I am going to use this to weaponize my anti capitalist sentiment into self acceptance!
My electrologist mostly.
If you want a lot of “fun”, look into the history of deodorant and why it is now required, practically, in the western world to smear our armpits with toxic chemicals at least daily, and oft times multiple times daily.
Would you mind doing some infodumping? :)
Well throughout history people have just dealt with excessive body odour by, you know, cleaning. Most times, under ordinary circumstances, the body’s odour is not really noticeable, and when noticeable isn’t really that offensive. For example I go to work every day in a pretty crowded subway. Most people in China don’t use deodorant, yet there is no real problem with body odour. If you sweat a lot for whatever reason (heat, labour, etc.) and body odour starts up, historically people just, you know, washed. With a cloth. And some water. Or in water-poor areas, with even just sand.
But then in 1888 Mum, a deodorant, was inflicted on the world. This was a cream you applied to your armpits. In 1903 Everdry, an antiperspirant, was inflicted on the world. These were not very popular for a variety of reasons, including how inconvenient they were to apply (Mum was hand-applied, and Everdry used a kind of daubing stick like boot black liquids), and in the case of Everdry, how much damage it caused to the skin and clothing.
Then in 1912, Edna Murphey marketed an antiperspirant derived from her doctor father’s concoction to help surgeons with sweaty hands as Odorono (Odor? Oh no! Get it? GET IT!?). Initial sales were slow and she commissioned a survey to find out why. The result was that most women just didn’t need deodorants or antiperspirants. Or so they thought. EDNA WOULD SHOW THEM HOW WRONG THEY WERE!
And thus was the insecurity marketing strategy born. Odorono’s advertising from that point onward was based on the term “B.O.” which was specifically invented to sell her product. (“Body odour” was a term in medical texts, but it was not a term in common usage until Odorono inflicted it on us.) It convinced women that sweating was an embarrassing problem that needed handling, and look! Here’s a product we make that fixes this embarrassing thing that you never once thought was embarrassing at any point in your life beforehand but now…
And thus the comic cavalcade of deodorants and antiperspirants began to really rock and roll.
Roll-on antiperspirants came about in the 1940s with Ban Roll-on popularizing it in the '50s using a product that basically imitated the then-new ballpoint pen. Also in the '50s Stopette came out with a new chemical to smear on your body to deal with that “embarrassing” problem of being human that nobody worried about until Edna came onto the scene. They were the name in women’s “hygiene” because of their sponsorship of The $64,000 Question, an insanely popular television quiz show. When Stopette’s patent lapsed it lost its massive prominence as competitors started crawling out of the woodwork to make the same product but cheaper.
Then again in the '50s (what was it about that decade!?), deodorants and antiperspirants, hitherto pretty much restricted to women, started getting marketed to men. This was hilarious because up to that point, deodorants and antiperspirants had been marketed so much to women that it was viewed as a product for women alone, like tampons. Marketeers had to come up with a whole new vocabulary to not make men think of deodorants and antiperspirants as “girlish” and “feminine” (and, sigh, yes, “queer”). Thus came the aggressive wording like “masculine protection” and all the other stupid man stuff that sold things to men back then.
Aerosol dispensers started showing up in the '60s so you could kill the ozone layer while protecting yourself from the harmful effect of smelling like a human being and occasionally doing a bit of an extra rinse under the pits. Vaginal deodorants, whole body deodorants, and all the other nonsense that the field became replete with followed suit until today we have a bewildering array of deodorant products ranging from deodorant soaps to deodorant sprays to deodorant sticks to deodorant body sprays to …
And yet, we really don’t need any of it. We just need to be clean and prepare to clean up in the day if things get out of hand down in the pits. But it’s much better to just smear/spray/whatever chemicals that harm our skin, clog our pores, stain our clothes, or in extreme cases destroy them, right?
Fascinating, and thank you for the detailed response!
It’s eerie how often the fashion/cosmetics industry keeps on capitalising on people’s insecurities (if not down right creating new ones)
I guess added to this, the pressure of being productive in a capitalist system leaves you with not much time/breaks to wash yourself and it’s much easier and quicker to just dab on some deodorant
Even that word “productive” is intriguing to me. That framing is hilarious!
If I spend evenings and weekends lazing around, maybe carving my chops, noodling around on my various musical instruments, reading, playing games, or any other thing that enriches my life and causes me enjoyment and/or relaxation I’m being “unproductive”.
If I work stupidly long hours with my nose to the grindstone to make someone else wealthy beyond anything I can even imagine happening to me in my lifetime, diminishing my health (both physical and mental) in the process while they begrudgingly give me three or more orders of magnitude less money than they’re getting from my labour and that of dozens of others, then I’m being “productive”.
That word there, boss: I don’t think it means what you think it means.
I vehemently agree with you! Maybe I should have put productive in quotes, haha. But yes, I very much dislike this mindset
Oh oh also also, clothing is different today than it was back then! Polyester clothing for example holds onto smells so much more than linen!
I bet if you wore exclusively “old style” clothing with multiple layers of linen and such, you’d have pretty decent luck at not smelling too bad since they’re going to resist the stinky bacteria buildup a lot more, and with multiple layers (as was common, many years ago) you wont smell it much.
Also as a slight side tangent, there’s a genetic component to these things too IIRC. Most people in China might not wear deodorant, but there’s an actual traceable gene that IIRC is most frequent in Asian people that reduces how much you sweat, and therefore how much you smell.
More sweating just means more frequent washing.
Remember that “B.O.” was not a thing until just before 1920. If you started to whiff a bit, you excused yourself, went to the washroom, and washed. Also armpit inserts were a thing, to the point that dresses had pouches for them. They wicked up excess sweat and if they reached the point where they smelled bad … you put in a replacement and next time you’re in the washroom you washed them out.
All of this had solutions. Effective solutions. Ones that didn’t involve smearing toxic liquids, creams, etc. under the pits. But those solutions didn’t make money for rich folk so they had to go!
Now as for polyester … it doesn’t wick up as much water as say, yes, linen, or cotton, or a few other natural fibres does. (This would be why I don’t wear polyester except as trim and accessories.) But still, in the end, that’s just answered with “wash more often”.
The prevalence (and assumption of the necessity of) deodorant and antiperspirant (the latter being particularly nasty) is purely a marketing campaign devised by a greedy woman in the early 20th century that continues to this day.
Try a salt spray
I use alum myself. It does the job without irritating my skin (though there are some whose skin it will irritate) and without melting my clothing, staining my clothing, or otherwise rendering my clothing bad.
I’ve tried underarm inserts and they kinda/sorta work but aren’t always convenient.
Oh that is GOOD. And you know who never benefits from it? Me!
One of the good things about being trans, is that i did not grow up with this “insecurities” forced onto me, so i didnt develop the habit of following them after transitioning.
It’s almost always either zuckerberg, trump or the person that designed the “and it’s just going to ask you a question” ipad screen.
