie: 29:50

It is a look. But I feel like I don't have it in me. I actually love the Clean Girl aesthetic and I am definitely aspiring toward it, which I will totally grant is like maybe not a neutral aspiration to have for reasons we'll get into, but yeah, I just feel like it doesn't really work on me. I have like at best, a little bit more of a like beachy girl aesthetic. Don't you agree?

David: 30:11

Yeah. Yeah. You're like the sweaty, like flowy fabric kind of girl from California. You're a little granola.

Ellie: 30:21

Like my naturally wavy hair looks like it has sand that's gonna be shaken out of it at any time. Like not, you

David: 30:27

Yeah. Yes. I think that's right.

Ellie: 30:29

Yeah. So for those who might not be familiar with the Clean Girl aesthetic, I'm actually pleasantly surprised you are David, because you don't really stay up on internet trends. But the

David: 30:36

clean girl

Ellie: 30:37

aesthetic has now been a popular trend for a number of years. So it's had some staying power. It usually comprises things like slicked back buns, a kind of no makeup makeup look where you look perfect, but you look perfect because it looks like your skin is perfect, not like you're wearing any makeup. Often gold hoop earrings are associated with this aesthetic, and I think it's generally part of this move to minimalism that we've seen in aesthetics in recent years. But some people have worried that this involves cultural appropriation because what's now known as the Clean Girl aesthetic really originates in hip hop culture in the nineties with black and Latino women.

David: 31:14

So I grew up in Mexico in the 1990s when that sleek pulled back kind of shiny look was, and I would say still is very common. And I know that in the past that look in women of color has been read by white people. As dirty, more specifically as kind of greasy because of the pulled back shiny hair. I honestly don't know how the shininess happens. Is it gel or is it hairspray?

Ellie: 31:41

It's gel.

David: 31:42

Yeah, I assumed as much.

Ellie: 31:45

My flyaways wanna stay down, but I have learned how to use it.

David: 31:48

Yeah, so I mean, I grew up with clean girls. It's just that they were not white like the current trend.

Ellie: 31:54

And then I'm just like jumping on the bandwagon post Hailey Bieber like every other white lady.

David: 31:59

I mean, who knows? Because I used to wear a lot of gel when I was a teenager, so maybe I was a clean girl back in the day.

Ellie: 32:04

David, I really don't think you were, I'm so sorry.

David: 32:07

Now it's like male appropriation, not cultural appropriation. But anyways, I think it's a really great example of how race codes not just our aesthetic perceptions, but also draws our attention to where that line between squeaky clean and greasy is because I actually think that's a really fascinating borderline, but it got me thinking about how soap itself highlights the impossibility of distinguishing between squeaky clean and greasy. Because soap is made out of animal fat and that is what produces that feeling of squeaky clean. So paradoxically, we become clean through that, which we considered the most dirty which is greasy animal fats.

Ellie: 32:50

I like this point, and I do think that there are trends where like a shinier look will be more popular and then a more matte look will be more popular. I mean, when I was a teenager, everyone was using blotting pads to modify our faces because we were self-conscious about our adolescent shiny skin and to be clear, the charge of cultural appropriation is not that white women like Hailey Bieber shouldn't be allowed to wear slicked pack buns or even hoop earrings. I've done a lot of research on hoops in recent years 'cause I was like, oh, is it cultural appropriation to wear hoops? And then I discovered, no in fact, that is not the case. For instance, Danish people a couple of thousand years ago were wearing hoops too, so. It is in my culture as well. But, we have more in our cultural appropriation episode if you wanna hear our detailed thoughts on that phenomenon. But it was really more a question of economics. It was the idea that white women influencers were capitalizing on the clean girl aesthetic. They were getting brand deals, skincare lines, et cetera. And the black and brown women who had been associated with the aesthetic for a lot longer and were also creating content around it, just weren't getting as much traction and therefore, as much money.

David: 33:55

And I think this raises the question of why those women of color, black Latina women would have been associated with what we now call the clean girl aesthetic in the first place.

