Culturally puritanical societies develop obsessive cleanliness as displaced sexuality

Evidence

This escape, this sadomasochism in which woman persists against both objects and self, is often precisely sexual. “The kind of housecleaning that calls for bodily gymnastics amounts to a bordello for women,” says Violette Leduc. It is striking that the taste for cleanliness is of utmost importance in Holland where women are cold, and in puritanical civilizations that juxtapose the joys of the flesh with an ideal of order and purity. If the Mediterranean Midi lives in joyous filth, it is not only because water is scarce there: love of the flesh and its animality is conducive to tolerating human odor, squalor, and even vermin. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1239

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the reader’s published essay on ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — both trace the same puritan/class logic across cultures, and both use cross-cultural comparison (Holland vs. Mediterranean) as method. — connects to: Industrial capitalism erased female wantonness into hygienic respectability; Modern hygiene conceals rather than cures the psychic ills it represses; Children perceive sex as excremental dirtiness that adults scandalously embrace — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 718 (+6 more)
• ADDENDUM: This reverses the angle of ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’: instead of moral panics over dress as displaced class signaling, here cleanliness itself is read as displaced sex. Strong supporting material for a follow-up.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: is there empirical support that regulation of bodily ‘dirt’ correlates with stricter sexual moral codes cross-culturally, beyond these two examples?

Broader Connections

• Medieval fixation on genital washing mirrored Christian obsession with Islamic sexual sin #exemplifies (0.90)
• Sexual taboos in strict religious communities drive guilt or early marriage #exemplifies (0.85) — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 557