There was much about Gregory Rasputin that was repulsive. He was filthy. He rose and slept and rose again without ever bothering to wash himself or change his clothes. His hands were grimy, his nails black, his beard tangled and encrusted with debris. His hair was long and greasy... Not surprisingly he gave off a powerful, acrid odor.-Robert Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra
Red deer and wapiti stags wallow in smelly mud pits during rut, and it is possible to tell rutting stags from non-rutting ones at a great distance, as they are covered with mud and peat. The great wallowing pit hollows made by the American bison in the Great Plains are still visible today, almost a century after they ceased to be used.
If we allow our social ornamentation to become fully expressed, the older males become a greasy-haired stinky mess. The "down and outs" of society are intimidating with their stubble beards, wrinkled and dirty clothes, and unkempt hair. I’ll bet every time a panhandler approaches you on a lonely street there is a twinge of fear; a lot of it is our cultural categorizations, but some of it is because in your mind he is a desperate, muddy stag still fighting over commodities in limited supply.
As a few people began to "keep" other people, some of these status values began to change. The well groomed individual gives the signal that someone is caring for him, almost like the protective signals given by children - no glandular odors, smooth face, and fresh breath. It has become a posture of social facilitation - of gentlemanliness. These are the signals used as personality clues in psychiatry. A person who has completely let himself go to seed, physically, is someone who has lost his social state - in his own evaluation he has no one below him in the rank order and therefore has no social front to maintain.
A major taboo in most human societies is dirt. Dirt is bad. We rationalize the social stigma of dirt as unsanitary. This is essentially a myth. Coal dust, soil particles, and petroleum grease are for the most part free of pathogens. However, someone who is "dirtied" with them, like the mudcaked red deer, can make bystanders shy away. Dirtiness is the main thing which around the world separates castes and classes.
We think of hands - a child's or a fair lady's - as being very lovely; but seldom beautiful feet, except for baby feet which haven't begun to show use. A beauty queen parades in a bathing suit to reveal the contours of her hips and breasts; however, she covers her feet with shoes - the only object to be covered because it is neutral at best. Big feet in a woman are considered ugly, more masculine. A big "dirty" organ is no asset. The Chinese custom of foot-binding (similar in principle to Western women buying shoes so small they deform the toes) was an attempt to retain the aesthetic foot of the child. Polished shoes, shiny patent leather, or white bucks reveal the wearer as not of the soil - not a clod.
In order to give a signal of higher and higher station one had to come up with a classier looking collar and cuffs; in the 18th century collars became so large and ornately ruffled that they impeded function. The same is true of frothy lace cuffs. We have reverted to more practical collars and cuffs, but they are still of light color among the high of stature ("white-collar workers"), and soap ads tell you how to get these important areas "whiter than white". White shoes were a symbol of FDR's upper-class summer wear, which is probably what made the tennis shoe so important in the leisure wear of the 1950's.
Frequent changes of clothing among the well-groomed is another status pattern. A secretary who wears the same skirt and blouse to work every day of the week is not playing the status game with her peers. We don't really "need" a lot of clothes changes.
When one feels "down" there is a sensation of dirtiness about him. Women wash their hair to come out feeling clean and men go to the steam room. Both enjoy a hot tub of water or a sauna after a hard day, especially after one that hasn't gone well and one's status-stat is reading low. We use the terms dirt, dirty, and filthy to refer to other things we dislike: sexual aggression ("that dirty old man" and "filthy pictures"), feces ("were forced to eat their own filth"), ill-earned gains ("filthy lucre"). Most of us treat oily, musky odors with the same repugnance that we treat dirt - garlic, onions, Limburger cheese, and stale cigars.
Most of our table manners are standardized rules of how not to offend your messmates by dirtying yourself. So is the use of different tableware (extra plates, two forks, and two spoons) in formal dining so as not to mix desserts, salads, soups, or tea. We use napkins and finger bowls to keep our person clean. Dinner wear allows you to come to the table looking your cleanest - this was once such an important ritual among the British elite that special dinner dress was taken into the field and used under the harshest extremes in jungle or desert. Cleanliness is an indication of station. The learned and wealthy have often referred to the "others" as the "great unwashed".
The hippie trend of not washing was a way of saying that they were not playing that particular status game (of conspicuous consumption in the form of a large wardrobe, bathing rituals, etc). It is interesting to see how we mix our values in such statements as "I can see why they wouldn't want to own a lot of clothes, but they could at least stay clean." As conservationists we decry the horrible waste of water, yet spend hundreds of gallons a week flushing our excrement, keeping clean, and washing and rewashing the body scents from our clothes. We fear that dirty clothes and dirty bodies are common indicators of social dirtiness.
The establishment's attitudes toward those who do not participate in this social ritual are particularly hostile, even more than toward uncropped hair or profuse ornamentation. Yet while dirt is an important theme in our social values about appearances and smells, there is one thing far worse - excrement.