and pleasure and joy and indulgence—and sometimes, for women especially, about sexiness. They teach us to get clean, but they also teach us to get that fresh, clean feeling that we have unconsciously learned to associate with the commodities in our shower caddy. Ads don’t tell us that soap works first by bonding dirt to hydrophobic fatty acids, encapsulating the dirt in droplets of water that can be rinsed away, or that shampoos generally use detergents like ammonium lauryl sulfate to remove our hair’s natural oil and phthalates to dissolve scents and thicken lotions. They certainly don’t trouble us with information about the chemistry of conditioners, which not only coat the clean hair with different oils, but also with silicone, humectants, proteins, and quaternary ammonium compounds—primarily to make hair slick and easy to comb. We don’t learn where the ingredients came from, or who was involved in manufacturing them, but that’s okay, because our hair looks great, and that’s what matters in the morning.17
Indeed, we don’t learn these things because shampoo commercials aren’t about shampoo: They’re about cultural conceptions of beauty—about hair and the meanings of hair. Shampoo companies hire models like Cindy Crawford, Eva Longoria Parker, and Jessica Simpson—who possess what is essentially professional hair—to teach us that a woman’s hair, and not the brain beneath it, is what makes her sexy and attractive. Generally these shampoo models have long, straight hair that they wave around in slow motion. Watching the ads, we might believe that the purpose of shampoo is to train hair to dance.
A guy’s hair usually doesn’t dance in ads. Joe College’s shampoo can be stylish and scented, but for guys in TV ads, shampoo serves three putative purposes: washing hair after an athletic event, thus confirming one’s manliness; getting rid of unsightly dandruff, thus confirming one’s attractiveness; and convincing women to stroke the clean hair lovingly, thus confirming the gullibility of the guy who believes in such a scenario.
Shampoo ads teach us, or at least remind us, that women are meant to smell like flowers and fruit. For men, as usual, there is a narrower range of choices, and they tend not to be floral or fruity. If men smell, the ads tell us, they need to smell different from women—musky perhaps—thus confirming their independent gender identity. At the end of a shower, therefore, we can rinse off the shampoo, but it’s harder to escape the images and assumptions locked in the lather of the ads. Advertisements shape our common sense of what’s normal, and we respond, subtly shaping the moral ecology of everyday life.
The Natural Resources of Showers
In the shower, we get in hot water when we forget where the hot water comes from, because both water and heat come to us from nature. A toilet is basically a small pond in the bathroom, while the shower is a waterfall positioned for our convenience. While they definitely depend on plumbing and human ingenuity, they rely more basically on precipitation and the recharge of groundwater and aquifers—natural phenomena. And because water in nature is seldom warm enough for a satisfying shower, Joe and Jo College use nature to heat nature, warming water by burning fossil fuels or causing chain reactions in uranium. While we luxuriate in the shower, we also suck up the world’s fresh water and generate more greenhouse gases.18
If a normal shower delivers three gallons of water a minute, then a ten-minute shower requires thirty gallons of water. With just one shower a day for a nine-month school year, most students will use about 8,100 gallons of water; if the average university has ten thousand students, that’s more than eighty million gallons. Simple updates like low-flow showerheads could allow the university to save four million gallons of water, plus the fuels needed to warm that much water. Students would still be clean, with hair that would still glisten, but the school could easily be conserving resources.19
The American shower has a deeper effect, though, by impressing the planet’s other people, who often emulate U.S. standards of cleanliness. “The British bath,” notes Elizabeth Shove, “is in danger of being abandoned in favour of showering on a daily or twice daily basis.” By itself, this English adjustment might be no big deal, but it’s a small part of an energy-intensive shift in international comfort standards, and that is huge. This also suggests that standards of cleanliness are never universal or permanent. American students now expect free and unlimited water for showers in their residence halls. At one time, however, a trustee at a college in the prairies of the Midwest thought that the purchase of a single tin bathtub was an unnecessary luxury for students. The extravagance only seemed justified when he discovered that the college could charge students a nickel a bath. If today’s colleges charged students for water by the gallon, it might help teach the costs incurred by lingering luxuriously in the shower, and it might be a first step toward full-cost accounting (and accountability) for all the resources in students’ lives.20
We shower ourselves with water, in an artificial waterfall created by culture. Though our morning shower never seems like “getting back to nature,” it’s one place where we could wake up to nature, a place where we could practice mindfulness about our “ordinary consumption.” Usually when we think about consumption, we think about buying stuff or going out to restaurants, movies, or concerts. “Ordinary consumption,” on the other hand, is so routine and repetitive—like water and heat, electricity and embodied energy—that we don’t normally consider it a part of our consumer behavior. In the shower, then, we can fully enjoy the comforts and convenience of the steamy stream, but we can also begin to immerse ourselves in the paradigm shift of conservation that will characterize the coming culture of permanence.
Mirror Image: The Nature of Looking Good
After performing their cleansing rituals, Joe and Jo College usually take part in rituals of self-inspection and self-improvement in front of a mirror. The word “mirror” itself comes from the Latin root mirari—to admire—making a mirror, at its root, a meeting place for a mutual admiration society of one.
Yet while its smooth surface simply reflects the images of objects, a mirror also performs cultural work, reflecting the patterns of American society. It is a visual echo, and, like television, a way of seeing—and not seeing.
As a matter of physics, most mirrors reflect exactly the patterns of light and shade that hit them. But as a matter of culture, there can be significant distortions, because mirrors reflect not just the way we are but also the ways we hope (or fear) to be. For example, when we look at a mirror in the morning, we are trained by years of advice and advertising to see not just our own reflection, but also its relationship to ideal images in magazines or on TV. We are trained to focus on particulars: We don’t usually see the whole picture because we’re concentrating on so-called problem areas that popular culture has pinpointed for us. One student’s mirror highlights his pimples and the size of his nose, while another’s magnifies her worry about her makeup and hair. Mirrors permit us to objectify ourselves, to look at ourselves as others see us, rather than as we truly are. American culture teaches us to be attractive, and to dress for success, and the mirror provides the final exam to see if we have succeeded.
But mirrors can’t do everything. Although they reveal the social self, they divert our attention from the natural self. Contemplating teeth, zits, facial hair, and the dark circles under our eyes, we forget to appreciate the intricacy of the organism that stands before us. We forget, for example, the marvel of our eyes, which allow us to use a mirror effectively. An immense evolutionary advantage, they provided our ancestors with the hand-eye coordination that has made Homo sapiens such a successful species. Containing about half the sensory receptors in the body, our eyes use about 30 percent of the brain’s cortex to see that bleary face in the mirror. But we don’t usually perceive the amazing ecological adaptation staring back at us. Eyeing the mirror to check