Ellie: 34:07

Exactly, and there's a fascinating history there, especially with respect to the cleanliness habits of black women. So I wanna focus on that because I read, in particular, a Refinery 29 article about the hygiene Olympics among black women and unsurprisingly, the strong association of black women with cleanliness has to do with the racist history in our country. The idea that black people, especially during slavery, were considered dirty, filthy, et cetera, and so in order to combat that as black people in our country have gained more freedom or economic power, there's been a real move the other way to be extra hyper clean. And it's also associated with respectability politics, where to be clean is associated with not only economic success, but also with a certain level of cultural success.

David: 34:56

Yeah, and I think it's important for us to recognize that stereotypes about people of color being dirty have very real life consequences for those individuals. The article that I mentioned at the beginning of the episode by Dana Berthold, an article called Tidy Whiteness, talks a lot about this racial hygiene history, and she points out that those stereotypes also applied to Native Americans in the 19th century. She gives this example of an ad for ivory soap from the 19th century that depicted Native Americans who used that soap as morally clean and civilized and ready to be welcomed into white society by virtue of having become physically clean due to the soap that they bought. And so the ad depicts a Native American family of three, like a mom, a dad, and their kid. All clean holding the soap now wearing these European clothes that are signifiers for civilization. And I think we can envision very easily many versions of the stereotype of the person of color being dirty unkempt, unclean and having a bad smell. Berthold says that performing cleanliness became a reaction to being denied fair treatment and especially class mobility based on these stereotypes. And she says that this is why all of us in the present have to be very careful around cleanliness signaling, because obviously the desire to live in clean spaces is more than reasonable, but when that desire becomes an anxiety about purification and purity, it can make us complicit with this racial history of cleanliness.

Ellie: 36:43

So maybe the clean girl aesthetic has to go. Or at least maybe we just have to be mindful of it. But certainly, I mean, ivory soap itself, like the kind of signifier of that ivory white and the history of these racist advertising campaigns. Also, the fact that a lot of Jim Crow laws in the South had to do with cleanliest and purity. The idea that black and white people couldn't share the same bathrooms or swim in the same pools. And the Refinery 29 article that I mentioned talks about how in recent years on social media. It's become very popular among black TikTok creators or creators on other platforms to engage in what's known as the hygiene Olympics. Something like, I use three different towels for my body when I get out of the shower and seven different towels for my hair. Naomi Campbell wears a hazmat suit on planes because she thinks that airplanes are disgusting and the author focuses on a Twitter dust up a few years ago around washing your legs where somebody posted a poll on Twitter, do you wash your legs in the shower? And a lot of people answered yes, and a lot of people answered no. But black Twitter was like, who are all these white people? Not. Washing their legs in the shower.

David: 37:53

Washing their legs.

Ellie: 37:54

Because it became very evident that the people who were advocating not washing their legs in the shower were by and large white. And indeed, there have been a lot of white celebrities like Kristen Bell and Mila Kunis who have talked about how they're dirty. And I'm very aware of the fact that my, like crust punk vibe is dependent on the fact that I have pale skin and so I get to like be dirty in a way that might not be extended to people with more melanated skin. Right? And okay, so this Twitter dust up, do you wash your legs in the shower? That was one thing. And black Twitter was up in arms around the responses of, no, a lot of people don't wash their legs in the shower. Related to this, I was thinking about this controversy that happened over an early season. I think the first season of love is blind around washing your chicken. David, are you aware of this?

David: 38:41

I know about this. Yes.

Ellie: 38:43

Okay, so there was an interracial couple, black woman, white guy on Love is Blind, Lauren, and I forget the guy's name. They were making chicken together one night and the guy wasn't gonna wash the chicken. And Lauren was like, well, you have to wash the chicken. And he was like, what? I've never washed my chicken. And she was like, what? You've never washed your chicken. That's so disgusting. then it became very clear on social media that there was a cultural difference where most African Americans wash their chicken and most white Americans don't. And I did read that. This is backed up by research. An article that I found said that African Americans are more sensitive to issues of cleanliness compared to European Americans, and in particular more sensitive to cleanliness of kitchen items. So basically, African Americans are keeping their kitchens a hell of a lot cleaner than americans of European descent.

