Ep 218: Ablutophobia - Fear of Baths and Bathing

Oct 16

Listen to episode 218 here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We might have to start calling October phobia month here on the pod, because this week we have another phobia we need to discuss. This week, we go back into the bathroom, to face our fears, and look at another bathroom related and centered phobia. Let’s first look at some of the history that surrounds this.

As we have discussed, for much of our history, the idea of cleanliness being next to godliness was not only an axiom that people shared to note the importance of taking a bath and cleaning yourself up. It ACTUALLY served that role. If you were clean, you had removed something that the gods detested. This, coupled with the health benefits of cleaning, caused people to believe that they had earned the favor of their deity because they had been given health and vitality. Greeks, Romans, ancient Asian and countless other cultures have pretty clear and sophisticated customs and rules for bathing, many of which we have discussed over the years on this show.

However, that does not mean that all cultures for all of time continued to hold to those notions of bathing and cleaning.

A Brief History

Doctors coming out of the 1500s and the medieval period subscribed to an idea we brought up briefly last time called the open pore theory. This theory rejected a lot of Eastern medicine which sought to open the pores in one's body for cleansing, and said that the opening of one’s pores through bathing and washing, though it does rid the body of “bad air”, would consequently open someone up to other diseases as a part of the miasma theory of disease. In short they thought that washing made a person vulnerable in that it opened them up to disease or even possession in the strangest versions of the miasma theory. Some people thought you could catch the crazy, literally in the air.

The dirt and sweat, and I’m just going to go ahead and put it out there because sanitation was at an all time low, the pee and poo of life would come to be found on people just served as an added protective barrier from these bad airs of the outside world. This layer of filth acts as a protective stink barrier warding the pig pen-esque individual away from being penetrated by the evils of the air outside. In this view, not only does bathing open you up to susceptibility, lest the bad air and demons infect your pores and get into your blood, but it also resets and undoes the protective layer of filth defense you have coated your body in.

In my opinion, this is such a classic K-3rd grade boy perspective on taking a bath. You’ve destroyed my days of progress. This begs the question then, what about swimming? Would people forego swimming if it would open them up to disease and possible possession.

There was developed coming out of these times a method called “waterless washing”. This was a system of dry rubbing, like you are some sort of steak that is being prepped for the grill. In short, you sought to remove some amount of dirt and filth just by rubbing it off. They believed that would actually make things worse. Others believed they could mitigate it by wearing linen clothing and avoiding getting dirty or working up that sweat in the first place. I’ve talked a lot about sweat in the past few months on the show, but you just never really know where things are going to go when you get them going. Anything to avoid warm water washing, or soaking in water both of which would open your pores.

At the time, bathing would often be tied to pagan rituals and the divine. A person takes a bath to indulge in the pleasures of this world. Not only was not bathing viewed as a hygienic option, but it would become a moral one as well. A person could ward off not only disease but the temptations of the devil by saying no to a bath. Cleanliness would be framed not as a thing for purification but something that should be limited in practice of moderation and self control.

Bathing was viewed as only by necessity, if ever at all and in the most severe instances, the bath would be medically supervised. Physicians said that IF bathing occurred at all, it should be seldom brief and be followed by thorough and rigorous drying of the body so as to close the pores before you let something bad in.

They began to measure cleanliness by how often someone changed their clothes, which if you aren’t going to bathe, I would hope would be often. Royalty took less and less baths and spent time working on perfecting perfume to help mask the odor. This needed to be the case because bad smell was often linked to moral corruption or evil. So you had these people who had bought in to not bathing for a really really long time, now smelling like a walking turd sock, and then having to adapt that belief to the idea that if you also smell bad it was a sign of evil and more corruption.

The rich could afford not to bathe and still smell relatively good. It became a signal of the lower class to smell bad. This made the rich blame the poor for the release of sickness, and stench, or bad air onto the public as they would be housed in crowded spaces, couldn’t afford stink management, yet were not bathing due to still prevailing beliefs about bathing and illness.

As cities grew, this was still held in the 17th and 18th centuries. Likely when America was being founded, there was little to no bathing that happened. When we think back on Ben Franklin’s air baths, we can gain an appreciation for why he would begin to do so. The biggest shift in thinking in the 1700s was not that bathing was good. As they understood that polluted air from crowding and poor sanitation led to illness, it was assumed that not bathing would still fight against these dangers.

