The Nature of College. James J. Farrell
ultraviolet light, or ozone—the water is “polished,” to bring it up to legal standards, and discharged back into rivers. When we flush on campus, we’re intimately (and institutionally) involved in the water cycle.13
Biologically, excretion can remind us of the beauties of the natural world, the ways in which our bodies are designed to manage the ins and outs of animal life. Ecologically, our bathroom break reminds us that all natural systems, including the human body, are involved in processes of consumption and return. Taking in nutrients, we expel wastes, which function in the grand scheme of nature as nutrients for other species. Culturally, however, our excretions are a mess: We treat shit like shit. As Christopher Uhl says, “We take two perfectly good resources—human manure and fresh water—and splat them together in the toilet bowl, making them both useless.” But if we ever get our shit together, perhaps we’d see that human wastes aren’t wasted when we use them—properly treated—as fertilizer or fuel, thus returning them to the productive and regenerative cycles of nature.14
The Artificial Waterfall
At some point in the day, most college students take part in a purification ritual called a shower. They walk down the hall to the bathroom carrying a plastic caddy holding soap, shampoo, conditioner, and other lotions and potions. Towel on shoulder, washcloth or loofah in hand, students look for an open shower, set their supplies on a bench, draw a plastic curtain, undress, hang up their clothes, step under the showerhead, and then open the valve to a torrent of cultural assumptions and expectations. Though turning the tap seems mechanical, it’s also organic and very complex. In Northfield, Minnesota, for example, the water flowing in the shower is drawn from the Jordan Aquifer. It’s pumped through a purification plant for chlorination and fluoridation, and then to water towers that provide the pressure for the whole municipal system. In a hydraulic civilization, water goes not just where it falls or flows, but where we want it.15
The shower gets us clean, but it also performs cultural work. Dirt is evil in our culture, and so we ritually cleanse ourselves in a sort of daily baptism, initiating us into a sect of sanitation. Early in the morning, as we’re trying to wake up, a shower is cleansing and stimulating. Later in the day, after a run or a game of basketball, it’s cleansing but also relaxing. In either case, a shower is a way of washing the body, but it’s often also a luxury, too. The water streaming over the skin, massaging the muscles, is a sheer delight. The sound of constant flow is soothing, like a cascading creek. And the steamy heat penetrates our pores, comforting us with wondrous warmth. We bathe not just physically, but also psychologically. When we’re dirty, we tell ourselves we need a shower. When we’re tired or stressed, we tell ourselves we deserve a shower. A long shower, too, is a counterpoint to the culture of speed and efficiency so recently reinforced by our alarm clock. In a small way, a slow shower is a protest movement against a world of enforced time poverty: As we linger in the liquid tranquilizer, we’re not quick and we’re not efficient. This ultimately is a problem. Resisting the time pressures of our society might be a good instinct, but using fifty gallons of fresh water in the process is not so good.16
The Social Construction of Showers
We all understand how a shower works, and how it can work to wake us up, but we need to wake up to how it functions in the moral ecology of everyday life. Considered analytically, a shower, just like the toilet, is a way of transforming drinkable water into wastewater. The drain water finds its way (sooner or later) to an ocean, where it evaporates and circulates in clouds until it precipitates into places where we can pump it once again. In the shower, we’re in the water cycle, which is affected by every turn of the tap.
We think of a shower as a private act, but when we get in the stall, we enter with a lifetime of education and expectations. Every day, ads for soaps, shampoos, conditioners, gels, and moisturizers teach us what clean really means. They teach us about feelings—about comfort 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