Question for the Masses. This is a gutsy post in hypochondriacal America, and now that someone with courage has proclaimed their stance, I’ll timidly echo it: I think the handwashing-obsession is just a new iteration of our culture-wide phobia of all things corporeal and organic:
- Hatred of imperfect teeth
- Hatred of pores or skin tone variations
- Hatred of body hair
- Hatred of the smells of the human body
- Hatred of the signs of aging
Notice a common-denominator? Gradually, we’ve become disgusted by all the things that make us different from plastic; we are attracted to uniformity, blandness, odorlessness, texturelessness. We seek to be uncorporeal, ageless, without sweat or organs or wetness or scratchiness or shit or piss or spit or decay. We want to be Barbie or Ken; we airbrush our heroes to make them look that way.
I don’t think you need to be Freud to ascribe this to a cultural inability to process the ultimately contingent physicality of the body, its unavoidably facticity, and the relationship of that quality to death. Anytime hysteria precludes a measured reasoning of science, something deeper is happening. In the case of our national Howard-Hughes-sort of groundless germaphobia, I think it’s simple: we ignore the facts about immune systems, about germs in the air, about where germs are and how they hurt you, because we want to control our environment, control being a means of escaping contingency and death.
Many of the people I know won’t even use public restrooms, especially not to shit; to me, that’s a crippling level of discomfort to feel over one of the most elemental parts of being a human.
