I’m Dirty, Filthy, and Impure

Cleanliness was never my priority, but perhaps that's changing (my most tmi post yet)

I am filthy.

As I type this, I have three days of accumulated summer city life on my body. Layers of sweat on my sun-shined shoulders, car (and emotional) exhaust on my neck, park dirt on my shins, and some other dried brown film on my knee from when I kneeled while helping my kid out of a climbing frame. It’s not that I don’t appreciate cleanliness. I do. I love lying with nothing on my body — no clothing and no random brown film — on and under clean sheets, rubbing up against my husband Joe’s clean, hairy body. I just don’t prioritize cleanliness. I don’t require it.

“The Bath - Woman Scrubbing Her Back” Edgar Degas (1887)

I still feel sexy with dried salt and grains of sand on my scalp. I am capable of arousing myself and feel capable of arousing others with a knotted ponytail. If I held up my arm right now, I’m fairly sure Joe would tongue my unshaved armpit. But my dirt endurance is more than anyone’s approval.

When I fell in love with my husband, he probably had some type of oral bacterial overgrowth. I could taste and smell it when we kissed. He loved to tongue my mouth when I had sweat dew on my upper lip. The first time I remember this filthy make-out was the first morning after I slept over at his place. After we woke, I rubbed my teeth with my finger and his toothpaste. In a park an hour later, I let him French me that way, even though deep kissing wasn’t really my thing. But when his irregularly aligned teeth bonked into mine as his tongue petted the roof of my mouth, it excited me. Maybe it was our exposed insides, or the imperfection and rawness of it all.

The filth got worse when we became parents. We prioritized fucking before cleaning the dried rice from that night’s dinner. I prioritized my children over myself. I showered more infrequently. We had sex just as frequently.

“Woman Washing Her Left Leg” Edgar Degas (1883-86 / cast 1920)

I thought it was relatively harmless, but I’ve had opportunities to learn otherwise. One time, while our eldest child was one or so, my husband fingered me with unclean, unmanicured hands. I got an internal scrape and a yeast infection that lasted for months.

After we recently moved, we had drunk feral sex. His tongue moved from my clit to my ass hole and back so many times that I got, drum roll, a yeast infection. It was hot in the moment, but in the end, it was not.

After this last occurrence, I drew the line on tonguing succession. After the first occurrence, I suggested he stop biting his nails. The filth slowly stopped arousing me, but I hadn’t yet gotten an aversion.

When I was young, someone told me that rubbing soap on my vulva could promote, you guessed it, yeast infections. These post-douche PSAs and the awareness that my bacteria were self-cleaning were my laissez-faire facilities-management origin stories. But it was more than logic, as it was more than water-saving environmentalism.

“Woman Seated in Chair Wiping her Left Side” Degas (1896-90 / cast 1920)

I’m not righteous about my infrequent bathing. Although I do think that obligatory cleansing borders on indoctrination,¹ and the root of shame.² Technically, the genuinely pure is impure.³ All symbols of purity — the lotuses, lilies, and lambs — are coated in debris, contaminated rain residue, and bee vomit. Greater than any potential filth kink, or filth tolerance kink, is my belief system: I reject the concept of purity so deeply that I subconsciously prefer to be filthy.

I do clean myself. I even find a bath erotic. Joe and I loved visiting the Hampstead ponds and having a natural bath with the ducks and algae that first feral year together. With our current closest bodies of water, the active EPA Superfind Site, the Gowanus Canal, and the East River, I’ve taken to our indoor bath.

“Woman in Her Bath, Sponging Her Leg” Degas (1884)

Preparing myself with a soak, scrub, and an oiling is a celebration and appreciation of my body. But my body doesn’t need extra celebration. Bolstering my confidence was never more important than pushing away suitors who might have been averse to it. Part of my filthiness is a strategic rejection of purity, to repel those who would require me to shower pre-sex, which I only consider permissible in extenuating circumstances. I knew that type of partner wasn’t compatible with me, so I didn’t accommodate them.

Those courtship days are long gone, and in their place are parenting days. The constant, my filth. Although a change may be near for the same reason as I’m sending this newsletter later than usual.⁴

Yesterday, I woke up in clean sheets, the three-day brown knee smudge gone, this essay sat without an ending in my Drafts, and a pain throbbed throughout my body. Despite feeling clean, I was rocked by my second stomach bug in a month.

“Woman Seated in Armchair Wiping Her Left Armpit” Degas (1895 / cast 1920)

It’s not a coincidence, of course, that we’ve been potty training my youngest during this time. It might be a coincidence that I sucked Joe’s dick three nights in a row (Father’s Day Weekend triple header⁵), two of which followed him sharing a bath with my two boys. Whether the specific cause of my pain is the bath cock, the traveling yellow toddler potty, or that three-day brown knee smudge, I know the overarching issue is myself.

Many sweaty hours in a bathroom and many more curled around myself in bed provided ample time for reflection. Is it because I didn’t wash the backs of my hands? Is the Trader Joe’s soap not antibacterial? Did I not wipe every part of the potty? Or was it the doorknob? Should I have thrown away all the knickers with accidents? The contemplative pose upon porcelain, in a sweat-wet pajama shirt, also leaves one feeling as asexual as humanly possible. Why did I ever find exposed insides erotic? Do I need to ask Joe to shower before sex? A more horrifying position than the fetal one. Then, I know how to finish today’s essay.

Before I ever met Joe, a friend told me I was “very tidy.” I side-eyed her. She said, “I didn’t say clean.” My face was fresh. I didn’t often shower or shave, but my pubic and armpit hair were in cute, contained little mounds. My kitchen counters were wiped with a natural product that probably wasn’t protecting me as well as it protected the environment. Has my preference for toxin-free products left my home ironically uninhabitable for humans? So many parts of myself have changed since that conversation, but not my state of cleanliness.

“Woman Washing Herself” Degas (1892)

I am filthy. It was a sexy thing. It was a belief-system thing. It was a self-protection thing. Now, well, I am not so sure I want it to be a thing. I’d like Edgar Degas’ visions of bathing to supplant the PSAs in my psyche.

Recently, Joe and I started flossing together. It’s sexy watching him prod his gums. Seeing it, I imagine his longevity expanding. Us growing old together. I winced this morning, keeled over on the couch, “I want to grow old with you,” I said. I was thinking about all the ways he took care of my kids and me that morning. I was thinking about how great a partner he was, filth and all.

Filth or not, I want to be the same.

But ask me again when my baby wipes his own butt.

1. Isn’t the expectation of a “pure” body, purity culture? Soap’s history is troubled. As is body hair removal products. Totem of moral and cultural “cleanliness.”

2. If bathing were a prerequisite to feeling worthy of arousal, or my partner wouldn’t entertain adoring me tainted, those emotional barriers are far more prohibitive to eroticism than dirt.

3. Even the unsculpted mind of youth is sexual.

4. I’m sorry about that, by the way (my OCD is more duty-oriented than doody, as you’ll soon read).

5. ;)