The miasma theory prevailed until there were scientific advancements in the world of microscopes. As illness and other things were being traced by patterns miasma could not explain, doctors began to see if they could look closer at the air and “contaminated water” to see if there was an explanation. Turns out there were, as they began to find bacteria and other things growing and thriving in these spaces. These pathogens were small, but they were material in nature and as a result it was posited that perhaps water could wash them away too.

However, just because you can understand something, doesn’t mean everyone will believe you and adapt to it themselves. It would be almost a hundred years before standards of bathing would be accepted in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. To be clean one shifted from managing exposure to contaminants, to managing exposure to contaminants.

By the 1900s bathing became a normal and expected part of life, we just had a few smelly years there. While there were many people who were truly “afraid” of bathing in old times, this was due to the belief that bathing would get you sick or make you susceptible to disease. As we move into the modern times, it turns out, there are some who still hold an aversion or a fear related to bathing.

The Phobia

The modern term for fear of bathing, washing, or cleaning oneself is called ablutophobia. From the latin ablutere which means to wash off.

However, the amount of people running around with this phobia is much less and I guarantee that they aren’t running around saying it because they are afraid of their pores opening up and an illness or some sort of demon or something getting in.

What are some of the reasons that people experience ablutophobia today? This is not just people who don’t want to take a bath. This is also not those adults who are like, yeah I’m not sure that last time I showered. Rather, ablutophobia is an actual fear of the bath or bathing experience as a whole.

Symptoms of ablutophobia are similar to any phobia, racing heart shortness of breath, fainting, feeling hot, shaking, sweating, dry mouth, nausea. In severe instances people will have a breakdown, faint, lose control, or die.

One clear source is childhood or adolescent trauma around the bath or shower space. If you have something bad happen to you when you are in the shower or bathtub space, it makes it more likely you will not want to engage or be in that spot again. One common thing is drowning.

Another trigger or cause of ablutophobia is environmental. This can be things like growing up in a household where people experience it can cause you to be afraid of it yourself. Nothing will make you be suspicious or afraid of something like someone else being afraid of it themselves. Another is sensory or other sort of concerns. There are those who do not like the way a bath or a shower feels. As such they develop fears related to these experiences.

The tough part about ablutophobia is with most phobias, you just avoid the thing and it comes up fairly seldom. However, if I’m afraid of baths, showers, and washing, I can’t just avoid that. We’ve learned from history that life is better, and cleaner, when we are bathing and taking care of that part of our lives. So… what's the path forward?

While I think it is a bad idea long term, doing your best to get clean when you can and the ways you can is a start. Dry shampoo, sink baths, etc. It’s not a substitute, but it could help you take the next steps. In more severe cases, you may need to go to therapy and get some behavior therapy related to your phobia. Some include behavior, exposure, and in some cases, anxiety meds to help deal with the symptoms so you can bath and function. However, before we move on, we would do well to discuss the cultural impact and how ablutophobia is highlighted and often made worse by the media.

Ablutophobia in the Media

1960’s Psycho did a lot to make people feel uneasy and afraid specifically around the shower space. The image of the character being attacked in the shower, which is undoubtedly a very vulnerable space to be in stuck with audiences. As we’ve noted, bathrooms are vulnerable spaces in tv and movies, often played on in tropes to highlight how someone could be caught off guard or taken advantage of in those areas. The bath and shower however play particularly well in this space for a number of reasons.

However, when it comes to showers, there is a fear related to the sensory deprivation of the thing. Your inhibitions are let down a bit and you are more alert and aware of things than maybe you normally would be. Others besides Psycho that continue to play on these tropes are the Nightmare on Elm Street with the famous bubble bath scene.

What Lies Beneath has the bathtub death scene where the paralyzed woman is put in the bathtub by her husband and the water is slowly rising up over her face.

Shivers has a slug crawling up out of the bathtub drain to terrorize a woman in the tub, this was later revisited in 2006 Slither. In a Quiet Place, the protagonist has to give birth to their baby, quietly I might add, in a bath tub.

Shower scenes include The Grudge where a mysterious hand is reaching out of your head any time you clothes your eyes in the shower. Arachnophobia has the giant spider in the shower scene. Final Destination has the leaky toilet which kills a man as he is strangled to death by a shower curtail line.