Cleaning up on hygiene

Have you ever read something that you knew you shouldn’t, but you couldn’t help yourself?

When I was 13, it was “The Exorcist.” That novel gave me nightmares for years and made me hate pea soup. It wasn’t much of a loss. If you’re going to associate a food with demonic possession, you don’t want it to be pizza or ice cream.

Last week, the piece I couldn’t avoid was “Your Body Is a Wonderland” in the Aug. 3 and Aug. 10 issue of The New Yorker. In it, Brooke Jarvis reviews two books on skin, a topic that always makes my own thin layer of external tissue crawl with the thought of microscopic critters feasting on me day and night — especially night.

(Although I know it’s been widely debunked, I still can’t shake the fear that we swallow a certain number of spiders in our sleep each year. It’s another, less-publicized reason to wear a mask. If eight-legged freaks are going to lay eggs in my stomach, they’ll have to gain entrance through my ears.)

The books Jarvis reviews are “Clean: The New Science of Skin” by James Hamblin, and “The Remarkable Life of the Skin” by Monty Lyman. Both appear to address the way we have dissed our epidermis over the last few generations and to extol the virtues of a back-to-basics approach.

Hamblin’s book sounds especially odd. He is a medical doctor who no longer showers, although he “occasionally rinses.”

I went through a phase like this in grade school. I would retreat to the bathroom, fill the tub with water, and then sit beside it, splashing with my hand every once and a while to satisfy my parents, who were listening outside the locked door because apparently there was nothing good on TV.

Instead of bathing, I would read books and comics I had smuggled into the bathroom. My vocabulary was increasing at about the same rate as my B.O.

This went on for a while. I don’t recall a come-to-Jesus moment when my friends confronted me because I was stinking up the classroom — it was the ’70s, and nobody smelled too good — or any teacher phoning home to inquire ever so carefully about why I looked greasier than usual.

One day, I just started to groove on bathing again.

Dr. Hamblin hasn’t outgrown his inner second-grader. He argues we are better off not stripping away the body’s natural biosphere with abrasive soaps and chemicals, only to add them back with commercial moisturizers.

Jarvis makes a point to say that Hamblin still endorses handwashing, however, so coronavirus conspiracy lovers need not apply his rhapsody on the unwashed body to any spurious arguments about herd immunity or letting viruses ooze all around us unchecked.

Fair enough.

The takeaway is that Americans have been sold a bill of goods about cleanliness, to the tune of about “a hundred billion dollars” in 2019. What most Americans today take as a given — wash the body with soap, the hair with shampoo — is not natural, but rather the consequence of generations of marketing decisions to make us feel perpetually dirty.

If I can get serious here for just a moment (it may surprise some of you to realize I was trying to be funny before), this cleanliness manipulation is a reminder that many of the assumptions undergirding our lives —about gender, race, beauty, education, transportation, faith and civic duty, to name only a few — are not some profound expression of natural law or eternal truth, but the result of coordinated campaigns that benefitted somebody, somewhere.

Follow the money, goes one old saying. “Nothing happens until somebody sells something,” goes another.

All of which isn’t to say that I’ll be swearing off either soap or showering anytime soon. Nor do I plan to read Hamblin’s or Lyman’s books.

A few pages of skin creepiness is more than enough for me. If I want to be scared this summer, I can always reread “The Exorcist.” Or just watch the evening news.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter