Here's the objective fact: when you sweat a lot, molecules corresponding to pheromones in your skin and bacteria that live on it (particularly in enclosed areas like armpits) waft into the air around you and enter the noses of nearby people. This triggers nerve impulses that travel to the brain and give the sensation of "smell".
Here's the subjective fact: you smell bad.
People often lift their subjective impressions to the level of objective facts, because they have no other experience to compare it to. But the brain is remarkably plastic, and people continually underestimate how much their subjective experience of something can change through exposure and perspective shifts.
Here's another objective fact: when researchers have exposed subjects to smell for a long period of time (usually hours is enough) and then MRI'd their brain, the neural pathways related to smell cease to fire. Prolonged exposure deadens the experience; the brain is no longer interested in smells that are no longer novel. Subjectively, the subject ceases to smell the offensive odor at all.
And from an evolutionary perspective, this makes perfect sense: smell is our early warning system for situations that might present danger or opportunity (eg. bacterial contamination, an aggressive rival, a desirable mate), but if we don't act immediately on that information, there's no purpose in continuing to smell the odor. Presumably we are unable to act otherwise, and continuing to fire those nerves just overloads the brain when it could better use that processing power elsewhere.
So both you and the article are right. You do smell natives who don't use deodorant - when you first encounter them. But if you lived shoulder to shoulder with them for years, as people did before deodorant was invented, you would cease to smell them, and it would cease to become a problem.
The way marketers work is to highlight the instances where it is a problem, so they enter your consciousness, and then reoccur in your consciousness whenever the stimulus occurs. Instead of "I stink, but I can't do anything about it, so why worry about it?" you think "I stink. I should put on some deodorant."
I've got lots more to say about how this affects adoption of products and cultural values (basically: you cannot get people to adopt a radically different innovation without relying on or creating some insecurity. If you can't create insecurity, you have to wait for everyone who was secure with the lack of your product to die off), but this comment is already pretty long...
But once you get back home it becomes obvious how smelly everything from the boat really is.
Marketers basically invented a pretty pit for people to throw their money in, and made them self conscious of their natural bodies in the process. It's had an almost entirely negative influence on the world.
Garbage in New York is unsanitary, attracts pests, and causes disease. Human body odor does not. They are not comparable.
You just don't realize that you are in cultural and subjective bubble and you don't have objective keys to the world of smells.
If you travel around, you will realize that people have different smells and some of them are really strong. When you get used to them, they stop bothering you.
Sure we are. Productivity is reduced if we're distracted by stench. Why argue for making life less pleasant? Bathing and mitigating foul odor should be encouraged.
When you take humans out of their natural environment, can you really argue that features of the human body are "natural" and thus in some way inviolable?
Garbage in New York... attracts pests. Human body odor does not.
Good to know. Flies must be attracted to something other than body odor & sweat then. Perhaps... body heat?
Stop anthropomorphizing nature; it gets angry when you do that.
well, mosquitos (which carry disease) are attracted to carbon dioxide.
And, as you mention, in hotter climes and where people do manual labor and take public transportation it is very noticeable if people opt not to use deodorant. It's like entering a stable on a hot day.
New York smells much better than it did 150 years ago, when there was no organized sanitation service and decomposing food and horses lay in the streets. There were an estimated 25,000 horses in the city. Each horse produced 30-50 pounds of manure a day. Clouds of pulverized horse manure particles blew into the air and the unbearable stench spread everywhere. There were no electric fans available to move the air, and the humidity made people sweat profusely.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/07/28/nyregion/heat-...
Anecdotally, deodorant was a rite of passage for me as a teenage boy. As an adult with an office job, I find a lot of the time I don't need it (just like it turns out to be not a great idea to wash my hair every day). Additionally, I feel increasingly leery about rubbing aluminum under my arms every day. Do I smell? I don't think so. Am I headed for an office intervention? God I hope not.
Then don't use antiperspirants. Regular deodorants don't have aluminum zirconium in them, and in the U.S (I'm not sure about non-U.S regulations) deodorants that do have aluminum in them must declare it as an "active ingredient".
http://www.fda.gov/Cosmetics/CosmeticLabelingLabelClaims/Cos...
The fact that people forgot about it and get used to it pronto, as you already admitted above.
Also, who said people found the smell of a sweaty human unpleasant in first contant (before olfactory fatigue)?
This pressuposes an essential "badness" of the smell, regardless of if someone perceives it as bad or not. Where would this "badness" essense lie?
Because smells are not hardwired [1], we are nurtured into being distasteful of the scent of sweat. One nice example of this that I like is that you can find infants happily playing in faeces without being disgusted by it, it doesn't bother them the sligthest.
[1] http://www.foodnavigator.com/Science-Nutrition/Nurture-plays...
Smell is a sense. If you "don't realize it", it might as well not exist.
>If you've ever been to a part of the world where deodorant use is less common, you know its not a marketing-manufactured problem.
Nope -- that only holds were people don't bathe frequently.
I would put that differently: "bad" is subjective -- if you don't notice/think that a smell is bad, then it isn't bad, whether the smell exists or not.
I also know this to be false from personal experience, unless you are using an unusual definition of "few". (Certainly, there are some smells that you stop noticing at all, and the rest are noticed less, after a few minutes.)
As a species, one of the these we enjoy is the ability to use our intellect to improve naturally occurring things about ourselves. Just because something is natural does not mean it is perfect.
No, but just about every hipster in Allston-Brighton does. Walk into any indie record shop in the Boston area and there'll be at least one 20-year-old with a beard to make Santa jealous.
Isn't that kind of the definition of "not a real problem"?
The less anything smells, the better.
For example, smell can alert you (of gas, of glycerin vs. water in a can, food burning during cooking, etc.). Further, it's not only that food doesn't taste as good, you either have to force yourself to eat (enough), or you eat too much, because the experience is more shallow than you were used too and you try to compensate.