David: 39:30

So Ellie, I used to be a chicken washer when I was young and I started cooking in graduate school. And at the end of college I would wash my raw chicken with dish soap. And I remember well, yeah, like it's for like you use it to clean vegetables, use it to clean chicken breasts.

Ellie: 39:49

Okay. Yeah. I have questions about the chemicals that you were putting into your food.

David: 39:54

But like, it's not like you cook it with the soap, you know? Like you obviously rinse it very thoroughly. And if you're already using it for everything else in the kitchen, what's the big deal?

Ellie: 40:02

I dont think Lauren from love Is Blind was using dish soap.

David: 40:04

Well, I was using the soap and I remember, I forget who it was, who one day kind of shamed me for it. And they're like, nobody washes their chicken. And so since then I stopped. But at the time. It seemed like the most rational thing that you would wash something before you eat it. So I used to be a chicken washer and now, well now I'm not a meat eater, but you know, then I changed my practices because of the social shame that came with washing my chicken.

Ellie: 40:32

I have become a chicken washer since love is blind.

David: 40:38

Overthink is a self-supporting independent podcast that relies on your generosity. By joining our Patreon, you can gain access to our online community, extended episodes, and monthly zooms. If you'd prefer to make a one-time tax deductible donation, you can learn more at our website overthink podcast.com. Your support helps cover key production costs and allows us to pay our student assistance a fair wage. Maybe the most influential book on the topic of cleanliness is the 1966 book written by the British anthropologist, Mary Douglas, entitled Purity and Danger. This book is a reflection on the concept of dirt, which Douglas says is a relative concept. Earlier you mentioned Ellie, that the book you read also talked about dirt as being relative. I believe that claim is borrowed directly from this text, and by this Douglas means that there is nothing inherently bad or polluted about the things that we consider dirty, because dirt is, and this is the famous definition that comes out of this book matter out of place. You know, we talked about, yes. This is from this book, Ellie, this.

Ellie: 41:45

Dude you should've said that when I said it. People who didn't get this far in the episode will be not realizing. They'll be attributing that to Virginia Smith. It's funny because she talks about Mary Douglas in the book Clean, but she doesn't have a citation for it there. I don't believe.

David: 41:57

Oh yeah. No, this is like what Mary Douglas is known for this like four words. I know, but like I, we were having a blast talking about the content, so I thought we'll bring it up later Anyways. And so we've talked about what that means, that something is dirty. Only dirty in its relationship to other things. So for example, shoes with dirt are not dirty if they are on the floor, but they are dirty if they are on the kitchen table, right? Or a plate with some food is not really dirty if it's in the sink, but it is utterly disgusting if it's like on your bed, on top of your pillow, like, what the hell is going on? That this plate is there. And so what is offensive about dirt is not really contamination, but disorder. Now the question is why do we care so much about order? And it seems to be Mary Douglas's position that it's just part of human nature to introduce order into the chaos of experience, right? Our minds do that naturally when we classify things in particular ways. It's what cultures do as well. Cultures indoctrinate us into cultural schemas that order the world for us in terms of distinctions, like citizen versus foreigner, man versus woman, proper versus improper. And when that order is broken, we use the concept of dirtiness to make sense of that violation.

Ellie: 43:23

Yeah, I read this book back in undergrad and obviously we both knew that we needed to talk about it in this episode, and so you took the lead on it. But I did revisit some of my college annotations, which are funny in their own right. But I remember one of the really important ideas from this book being that our ideas of cleanliness or un cleanliness, express symbolic systems. It's not just a matter of what's literally dirty or not, and that means that every culture is gonna have symbolic systems around dirt, and those symbolic systems might just alter in their details.

