Why so many people don't shower anymore

In the 1980s, there was a television commercial for the brand Dusch Das ("the shower ace"), which showed a young man who got up sleepily and listlessly, rubbed himself with Dusch Das in the shower while using the water lavishly and happily distributes the foam over his body in order to finally start his working day tidied up, fresh and full of activity. He inspires passers-by with the storm of freshness that emanates from him.

Shower This is something like the Renault Twingo of shower gels: not very appealing in terms of marketing, but inexpensive and available everywhere. You don't need to study sociology to understand that the commercial also advertises the performance principle: you don't take a shower to lie around lazily afterwards, but to feel better physically when you fulfill your plan.

Today's eco-bourgeois civil society watchdogs would probably recommend removing the ad. Not once does the man turn off the water in the shower, there is something self-serving about his enjoyment of lathering, and the breeze of enthusiasm he sends to those around him could be felt to be overwhelming. The doctor and best-selling author James Hamblin, whose book “Clean: The New Science Of Skin” was published in German at the end of last year, shows how one has to talk about personal hygiene these days.

He complained to the magazine of the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” that “advertising and films” so often show people “soaping up all over their bodies as if they were a car in the car wash”, and warns: “One spends then spend more time in the shower than necessary, use more water than necessary, buy products whose ingredients have been transported halfway around the world several times and then filled in plastic bottles.”

Therefore, he diagnoses a narcissistic relationship of habitual showerers to their bodies in the sense of the American non-bathing movement. Its ability to regenerate is damaged by the use of too much hot water and soap, as is the climate. Non-bathing adherents refuse to take a daily shower for health and environmental reasons.

If you don't shower every day, it doesn't smell that good at first, but this is compensated for by the metabolism: "After a while without intervention, a new balance develops on the skin and in the hair." The Munich dermatologist Marion Moers-Carpi, who after says he showers twice a week, defends Hamblin's theses. Frequent showering makes the skin dry and promotes the consumption of pointless luxury items such as moisturizers.

In addition, Moers-Carpi, who has a preference for curd soap, reinforces her argument with a historical digression: “Just ask your grandparents how often they washed. In the past, bathing was usually only announced once a week. And they weren’t all stinky people either.”

The grandparent cult (a lot of curd soap, little fragrance) fits in with the fact that body care products have largely run out of foam in recent years due to the withdrawal of climate-damaging additives: Eco-friendly shower gels in particular, and increasingly other shower gels, clean, but hardly foam. If the contempt for softness and luxury hidden behind the alibi of sustainability were limited to lifestyle supplements in daily newspapers, it would be annoying, but not a social problem.

But since the Ukraine crisis at the latest, instead of correcting earlier mistakes, politicians have turned to moral blackmail of the population in terms of personal hygiene - since the failed energy policy of the federal government with its Germany-specific mixture of faded idealism and pragmatic mumbling around has become completely obvious. The pioneer is Klaus Müller, a member of the Greens, a confidant of Robert Habeck, a former member of the Board of Trustees of Stiftung Warentest and President of the Federal Network Agency since the beginning of 2022.

Müller, who apparently misunderstands the task of consumer protection as protecting consumers from improper consumption, advocates a sauna ban in view of the energy crisis and for the waiver of the complete heating of single apartments. He also doubts that people need to shower every day. Such brazen interventions by politicians in the private sphere of citizens deny what, despite all violations of the principles of the welfare state and economic liberality, could be reasonably trusted up to now: the state guarantee of minimum infrastructural conditions for individual self-support and the pursuit of happiness.

They also replace instrumental reason, by whose limited but verifiable criteria all realpolitik is to be measured, with a moralism that is an end in itself and to which the everyday actions of the population are to be committed. The last illusions that make a bubble bath something nicer than treading water and moisturizing cream something nicer than curd soap should be cast out of people's minds. So Robert Habeck, instead of presenting solutions to the energy crisis as Economics Minister, has announced in an exemplary manner that he wants to reduce his personal shower time.

The authoritarian moralization of everyday life, which has always been the goal of green politics, has received a powerful boost since the Corona crisis. It is not for nothing that supporters of the non-bathing trend point out that the consumption of shower gel, shampoo, deodorant and perfume decreased during the lockdowns and exit restrictions because consumers, due to the lack of places to go out, placed less value on styling and learned that not everything that you want to treat yourself is also necessary.

Anyone who seriously believes that people wash themselves primarily for the purpose of disinfection and not to be able to meet themselves and each other more pleasantly; So if you see the only benefit of personal hygiene in being sterile, disinfectants will eventually be more important than bubble baths and cosmetics. And yet both are products of a civilization whose concept of sociality has learned to relate the useful and the non-purposeful, luxury and necessity, rather than separating one from the other.

Where people feel like 100 percent sustainability citizens with their morning shower instead of thinking about themselves for a few minutes, that relationship is destroyed and the society that made it possible is shattered.