Cleanliness, however, doesn't stop at the surface. It's also taking a highly invasive course. A growing trend among upper-class women is getting a colonic enema or vacuuming at the spa, along with a manicure and pedicure. Vegan blogger Kathy Freston advocates dietary detoxification. "Doing the cleanse delivers one to a fresh start," she insists. "It's like a vacation, a reprieve, from our old and tired ways... a way to let your body rid itself of all the stored up junk it has had to process throughout the years. I'm not saying it's easy, but it's worth it."
In fact, the body has intricate mechanisms for cleaning itself without vacuums or extreme diets. The mucosal cells lining the digestive tract, for example, replace themselves frequently. Embodiment is the very heart of our existence; it is entirely likely that envisioning the buildup of "junk" in our bodies is a way of expressing cumulative emotional damage. Get rid of that and perhaps you can purge personal heartaches, too.
Big and Bigger
It's one thing to experience anxiety, a need for control, a fascination with "fresh starts," even self-focus. But media and marketers have exploited those concerns, and in doing so have exacerbated them. "We've developed a paranoia in the last five to 10 years," says Andrea Gardner, author of The 30-Second Seduction: How Advertisers Lure Women Through Flattery, Flirtation, and Manipulation.
Gardner points to TV shows in which an expert shines a black light on a seemingly tidy hotel room and then exclaims, "This mattress looks completely clean and yet look at all the dust mites!" Their eyes opened to invisible threats, the audience gasps in horror at the tiny interlopers.
Marketers are also tapping into parental vigilance. If you aren't disinfecting to protect your kids and they get sick, the message is you're a bad mom, says Gardner. Advertisers also remind parents that by keeping the family well, they won't have to miss work themselves.
"The definition of clean is expanding." This from no less an authority than Packaged Facts, the marketing research firm. They conclude: "The relationship between cleanliness and health is clearer than ever in the minds of consumers in a time of germ warfare where life-threatening asthma, allergies, SARS, avian flu, and superbugs are a daily reality."
Casualties of War
The pursuit of purity, like the quest for perfection, can have consequences.
Escalating standards of cleanliness disproportionately burden women, who still bear the brunt of domestic chores despite working full-time. Women in relationships do two-thirds of the housework, a continuing source of personal stress and family friction.
But the most serious consequence of the cult of clean may be that it undermines the immune system, which, like the brain, grows and develops only when presented with challenges. Exposure to infectious agents is essential. It prompts the immune system to create specific antibodies and then store them so they can be readily summoned to defensive duty when a similar bug poses a threat.
Many scientists believe that our sanitized surroundings are fostering allergic disorders in children, which have doubled in the last decade. According to the so-called hygiene hypothesis, children who lack exposure to dirt, bacteria, and other microorganisms develop weak immune systems and are thus prone to asthma and allergies.
Studies show that children with many siblings, those who live on farms, those who enter day care in their first year, or who have a cat—circumstances that expose them to bacteria in soil or air—are much less likely to develop allergic diseases than children who face none of those circumstances. Bodies with no bacteria, viruses, and parasitic diseases to fight off turn on innocents like peanuts and pollen and do battle with them.
Christopher Lowry takes the hygiene hypothesis further and contends the lack of exposure to germs harms our minds as well as our bodies. An assistant professor of physiology at the University of Colorado, he points to growing evidence that disorders such as depression and anxiety, like asthma and allergies, are set off by inflammatory processes within the body. The high incidence of depression and anxiety in developed countries could be due to diminished contact with benign microorganisms to which we were exposed throughout our history—organisms that raise the bar for setting off inflammatory processes.
"The hygiene hypothesis is widely accepted among immunologists," says Lowry. "It suggests that we have less exposure to certain organisms in the soil and water than we used to. In the case of the soil, the organisms are still there." But unless they live on farms, kids don't play much in the dirt anymore. As for water, he observes, municipal water sources have been purified and sterilized. Lowry "can imagine that if a child goes out to play in the field and gets wiped with sanitizing cloths as soon as he comes in, it could be limiting his exposure to those microorganisms in the soil."
At the same time that it is weakening us and our children, the overuse of cleaning products is beefing up the germs around us, turning garden-variety microbes into superbugs. "If you routinely expose microbes to cleaning agents, over time the microbes could evolve to tolerate more of the stuff," says Bry.
Germs, after all, are far more adaptive than we are. A carton of milk left out of the refrigerator overnight will host thousands—thousands!—of generations of germs. In just hours, they will have evolved characteristics to help them thrive in that carton.
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