David: 43:58

That's correct. And I think she was responding at the time to a number of anthropological theories that maintained these racist views about like people from other parts of the world that are. Not Europe saying they don't have a system of cleanliness. They don't even recognize the distinction between clean and unclean, so they are fundamentally unclean, and by turning to the symbolic order and thinking about dirt as a violation of that order, she says no, everybody has a concept of clean and dirty as long as you understand it as matter out of place. Based on the system of ordering that they have for themselves. And once she lays out this framework, she uses it to make sense of religious notions of cleanliness and purity. And she specifically has a very influential reading of Leviticus in the Hebrew Bible. Now Leviticus stipulates a lot of things that Jews should not do and things that they should not eat because they are considered dirty or impure. Among the things that Jews cannot eat are included pigs, shellfish, you know, the Bible says they can't eat fish without fins and scales and other animals like hares, for example. Now the question that Douglas is tackling here is how do we explain these very specific but seemingly arbitrary prohibitions that we get out of the Bible? Now one theory is to say, oh look, all religion is arbitrary. All these codes make no sense. So there is no point in trying to find the order in these prohibitions because there is no order. And Douglas says, that's wrong. There is a kind of order. There is a symbolic organization in place. We just need to find it. Another explanation for this is what is known as the medical materialist explanation that says all of these prohibitions are guided by public health concerns that then are just expressed in religious language. So at the time, people understood through experience that you shouldn't eat shellfish because they'll make you sick. It's very difficult, you know, like to keep them in good form. And so then that prohibition was articulated using the language of, God doesn't want you to do this, but it's really just a public health concern and Douglas really dislikes this explanation as well. She says that this medical materialist explanation turns Moses, and I underline this part of the book into a public health administrator, so she thinks it really trivializes what we get in the Bible. So what exactly is happening then with these prohibitions? What she does is offer a close reading of Leviticus that tries to explain why all of these animals and these animals only become unclean without reducing that prohibition to something irrational or just at the expression in religious language of a public health concern.

Ellie: 47:06

And is it fair to say that this has to do with her idea that our very concept of the dirty is comprised both of a care for hygiene and a respect for conventions, and that the medical model is too myopically focused on the care for hygiene at the expense of understanding the social components that are going into this?

David: 47:24

Yeah, the social and the symbolic components. And so what she's trying to do is ask us to think about what's the symbolic system in place in the Bible that establishes that distinction between what is dirty and what is clean so that then we can make sense of all these prohibitions. But to do so, you have to understand that symbolic system. That symbolic system now to get directly to it, has to do with the biological. Worldview that is built into the Bible. So the Bible obviously has an account of the natural world. It has a way of organizing animals into larger groups or classes. In particular, there are three classes of animals in the Bible. There are the foul in the firmament, in the sky. There are the terrestrial animals on land, and then there are the scaly fish in the sea. Now each of these classes of animals has certain defining features that are essential to the class, right? Like they have a certain look and they have a certain style of locomotion. So the birds in the sky have feathers and they fly. The fish in the ocean have scales and they move around with their fins by moving their bodies from side to side, and that the terrestrial animals are quadruples that like jump and walk around. That's the biological ordering of the Hebrew Bible. Now, if you look at the animals that the book of Leviticus says you cannot eat, you start realizing that those are the animals that do not neatly fall into any of these categories or that are imperfect representations of their class. So, for example, shrimp and shellfish. They are marine animals, so they're kind of fish, but they're weird because they don't have scales or fins. So they are kind of like metaphysically inferior fish. And so that sense of inferiority is what makes them dirty because they're kind of out of place in this taxonomy. The same thing happens with animals like serpents. They are terrestrial animals. But what the hell? They don't have legs. They don't run and they don't jump. They are a violation of order. So they are dirty because they are matter out of place.

Ellie: 49:39

So what about pigs? Because that's obviously a very important food prohibition for Jewish people, and it seems like pigs are squarely in the terrestrial animal zone, right?

