October is the second anniversary of the start of my life without running water. At first it was a bit traumatic, but as the days went by it became clear that I would have to adopt new cleaning and personal hygiene habits that did not depend on this basic service. While it would obviously have been easier to pay the outstanding Aigües de Barcelona bill and remain in the ?comfort zone?, it was more educational and interesting to embark on a methodology for survival without running water. Going to the closest drinking fountain and collecting 5 and 7 litre plastic bottles has become a fundamental part of my daily timetable.
This videoplaylist could have been a tutorial on how to live without running water and the environmental and financial impact of this lifestyle choice, or a rundown of strategies for collecting and distributing water using portable devices. Or it could have been about the design and different models of chemical toilets made out of cardboard.
But I?ve opted for a selection of videos that highlight some aspects of the distorted relationships between the human body and domestic cleaning.
Censorship in education about the human body, the objectification of women in our male chauvinist society, extreme personal hygiene, ignorance about managing bodily waste, postmodern male slavery, and hygiene in zero gravity are the phenomena I?ve chosen to share so that this videoplaylist looks like it was put together by somebody who has read a lot of Foucault.
Perhaps the fact that I suffer from OCS when it comes to cleaning has also played a crucial role in the selection that follows.
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The Human Body, as per Disney, doesn?t go to the toilet
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The Invasion of Sexist Electrical Household Appliances
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Faquirs of Cleanliness
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These Things Happen
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Floseando in Montreal
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Showering in Space, what Lousy Technology
The Human Body, as per Disney, doesn?t go to the toilet
An educational film made by Walt Disney for the ?Health for the Americas? information campaign promoted by F. D. Roosevelt in 1939 as part of the late New Deal policies. This animated guide explains the human body and how it should live, dwell, eat, breathe, and think. It deliberately overlooks the last part of the digestive process, ignoring the where and how of dealing with the resulting waste. The lack of graphic information on shit and urine management must be why we never see cartoon characters use the bathroom.
The Invasion of Sexist Electrical Household Appliances
The washing machine, that great 17th century appliance invented by the British and sublimely developed by the Germans, is, along with the mop, one of the pillars of the contemporary hygiene society. Automatic washing machines were introduced in Spain as part of the invasion of household electrical appliances in the sixties. Their mission was to liberate women from those tedious daily household tasks that prevented them from concentrating on the care and total devotion to the man of the house. JALITAN was a Catalan-designed Spanish washing machine that was promoted with these kinds of sexist ads, in which the woman?s image was always framed within a pathetic sexist landscape defined through the new Francoist marketing strategies, at the time when the Female Section of the Falange wrote their ?20 Principles for Marriage?.
Faquirs of Cleanliness
This tutorial on cleaning the body by means of Pranayama techniques is very useful for achieving in-depth cleansing. That is of course if you manage to follow all instructions to the letter without ending up in the emergency room. I have included this video in the list in homage to Maxon Crumb (brother of Robert) and his famous intestinal cleansing string. India really has done a lot of harm to the West.
These Things Happen
Emesis is something that nobody is ready for. And we certainly haven?t been taught what to do when it happens. Only Gilmore Schjeldahl brought the subject into the open with his famous Vomit Bag in 1949. Everything else we know about vomit remains within the bounds of personal experience and urban legend. There is no formal protocol to teach us how to vomit without pain, or how to avoid dry retching when we behold regurgitation. But, as always, YOUTUBE comes to the rescue and shows us how to negotiate these kinds of situations, with the help of toilet paper and your hands.
Floseando in Montreal
There is no doubt that the Caribbean has generated much cultural, economic, and social wealth. But the greatest wealth of the countries in this region is their manpower in the domestic service sector, thanks to the persistence of the European slavery model at the hands of the new creoles. Caribbean maids are famous in Latin American households as efficient, servile, cheap workers who ?also speak our language?. For a long time, women took most of the vacancies in the field, but over the last few years men have also come on board offering these services.
David Tejada is a Puerto Rican who has run a household services company in Canada for the past ten years. His cleaning company also offers detailed tutorials on how to set up your own household services business in three days and manage it successfully. David is an updated version of an ?anba fil? (a 19th century Caribbean plantation slave who illegally crossed the border), now in the guise of a 21st century cleaner who exploits his working method and thus reinforces the chain of postmodern slavery.
Showering in Space, what Lousy Technology
The future we were promised has clearly not arrived and it never will. Or at least I hope not. Even so, we are in the space age, with its millions of scientific and technological advances that make us think we have evolved as quickly as Kubrik?s four million year ellipsis in A Space Odyssey.
Leaving the planet and going into orbit, sending astronauts into space and managing to bring them back, and generating new kinds of space garbage are difficult tasks that require a superior level of science. But as far as showers go, NASA deals with bodily hygiene by turning to familiar old towels moistened with soapy water. Up there, more than 400 kilometres above the earth, showering is still a mundane task that requires good old rubbing.