"The anthropologist Mary Douglas is famous for writing about dirt as a shifting category for everything that is out of place: shoes on the floor aren't dirty, but shoes on the dinner table are; it isn't dirty to have cooking utensils in the kitchen, but it is to have them in your bedsheets. She sees what counts as dirt as a gateway to the bigger systems that judgments like this are caught up in, and a way to figure out how commonsense judgments become that way."
- the believer / mary douglas
similarly, it's interesting to google image "dirty" and come up with a wealth of imagery that is not explicitly dirty but rather culturally constructed taboos, in particular images of womens clothed crotches... and this, legitimately dirty specimen:
which happens to be tween movie star zac efron's waxy ears, which is amazing. thank you the internet and mary douglas.
