Bathing, dirt and cleanliness

This post is dedicated to the anthropologist Marie Nauppas, who first got me thinking about the topic of baths.

Vintage 1960s Avon ad (modified, obviously)

When I was doing fieldwork in South Korea in the late 1990s, I remember having a conversation with a Korean friend about bubble baths. I don’t recall the film that sparked this conversation, but there was a scene in it where a woman hops out of an extremely full bubble bath into a waiting robe. My friend was curious about whether women actually did this in real life or whether they took a shower afterwards.

As the woman-in-bubble-bath scene has been repeated endlessly in Hollywood films and TV shows, I’d never given it a second thought until my friend queried me about it. I said that as far as I knew, mostly people just dried themselves off rather than showering—at least, that’s what I did. I think she was shocked, and somewhat disgusted, by this revelation, although I didn’t really understand why until I took my first trip to a Korean bathhouse.

Quite frankly, this was not a pleasant experience, primarily because I was completely unprepared for the fact that everyone was unabashedly naked.¹ I’m not sure what I’d expected, but there was not a towel in sight.² Korea wasn’t a popular tourist destination in the 1990s, and I lived in a suburb on the outskirts of Seoul where foreigners were a rare sight, so it felt like I was the object of the undivided attention of the 40-odd girls and women already in the bathing area.

Once I got over the mortification of being buck-naked in front of a hall full of curious strangers, I was surprised by the sheer industriousness of the bathhouse. Although I’m sure there are luxurious bathhouses in Korea, the ones I’ve been to³ have been no-frills affairs with spartan, industrial interiors focused on the business of cleaning rather than relaxation per se.

Indeed, there was little in the way of indolent lolling about in hot baths. I quickly learned that baths themselves are not the point of the experience. Instead, they merely prepare you for the real work, which is basically scrubbing (or, rather, flaying) the top layers of skin off your entire body. This feat is accomplished with the help of a torturous device universally known as an ‘Italy towel’. A small, square green mitt with the texture of sandpaper, its name apparently comes from the fact that the original towels were made from a viscose fabric imported from Italy.

I had seen these in the bathroom of the family I lived with, but never considered their purpose until my Korean mother offered to scrub my back with one at the bathhouse. The best description I have seen of this experience comes from the Korean American journalist Monica Kim, who writes,

‘To this day, there is a particular shade of electric green that gives me chills, conjuring memories of sitting in the tub while my mother sandpapered the skin off my arms. “See how clean it is?” she would say, pointing at the pilling dirt and dead cells, only adding to my horror’.

This was when I finally understood why my friend had responded so negatively to the idea of bubble baths. If the point of bathing is to prime one’s body to be scrubbed within an inch of its life, lying in a bath of bubbles without washing yourself afterwards accomplishes the very opposite. In other words, it makes one dirty rather than clean.

Notably, Koreans are not alone in viewing bubble baths as dirty. For instance, the majority of commenters on a Reddit thread titled ‘Do you rinse off bubbles after bubble bath? I never do, and my friend told me that’s like leaving soap on my body??’ state that not rinsing is ‘gross’.⁴ In fact, some commentators—like the dubiously qualified ‘Madame Sweat’—even advocate a pre-bath as well as post-bath shower, based on the premise that you are otherwise marinating in your own filth.

To some extent, these arguments miss the point of baths, which are arguably no longer primarily about getting clean, at least in Anglo-American contexts. To quote a response to a post in The Idler asking readers to compare the respective merits of baths and showers: ‘I don’t think you can compare baths with showers because they perform completely different functions. If you need to get clean quickly, by all means have a shower. If you want a decadently enjoyable experience, only a bath will do’.

Although the ‘decadently enjoyable’ aspect of baths is debatable when you’re trying to regulate the temperature of the water to something between tepid and scalding, they are clearly a more leisurely practice than showering. As the sociologist Martin Hand and his colleagues noted in 2005, its potential for speed gives showering a distinct advantage in late capitalist societies because of the ways it ‘can be slotted into narrow time frames, like those between waking in the morning and leaving for work’. In this context, baths likewise have taken on new meanings as a form of leisure and relaxation, albeit a somewhat gendered one, separate from the harried pace of daily life.

Notably, Hand and colleagues raised concerns about the environmental consequences of the UK’s embrace of showering, which they suggested would place greater burdens on water supplies. However, in the 20 years since their article was published, showering has increasingly been framed as superior to bathing on both hygienic and environmental grounds.

This seems to be a common view, despite the fact that bathwater, unlike shower water, can be reused—a practice that remained commonplace throughout the twentieth century.⁵ Still, based on responses to a 2021 episode of Coronation Street, when fans took to Twitter to express their disgust at a character asking his partner whether she wanted the bathwater after he was finished in the bath, it now raises eyebrows in the UK.