David: 49:52

Yeah, so they seem like a perfect instantiation of their class, but according to the Bible. They are not. The Bible's order is quite complex. At the first level, you have these three categories of the sky, the earth, and the sea. But then there is also an additional level of classification that has to do with which kinds of animals are the proper food for a pastoral community like the early Israelites. So that's another classification for animals and the animals that God puts into a kind of covenant with pastoral communities where you know, they get some benefit from the humans and in return they become food for those humans are what we now would call cattle. The issue is that the Bible actually defines cattle in a very, very specific way. It's not just cows. Cows obviously belong to the class, but it includes other animals as well. And so a close reading of the Bible, according to Douglas, reveals that cattle are cud chewing cloven, hoofed creatures.

Ellie: 50:59

What a phrase.

David: 51:00

As an ESL person, that took me a while to get out. Yeah. Cud chewing, cloven hoofed creatures. And the cut chewing refers to animals that eat something, then they pass it, and then they regurgitate it, and then they eat it again over and over again. So these are animals that now, yeah, we call them ruminants nowadays. Look at you, Ellie, with your animal knowledge. And then the cloven hooft refers to animals that have split hoofs, right? And so we call those animals ungulates. So cattle are ungulate ruminants. Animals that don't fit that definition are excluded from what is permitted to eat. And unfortunately, or rather, fortunately for the pigs, pigs are excluded from that category because even though they have cloven hoofs, they are not in fact cud chewing. They are not ruminants. And so they are like the serpents or like the shellfish matter out of symbolic place. And Douglas points out that. The Bible says nothing about pigs being dirty in the literal sense as having like dirty scavenging habits, for example. They're dirty in the symbolic sense that they don't fit into the classification that the Bible lays out, so they're dirty because they are a taxonomic failure dear.

Ellie: 52:21

Okay. I just got a lot more detail about pigs and cattle than I anticipated. Certainly what you are talking about in terms of Douglass's emphasis on the way that pigs fit into the system or rather don't fit into the system, I think is helpful as we think about what categorizes cleanliness and what, or the clean versus the dirty. It's really gonna be about these symbolic systems, and I think we could also talk about. The ways that preparation of food plays into symbolic systems of cleanliness and uncleanliness as well. And when we're thinking about ritual, which is a really big theme, at least as far as I remember of this book there are a lot of rituals too around like ritual slaughters or rituals of cleaning your chick, washing your chicken, we might say today.

David: 53:09

It actually specifies in the Bible that it has to be with dish soap.

Ellie: 53:15

But Douglas Douglas talks about how there are some cultures that are more emphatic about ritual than others. And so in the Ancient Judaic Society, which Leviticus has written about, really big emphasis on rituals around food, a lot of rituals around food, Vedic cultures as well. One culture that we haven't really talked about, if we, if we can call it a culture, is Protestantism, just within the past few centuries, because Douglass notes in passing that the Protestants were very resistant to ritual. But one thing we haven't really talked about, which is fine, people talk about Protestantism enough, but is also how Protestantism as a movement was very invested in this. Cleanliness is next to godliness type of idea. Of course, there's still symbols that are related to that, right? Cleanliness as symbolically being related to being closer to God. Dirtiness is farther away. But I think one thing we can take from the Douglass is that sometimes that cleanliness is next to godliness, takes a less ritualistic form, and sometimes it takes a much more ritualistic form.

David: 54:18

Yeah, and I would say that independently of whether your relationship to cleanliness and dirtiness is ritualistically mediated or not, it still probably is going to be mediated by some form of hierarchy because now I'm thinking about the idea that, for example, women are inherently dirty because of menstruation, right? That refers to a hierarchy between the sexes that maps onto the cleanlines-dirtiness distinction. Even if it doesn't involve religious rituals, so I have difficulties imagining a conception of dirt and pollution that is not at the bottom of some form of social hierarchy.

Ellie: 55:03

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David: 55:12

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Ellie: 55:27

We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan. Our production assistant Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene and Kristen Taylor, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.