I was talking to someone I hadn't seen for a while the other day. "This will give you cancer" she mentioned with an ominous forefinger referring to my perfume use. I felt like I was a 6 year old in elementary school, taught about the bad effects of picking my nose and tasting the boogers. It made no sense, though it appeared like it did. She was also misusing a lot of the words we hear brandished a lot
in similar discussions: "chemicals" (hey, everything is chemical, including H2O), "nasties" (some of them do keep your products from rotting), "toxic" (well...).
I try to be an inquisitive person, rather than an argumentative one, though it often comes across like I am argumentative (all right, I might be just a bit), so instead of trying to win an argument with my long-lost friend I probed her with more questions to understand the stem of her apprehension and panic towards fragrance. Turns out she was apprehensive and panicked about a lot of other things too, not just perfumes. Foodstuff, livestock, drugs sold at the chemist's, air pollution affecting her (nascent) asthma, whether her skin would withstand the assaults of "chemicals" in just about anything sold over the counter, how her totally dropping the habit of the occasional fag with her infrequent drink when going out, once every three months, would result in gaining a pound or two, God forbid, how she would never again let a drop of alcohol pass her lips "because it creates fetus malformations", the fact that she had just bought a juicer to try to juice her organically grown carrots and alpha alpha sprouts, yada yada yada. My eyes would have glazed if my surprise wasn't written all over them like storm on a winter's day sky. What the hell had happened to the woman I knew?
This modern obsession with all things "natural" and "clean" isn't necessarily modern. It does always bring on shades of psychoanalytical anal fixation all the same: The idea of one's gut being full of accumulated dirt, a need to purge, the need for control, control on ones' self at first but soon expanding to include one's surroundings. There's a heap of masochism thrown into this controlling desire, where every deviation from the ideal (i.e. an unattainable standard of "clean") is considered a moral lapse for which one must atone through elaborate ritual. Enter the macrobiotic diets, the purging via detoxifying juices and coffee enemas, the tossing of anything remotely pleasurable and its substitution with unpalatable -and when you research it highly dubious- stuff such as rice crackers (rice crackers, man, can you think of anything more cardboard-tasting?!?), the ionisers in the office and the dehumidifiers at home, the eradication of bed bugs through ultra-expensive machinery using UV-radiation (why not just bring out the matresses out in the sun every week or so?), the elimination of anything paraben-containing from the bathroom shelf, the demonization of sedantary lifestyles and the condemnation of the occasional social glass of wine. It's exhausting. No doubt obsessive people derive so much pleasure out of it. It's like taking a massive crap; leaves you light-headed and out of focus for a while, forgetting about third world famine, war waged against people's free choice, rampant unemployment and the collapse of democracy as we know it. Yes, I can well see there's an inordinate amount of pleasure involved; but that doesn't mean I condone it or agree with it.
Maybe I'm not the target audience for this "product", because it IS a product, called "clean living". I see (on the Net, not in real life, thank goodness) T-shirts with nonsese emblazoned on it such as "A clean living room is a happy living room". Come again? Or just look at Gwyneth Paltrow. She looks incredible, but somewhat unstable too, doesn't she? I wouldn't trust her with my offspring; she might try to give them rice crackers, for Pete's sake! When I peruse titles on Amazon selling clean living tips, the people on the cover are all invariably perfectly depilated, clean-combed, routinely in some variation of white and light blue or pink garment, with just the right tan and a whiter than white smile in a frozen "cheese" grimace. They make me shake my head, get convinced they're constipated and inwardly joke they're spanking each other on the butt for fun (something's got to give, right?). What's certain is they don't make me want to emulate them, like the advertisers and the lifestyle media battle to do, know what I mean?
Perfume is just the tip of the iceberg and my rant just a budding disconnect with the (misconstrued, I suppose?) Protestant morals that have swept over Europe and possibly the world thanks to the ill effects of previous policies. It's easy to target, because it seems frivolous and morally suspect (Isn't perfume routinely associated with sexual attraction and seduction?). It's also easy to place all the shortcomings of the modern world on the back of this little scapegoat, called perfume, and think that by ousting it out of the community, burdened with all our sins, we have escaped Nemesis and can go about our lives feeling much lighter as if we have taken a massive crap. Alas, as any classicist will tell you, things don't quite work out this way. Hubris is just around the corner.
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