It amuses me to read all these posts about the awful stench of the human body. When exactly did the scent of normal perspiration become the most intensely gross thing in the universe? The TV and magazines have really sold you people a bill of goods, haven't they. You smell bad! Your teeth are dingy! Your hair is limp! Your skin is too shiny! Your hands are too rough! Buy! Buy! Buy! ONly detergents and cleansers and odor reducers can save you from the vile pit of filth that your body truly is! Use more soap!

Because disease spreads more quickly when people are dirty. I don't think anyone should have OCD and shower or wash their hands more than necessary, and I'll be honest that if I have a day where I don't do anything at all I probably won't shower until the next morning, but excessive perspiration can be smelled from about two feet away and that is gross. And that is what a bra would smell like after it was worn for two weeks. Or maybe you just don't shower and have become immune to other people's BO, in which case I feel bad for you.

Yeah, vincent, I tend to agree with you. I mean, there's the natural smell of the human body and then there's filth, but it's weird that we work so hard to not to smell like ourselves at all. Maybe it's just me, but I think a sweaty man, straight from a workout, is madly hot...and also, hot.

Dirty does not = germy.

vincent1963:

It amuses me to read all these posts about the awful stench of the human body. When exactly did the scent of normal perspiration become the most intensely gross thing in the universe? The TV and magazines have really sold you people a bill of goods, haven't they. You smell bad! Your teeth are dingy! Your hair is limp! Your skin is too shiny! Your hands are too rough! Buy! Buy! Buy! ONly detergents and cleansers and odor reducers can save you from the vile pit of filth that your body truly is! Use more soap!

You must be a smelly foreigner.

Vincent, excellent post! I'm intrigued by the extend to which we try to eliminate all smells from our bodies and then replace them with perfumes and colognes that have a similar smell to bodily excretions... and then there are the phenoromes (sp?) we're supposed to exhude. There have been several studies showing that women are liable to come down with their period from smelling the armpits of a man's undershirt. Women living in dorms seem to have their periods all at the same time. Also (personel experience) men tend to go wild over a woman who is having her period even though they don't know it, at least not consciously --which is very weird because you'd think this would happen when she's ovulating, but that doesn't seem to be the case.... go figure!

Pogue, you really need to travel.....

Thanks folks. those who agree and those who don't. I don't think I'm very smelly. If nobody has had to tell me so, I'll assume I'm OK. I'm not talking about other people anyhow, I'm talking about how advertising has trained you to THINK you stink. Smelling like a human being instead of a flower is not gross.

i can't believe it took someone so long to say this.

I agree. It is a huge market to get folks to smell "good". Most of the time it makes me gag to be 5 ft away from some guy with cologne so strong it knocks you down. I'm not exactly living in squalor becuase I needed to wear my black bra two or three times this week before I washed it. I do bathe before getting dressed and work in an air conditioned office.

Interesting topic, this! I have a good friend who's ex-military. Never wears deodorant.

He stopped using it back when he was in training (the smell of your Speed Stick will apparently waft quite a distance when you're trying to creep up on someone through a swamp. So he learned not to use scented soaps, scented laundry detergent, whatnot.

Now that he's back in the civillian world, he's embraced a lot of these things again (fabric softener is our friend!) But he says that the longer he went without antiperspirant/deodorant, the less he needed it.

He says -- and I can confirm by my own sniff tests -- that he doesn't get the kind of nose-hair-curling underarm B.O. he used to have to mask with deodorant. He's dead-certain that deodorant causes the very problem it's supposed to cure. Sure, he still sweats under there, but since it doesn't stink, he doesn't sweat it (har!).

I'm not quite brave enough to try to wean myself off deodorant, but I am intrigued.

I ride the subway with deodorant-shunning people sometimes. It's noticeable.

Dirty people do stink, and no amount of romanticizing hides the reek. Maybe you don't remember the days before effective deodorants were made, back in the 1970s, when any unventilated room where many people had been sweating heavily had a heavy, nauseating smell like stale hotdogs? Using our powerful postmodern deodorants, it's hard to develop a reek like that...but fourteen days worth of sweat into an undergarment would go far to reproduce the same aura. Yuck!

The human race is a bust. I pray for tidal waves. This idiotic species can't even stand it's own smell. Please Darwin, give some other animal a chance at the top rung. Humans are beyond redemption.

I like the natural smell of a clean human (the smell you can smell from up close, even if a person just stepped out of the shower), but I don't like the smell of human sweat or other excretions. Nothing odd about that.

By the way before daily showers, cleansers, detergents humans really were a pit of filth. 18th century London smelled worse than just about any filthy US city block these days.