Cleaning flops: Though the idea of sharing public showers — and the shared germs within them — in residence halls scares some off from showering as regularly as they would normally, experts say the showers are more or less clean.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
At least three times a day, Najibullah Wardak, Wichita senior, takes a shower. He washes his hands each time he enters his house and every time he touches his shoes.
“I just think that’s good, clean habits,” he says.
Cleaning flops: Though the idea of sharing public showers — and the shared germs within them — in residence halls scares some off from showering as regularly as they would normally, experts say the showers are more or less clean.
When questioned about their bathing habits in e-mails and personal interviews, about 50 KU students said they bathe once a day for seven to 10 minutes a day. But in her book Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality, Elizabeth Shove says what one person sees as normal bathing habits, another person often does not. Like hairstyles and clothing, bathing is a fashion statement that changes throughout time and differs among contemporary societies.
Today, bathing is an individual experience in the United States and is an activity used for both hygienic and stress-relieving purposes. This was not always the case, though.
Although the idea of a group of males and females bathing together, naked, for fun, brings to mind the word orgy these days, in ancient Greece and Rome, communal bathing was a non-sexual, social activity. Garret G. Fagan says in his book, Bathing in Public in the Roman World, that even baths in private homes in ancient Rome were clearly designed to accommodate more than one person.
Then, for more than a century, bathing went out of style completely. People often survived their entire lives without washing. When the Roman Empire crumbled, so did their system of bathing. In her book The Dirt on Clean, Katherine Ashenburg says the Germanic tribes that conquered Rome preferred to wash in streams. Later, in the Middle Ages, people washed only their hands — a necessity considering they were still eating food off of them. Fagan attributes the decline of bathing during this time to the spread of Christianity and the religion’s disapproval of nudity.
Regular and public bathing customs resurfaced in Western Europe after the Crusades. The religion that had once discredited bathing brought it back to popularity in the form of Turkish baths. The most lavish of these baths resembled high-class parties — without the clothes. Musicians performed, guests gorged themselves on fruit and women wore elaborate make-up, jewelry and headdresses, all in the baths, Ashenburg says.
At first, the prostitution that sprang up in and around the public baths at the end of the Middle Ages was ignored. However, in 1538 bathhouses were prohibited in France as rumors grew that women could become pregnant and infected with sexually transmitted diseases by swimming in the water, Ashenburg says.
The spread of the plague led to the decline of bathing yet again, Shove says in her book. Medical experts in the sixteenth century led the public to believe that dirt-filled pores decreased the ability of the plague to enter the body.
Showering around the world
Lavez-vous un corps chaque jour?
About 51 percent of French women and 55 percent of French men do not shower or bathe every day, Katherine Ashenburg says in her book, The Dirt on Clean. “The French seem to have a perverse national pride in their own unconcern about cleanliness,” she writes. That’s just not true, though, says Olivia Prouvost-Allen, Lilles, France, graduate student. Prouvost-Allen says people have a lot of misconceptions about French hygiene. She is often asked if she shaves and showers regularly, she says, and answer is yes. All her friends bathe every day, too. The only people in France who do not are the people in their 60s and 70s, who she says are still not used to the idea of having indoor plumbing and unlimited access to water.
Daily showers are a privilege
Ian Cummings, Overland Park graduate student, has spent the last few years living in Honduras and Columbia, where the temperature of the water is extremely unpredictable, he says.
“Where I am now, the water usually starts out piping hot and then unpredictably turns ice cold,” he says. “This means that my showers have frequently become wild, frantic affairs. It is impossible to become accustomed to the cold water when it refuses to appear predictably.” In Honduras, not only is water temperature spotty, so is the availability of water. Cummings says sometimes he had to take his baths in a concrete water tank – a pila – behind his house. The pila was used as an all purpose water source, he says, excluding drinking out of. Whenever he visits the United States now, Cummings says he takes long, hot, wasteful showers.
Looking for a new way to exfoliate? Try tree bark
In Slavic culture, it was once customary to bathe after every sexual encounter, says Eve Levin, professor of history and author of Sex and Society in the World of Orthodox Slavs 900-1700. Bathing itself was a non-sexual activity, though, Levin says. Like Europeans of the time, Russians bathed in mixed-sex bathhouses that were used solely for the purposes of becoming clean and patrons used birch twigs for exfoliating. Levin says traditional bathhouses in Russia still offer the tree bark to customers today.
Popular showering myths
I need to use a lot of soap when I shower to get clean
Absolutely not, says Dr. Lee Bittenbender, a registered dermatologist and owner of Dermatology Center of Lawrence, 930 Iowa St. Soap removes natural oils from the skin and can dry out the skin when too much is used, especially in the winter when your skin is already drier than usual.
I need to wash my hair everyday
Wrong, says Patty Quinlan, supervisor of nursing at Watkins Memorial Health Center. You only need to wash your hair three to five times a week.
I shouldn’t use loofas because they are gross and spread germs
The problem with loofas is not that they are unhealthy, Bittenbender says, it’s that people are too rough with them. “Sometimes people get the notion 'I need to exfoliate and scrub the heck out of things and get tingly clean,'” he says. “I don’t think there’s any scientific basis for that.”
Using plain soap is better for my skin than using fragranced body gels
Wrong again, says Katherine Ashenburg, author of the book The Dirt on Clean. The type of soap we use has no effect at all on our lives. The type of soap we use does not make us any cleaner, more attractive or more boring.
