In the 1970s I had a glorious bathing ritual. Every day I immersed myself for half an hour in the tub, enhancing the luxury with a shot of Mr. Bubble or Vitabath, and reading a paperback. I washed with a “natural” sponge, but disdained the loofah, which was rather like a Roman bath tool that uncomfortably scraped the oil off. May I just say, Ouch!
I also invested in a plethora of shampoos. Shampoo was my hobby. In fact, our bathroom was too tiny for my collection of shampoo so I stored it in the chifforobe. There was Herbal Essence, Breck, Prell, Lemon Up, Redken, Pantene, and countless others I have forgotten.
But while we women were getting super-clean, the times they were a’ changin’ for men. Several of my men friends were washing less. Truthfully, they were not washing enough. I suppose people would call them “hippies” now, but that was a label nobody used. Some people of that persuasion called themselves freaks. There were some VERY handsome freaks. Even if they didn’t wash enough, we trailed happily in their funky cloud of armpit odor, because we knew it was a privilege to be seen in public with such beautiful men!
I understood where they were coming from (that’s the ungrammatical way we talked) with their sparse bathing. Soon I had read Dune, The Environmntal Handbook, and a variety of underground papers, not to mention my favorite book about the simple life, Thoreau’s Walden. There was a politics of not bathing. I wanted to conserve water. I really did. I wanted to lessen pollution. The daily bath became shallower and a little less bubbly, but I couldn’t give it up.
It probably balanced out: my daily bathing and others’ near abstinence. A friend who regarded bathing as bourgeois “crashed” at our apartment when he was passing through town. He was handsome, smart, and witty, but he stank. I mean really stank. He said he only took a bath once a month. As for his jeans, they seemed never to have been washed. I was awestruck by this god who didn’t follow the rules of hygiene But, really, couldn’t he have conformed just a tiny bit more?
After all, he could have used my bubble bath and shampoo!
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