I’ve been on vacation. Last year I blogged from my vacation, but last year I went to England to swing dance and this year I went to my mother’s house to rollerskate.
And there has been commencement and the various form of pageantry that dresses up saying goodbye to students.
As it happens, the actual dresses that the pageantry demands are white.
Yeah. White.
Guess why.
Well, folks will tell you it’s because it’s the school’s official color, but why is white the school’s color?
The color white, with its poetic overtones of purity apparently reflects the college motto, “To virtue, knowledge.”
Hrm.
The conflation of virtue with “purity” is, to me, problematic.
Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations research tells us that purity/sancity is one of the (five) basic dimensions of morality:
Purity/sanctity, shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. This foundation underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).
Coincidentally, today my cousin posted this video on Facebook:
Now, I’ve juxtaposed “purity” and “dirty,” and in each case the claim is that it ought to be extolled, celebrated, understood by the community as virtuous.
I can’t get excited about purity – which is actually strange, given that I am unusually sensitive to disgust (about everything except sex). Mice, bugs, bad smells, bodily fluids (outside the sexual context), germs, I’m a TOTAL wuss. I have driven 15 miles in the middle of the night to escape my apartment where my cat had just killed a mouse. I have called friends for moral support while attempting to dispose of the body of an ex-bumblebee. I don’t shake hands with people and I use my elbows to open doors whenever possible. The sound of people coughing wetly makes me nauseated and angry. I SHOULD, by rights, morally judge those who are not “pure.” But I don’t, I can’t. I view my inability to cope with the ickinesses in life as a shortcoming, not a virtue.
But I can get behind celebrating the virtue of dirty – and by that, of course, I mean not just hard, dirty work (a virtue I appreciate but nevertheless eschew, because I’m a middle class wuss – see above) but also the virtue of mutually consensual exploration between consenting peers, unhindered by cultural lies about what’s okay and what’s not okay to do with your body. The virtue of dirty sex – raunchy, forceful sex, anal sex, sex in the grass, sex in a barn, sex in a nursing home, sex with restraints and weapons, sex with non-normative fluids, any sex that violates the “community standards” that the FCC relies on to determine whether something is pornographic. Pornographic, offensive-to-others, mutually consensual sex that reaches deep into your soul and teaches you something about yourself, your partner, and the nature of being human: there’s a virtue I can get behind.
And to virtue, knowledge.
Congratulations and love to the new alums. Get dirty, in every sense.
This reminds me of some research I was taught about in the Sociology of Gender this year: apparently people who are comfortable in their “real bodies” (bodily fluids, weird random hairs, etc.) not only report more sexual satisfaction but more sexual encounters.
Sex is fundamentally dirty. I mean, most of the body parts used are otherwise used for the elimination of wastes. Even kissing is like spitting in each other’s mouths. People need to learn to revel in the dirty, not deny or recry it.
Emily, did you hear about this Cornell paper about “purity” and political ideology?
http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/cleanliness-cues-activate-conservative-attitudes-29718/
Just fascinating, particularly the bit about how the harshest judgments of participants concerned sexual morality. We humans have quite an aptitude for subliminal metaphor…
your students are smithies, no? that is, truly, perfect.
- m., Smith College ’07
One thing I like about Smith’ motto: the ancient Greek, Ἐν τῇ ἀρετῇ τὴν γνῶσιν, uses a word for virtue that is not pure in the ‘wait ’til marriage’ sense. It also could have a kind of ‘masculine’ ring to it. The first Liddell definition that comes up is “goodness, excellence, of any kind, esp. of manly qualities, manhood, valour, prowess”. So, ‘In valor, knowledge’?
Of course, this is Greek composed in the 1800′s, which probably does intend to have connotations of purity and womanly virtue, and even beyond the motto I agree with your thoughts. But, hey, language is cool!
Hello Emily!
If you have never watched Professor Winston’s experiments with ickyness in the first episode of the BBC series the Human Instinct, you’re in for a treat!!
The latest issue in a long line of “obsessive compulsive bleachers” (the folklore of the female side of our family is full of bleach related stories and other ick-intolerance quirks…), I spent quite a long time worrying about the problematic side effects of our low threashold for ickyness. Then I discovered the theories about the evolutionary role of disgust and its little quirks, and the idea that my family’s obsession for cleanliness could be in part responsible for our continuing existence sort of made up for all the little inconveniences (including pre-planning our city walks to ensure my younger sister has access to impeccably clean loos, and my mother’s extra monthly budget for the replacement of bleach splattered clothes…).
For some reason however, our ick radar seems to make a conspicuous exception for any filth acquired in the course of vigourous physical activity…
dirty and nasty are two virtues with subtle distinctions i’m sitting with right now;)
@meghann
“Sounds like Smithies” was my first thought, too.
–Courtney (Smith ’02)
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