Bittenbender says the type of soap used matters less than where we use it. If all you have done that day is go to class or go to the gym, you don’t need to use soap anywhere but in your armpits and your groin area.
Good, clean fun: Showering is a privilege to many who have spent time in the developing world, where water resources are scarce. But even in the U.S., many shower myths abound.
Bathing re-emerged in the late 1800s because of the successful creation and marketing of soap, Ashenburg says, and flourished with the advent of modern plumbing, which poured hot water over the body for extended periods of time with a simple touch of the hand.
Bathing was a symbol of a person’s status in society, both economically and racially, during the Industrial Revolution. Janice Boddy, a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto, says in the book Dirt, Undress and Difference that advertisers used cartoons of monkeys to portray those who didn’t bathe and referred to the unwashed as “jungle people.”
If bathing in the 1900s was a mark of the upper-class society, today it is a mark of belonging to society, period, Shove says in her book. Additionally, she says bathing has evolved into an activity about comfort and self-indulgence, with a sense of self emphasis on the type of soap or “body wash” one uses.
The dorm showers — It’s what you can’t see that will hurt you
Although outdoor, mixed-sex, nude baths have lost their flavor, remnants of the practice have subtly persisted in our communities.
At the University, women and men use separate bathing facilities in the dormitories, but same-sex group bathing is still acceptable. Students don’t necessarily enjoy showering in close proximity with strangers, though. Not to mention, the dormitory showers are far from the high-roller saunas promoted in the Middle Ages.
“They are just dirty, and some of them are moldy,” says Felicia Powell, a Lee's Summit, Mo., senior who lived in McCollum Hall her freshman year. “Then there are strands of people's hair, and it's just gross, even though they're cleaned daily.”
In reality, the dorm showers are cleaned daily, and most of the germs are nothing to worry about, even if the buildup looks like it’s a form of the bubonic plague.
“If we did culture the bathrooms, we would probably grow stuff,” says Pat Moody, a medical technologist at Watkins Memorial Health Center. “But it probably wouldn’t mean anything because it’s all harmless.”
Students could pick up a virus, like the cold or the flu, from the communal showers, though, says Patty Quinlan, supervisor of nursing at Watkins. Viruses cannot be grown, so it would be impossible for Watkins’ laboratory to determine how many and what kind of viruses are lurking in dorm showers.
Contracting a virus could be as easy as walking around barefoot in the showers with dry, chapped feet, so students are advised by Quinlan to wear swim shoes or flip-flops to the communal bathrooms, even if you do not have any open wounds.
For one KU student, going showerless freshman year was better than showering in the poorly lit, hair-infested dorm showers.
Samantha Collins, Olathe junior, considers herself to be a regular bather, but she admits she showered sporadically during her stay at the dorms and that sometimes during the winter, she showered only once every three days.
“It didn't help that my best friend, Erica, didn't shower very often either,” she says. “It was just a way of life freshmen year.”
Skipping the shower after a humid or even a cold Kansas day may sound repulsive, but is it a medical no-no?
Quinlan thinks so. Quinlan says students should shower every night, unless they did not leave their house that day. When we are out in public, we come into contact with an unlimited number of bacteria and viruses, she says, and the risk of becoming infected with those germs is heightened by not showering before we go to sleep. Each day, those of us who shower in the morning bring contagious germs into our home, transfer them onto our pillows and sheets and soak in them all night long. So, showering at night is especially important for those students who have aggressive allergies. But some people disagree with this idea.
Causing a stink: Showering habits vary across and within cultures. How much is too much? How much is too little? The answers may seem obvious but social norms have changed drastically over time.
The idea that everyone needs to shower every day is ridiculous, says Katherine Ashenburg, author of The Dirt on Clean.
“I think this is all propaganda about daily shower and bath with soap and deodorant,” she says. “We're all too individual for that.”
People who sweat more than the average person may need to shower every day, she says, but for the most part, to stay healthy, washing anything above the wrists on a daily basis is optional.
Skipping showers won’t help you save a whale or money
If not showering really is harmful to our bodies, surely it saves us oodles of money on our water bill each month? Doubtful, says the City of Lawrence.
According to the city’s website, residents are charged $3.18 for every 1,000 gallons of water used. In Lawrence, the average amount of water used during a 10-minute shower is 40 gallons.
That means if you take a shower every day, you will use about 1,240 gallons of water per billing cycle. So, at best, you could save yourself the extra $3.18 charged to you for going over 1,000 gallons by cutting out your Sunday morning shower. But showering any less than six times a week saves you no money at all.
Granted, the amount of times you flush your toilet and run water for other purposes plays a part in the cost of your water bill, too, but showering less saves you at most about 10 cents a day, or $38.16 a year, and that’s only if your shower head was made before 1992.
In 1992, the federal government changed the standard for showerheads, requiring that no more than 2.5 gallons of water be sprayed out per minute. At the end of the month, students living in newer apartment complexes are using about 775 gallons of water a month — well below the 1,000 gallon mark — so, decreasing the number of showers taken each week would save them no money at all, says Chris Whitley, a spokesman for the Midwest region of the Environmental Protection Agency.
As far as saving the environment goes, Whitley says that as far as he knows, the EPA has never released information suggesting a certain number of showers per week.
“A lot of this comes down to how long you can stand yourself and how long your friends can stand yourself when it comes down to bathing,” he says.
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