That claims about the more hygienic qualities of showers are increasingly couched in terms of their moral superiority to baths speaks to the salience of the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s arguments (rehearsed frequently on this Substack) about ‘dirt’. For Douglas, dirt is a cultural category tied up with conceptions of purity rather than hygiene in a purely technical sense. As the historian Virginia Smith observes in Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity, ‘To modern Westerners, our definition of cleanliness seems inevitable, universal and timeless. It is none of these things, being a complicated cultural creation and a constant work in progress’.

For most of human history, we relied on bathing rather than showers, the former merely requiring access to a water source. Showers, in contrast, require indoor plumbing—unless, that is, you have a mountain of servants to provide a continuous stream of water. As the following illustration by John Leech attests, early modern showers were complicated to set up and terrifying to actually use—according to Katherine Ashenburg’s book The Dirt on Clean, Charles Dickens’ family nicknamed theirs ‘The Demon’.

1851 illustration by John Leech of a manual shower powered by servants

Because the water came out in a torrential flood, cones had to be worn to allow the water to sluice down the body. To quote from an 1855 issue of the US magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book,

‘The dose of water is generally made too large; and, by diminishing this, and wearing one of the high-peaked or extinguisher caps now in use, to break the fall of the descending torrent upon the head, the terrors of the shower-bath may be abated, while the beneficial effects are retained’.

Given that the water used in these showers was tepid at best and freezing at worst, this meant that showers in the nineteenth century were typically speedy exercises involving little time or inclination for actively cleaning the body. Baths were widely (and probably accurately) viewed as more sanitary. But this is also because nineteenth-century showers were designed more with sanity than sanitation in mind. As the historian Stephanie Cox and her colleagues have outlined, in the early nineteenth century, physicians used them for the purpose of curing the insane, as cold showers were believed to ‘cool hot, inflamed brains, and to instil fear to tame impetuous wills’.

Although plumbed showers with hot water became more widely used by the turn of the twentieth century, especially in prisons, asylums and public bathhouses, according to Ashenburg, they continued to be viewed askance in Europe and the UK in the early twentieth century. Arguably, their conceptual rehabilitation only became complete in the late twentieth century, manifested in the widespread contemporary preference for showers over baths, except as a leisure activity.

While it’s tempting to assume that this is primarily the product of greater scientific knowledge about medical health and hygiene, it’s worth noting that these ideas about baths are hardly new. Ashenburg observes that ‘The ancient Egyptians thought that sitting a dusty body in still water, as the Greeks did, was a foul idea’. Besides, I suspect that many Koreans would consider Western-style showers inferior to Korean bathing practices (albeit clearly superior to bubble baths), because scrubbing the skin is considered so essential to cleanliness.⁶

Of course, the excessive use of Italy towels amongst Korean women has been shown to damage to the skin barrier, which provides further proof that ‘ablutions’ are about conceptions of cleanliness and purity rather than hygiene per se. But the real proof can be found in the fact that if hygiene was our sole concern, we’d devote a lot less time to bathing, soaking and exfoliating our bodies and a lot more time to simply washing our hands.

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1. You know how you have those naked dreams, where you’re in public and then you suddenly look down and realise you’re not wearing any clothes? Well, it was like that, except real.

2. This is hardly surprising, given the fact that Korean towels are typically the size of hand towels. And not regular-size hand towels, either, but the ‘dainty’ ones reserved for guests. In subsequent field trips, I learned to bring my own towel with me.

3. Three in total, and all for the sake of research rather than leisure. The only visit I actually enjoyed took place at the end of a 160km walking pilgrimage in the religion where I was conducting fieldwork, as I was too grimy and knackered to care about anything but getting clean.

4. Personally, I fall into the ‘shameless about not rinsing’ category, although I’ve learned the hard way that the cartoonist Edith Pritchett is right about bath oils. All I’m saying is that there’s no way that Julia Roberts got out of that bubble bath scene in Pretty Woman without a case of thrush.

5. For the record, we frequently reused the bathwater when I was growing up in North Queensland in the 80s. Probably the limits of our hot water system played a role, but no one gave it a second thought—although my siblings probably should have, because I have been known to pee in the bath. (Only joking. Or am I???)

6. In fact, based on the accoutrements left in the bathroom (bowls, Italy towels, etc.), and the sounds I heard emanating from the bathroom when anyone in the family I lived with showered, Koreans don’t typically just stand under the shower and wash themselves. Instead, they fill up a bowl with water, turn the water off, scrub themselves, rinse themselves off in the water and then repeat the cycle. I think this is why the towels are so small. You basically don’t need a large towel because your body isn’t completely saturated when you’re finished.

Sadly, how people actually bathe is understudied by anthropologists. As Virginia Smith notes in Clean, ‘Even social anthropology has studiously ignored human grooming’. Fun fact: a student in my Being Human course once wrote an essay on the topic of ‘grooming’ from a social and biological anthropological perspective. While he could find endless references in biological anthropology to grooming practices in primates, it turns out that ‘grooming’ has very different connotations in the social sciences, thus proving Smith’s point.