https://fortune.com/2023/10/27/unilever-deodorant-personal-care-hygiene-wfh-return-to-work/
Among those changes was the lesser time spent showering, wearing fresh clothes, and in some cases, even brushing teeth,
If WFH people are using less deodorant, it's not because they've stopped cleaning themselves, but because it's simply not necessary to wear deodorant when you're dressed in casual clothes all day and can scrub your armpits in the middle of a phone call if you feel like
Standards of hygiene and beauty are arbitrary and usually enforced by the preferences of the most powerful group.
Halitosis was a made up condition to sell mints and mouthwash.
Tooth whiteners, braces, clothing standards, shaving legs, faces, and armpits, makeup, acne treatments, etc.
The list goes on and that's not even getting into the racism around how people of color wear their hair.
And most of it is to either sell something or maintain someone else's aesthetic preferences.
It's interesting how much of this shows up in the Western workplace.
Western workplace? It shows up everywhere. Beauty tools and products are some of the most common artifacts found by archeologists. The silk road carried uncountable tons of materials for makeup, clothing, and jewelry. Do you think Mao or Lenin went around in their pajamas smelling like they haven't bathed in a year?
This isn't a western thing. It's a human thing.
I need to point out that all those humans lived in hierarchical class societies that had powerful groups that could dictate beauty standards, so the fact that people thousands of years ago wore makeup and jewelry doesn't prove that it's somehow inescapably human.
... What actually proves it is jewelry being found that is so old it predates civilization. Archaeologists found a shell bead necklace that is at least 150,000 years old. Humans like to feel pretty when they're around other humans, even under primitive communism.
But I think jewelry or aesthetics in general are different than say a society where kids are forced to undo dreads or cornrows because a different group of people thinks it's bad or unhygienic.
Beauty standards in class society are dictated by the ruling class, and because the ruling class is racist it sets anti-Black standards.
I don't think the concept of standards, themselves, are exclusive to class society. In primitive communism the beauty standards were set by nature, so sea shells would be fashionable by the sea shore while wooden beads would be fashionable by the forest.
Would someone who moved from the sea to the forest keep their shells, or cast them off for beads? Or wear both? Dunno.
This is all to say that, under communism, people will probably still work to maintain an aesthetic for people around them. It'll just be set to a very broad communal standard rather than set by the narrow opinions of the ruling class.
Or would social obligation simply be set by the collective, rather than the whims of a ruling class?
That means there has to be active effort to override it.
That, too, would be creating and enforcing a standard. Haha culture wins! culture always winnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnns!
I don't want to smell other people's human stink.
Does that make me a reactionary? 🙄
I'm reminded of the fact there was a period in Western history where they believed bathing was unhealthy and would let "bad airs" into your skin because you washed off all of the filth that protects you from miasma. Humans are sometimes really gross.
I was more talking about how racism and reactionary politics in general can be couched in conversations about hygiene and aesthetics.
Showering and bathing are perfectly fine. It's just a lot of people consider dread locks as dirty and use that as an excuse to treat Black workers differently and/or pay them less.
That's mostly an ahistorical meme. afaik the only historical basis is a brief period where public bath houses were shut down in parts of europe because there was plague going around. They shut the bath houses down because it was somewhere people congregated in large numbers, not because they thought bathing was bad for you. There may have been some quack doctors here and there, but for the most part Europeans have thought bathing was the coolest thing since the Romans turned up and introduced the idea of municipal bath houses. As far as I know folks mostly tried to get a real bath at least once a week when they could, and have always washed at least their hands, mouths, and faces if they couldn't manage more than that.,
Red ochre, too. If you've got humans, and there's red ochre in the area, pretty good odds you're going to find dead humans and red ochre in the same place.
Red ochre, too. If you've got humans, and there's red ochre in the area, pretty good odds you're going to find dead humans and red ochre in the same place.
Standards of hygiene and beauty are arbitrary
Come on it's literally the first part of the first sentence.
It's a Western thing to make up illnesses and sell the cures. Especially if it enforces gender or racial standards.
Bathing isn't bad, but it's telling that there's a market for skin whitening, hair straightening, and tooth bleaching. The fact that those things can change how 'professional' someone is means something.
If you believe that was a western invention, I've got a surplus tower or two at St. Basil's to sell you. Making up illnesses and selling the cures goes back into prehistory.
Maybe I'm not being clear, but I'm pointing to the explicit ethnocentrism in the West (Europe and the US) that redefined beauty standards to exclude BIPOC people.
I'm not saying beauty standards or hygiene are Western intentions. I'm saying that in the West, people in power pathologized humanity because their system had an easy way to determine who is and isn't professional, valid, human.
Maybe I'm oversimplifying, but the white supremacy delusion is rooted in the West's part in the Atlantic Slave Trade and the West exported those beauty standards to other parts of the world.
I'm not mad at you, but I am frustrated that I'm not communicating my point clearly.
I understand what you're saying, and I disagree.
People have always judged each other on their appearance. It's built into humans. It takes conscious effort to overlook someone whose dress or appearance deviates too far from the norm.
Do companies in the west take advantage of that? Yes, of course. They'd be stupid not to. But that doesn't explain why every member of the CCP congress wears an identical suit and has neatly trimmed hair. I'll bet they're even wearing deodorant. The Supreme Soviet of the USSR was a bit more diverse in that they wore blue, brown, or beige suits in addition to the standard black. And I'll eat my hat if Russian girls weren't prettying themselves up to impress the boys and making comment on the girls who didn't measure up, just like they do in every country on Earth.
You're trying to take an article about people not wearing deodorant when they work from home and turn it into some kind of racist western plot. It's a bit of a stretch.
Oh okay. I'm trying to draw a connection between the complaints of the people in power. People not using deodorant is being treated like an issue of immorality or a sign that American work ethic is suffering from work from home.
By making this an issue that is hurting businesses, it's implying wrongdoing by people who have no need or use for deodorant.
By vilifying a working class who doesn't need to spend extra money to work, it reminds me of how poor work ethic or professionalism were used to justify oppression or resist giving worker rights.
Hygiene is a good thing and it prevents a lot of health issues, but when work from home prevents the need for extraneous activities (unpaid work like shaving, doing hair, applying deodorant or dressing properly), it's treated like a sign of societal ill
As I understand it, people in power like landowners or employers can create extra hoops to justify poor working conditions and a population of unemployed people.
It's not directly racist to require deodorant to work, but in light of the productivity staying the same, a news article lamenting the profit losses of deodorant companies sounds disingenuous and indirectly supports an oppressive system that arbitrarily needs workers to pay for extra grooming to function. When wfh proves the opposite.
It's okay if deodorant sales go down when people are able to do their jobs away from other people.
The framing of the article reminds me of the posturing around workers, particularly Black workers, and who gets to decide what is and isn't professional.
Again, grooming and fashion are fine. It's when it's treated as a moral failing and individual worker needs to whine for (through paying for cosmetics and extra items and the time lost in getting ready for work.)
I see this as similar to requiring a person to have a car to work and how the economic system in place makes it particularly hard for poorer people to work. Especially when the wealth is disproportionately smaller in BIPOC communities.
I don't see the implications of immortality or lack of work ethic in the small amount of the article you can see without a Forbes subscription. But regardless, remember Forbes' target readership: business executives, investors, and people in the finance industry. Those people aren't considered bastions of morality by the populace at large anyway.
Also remember that Forbes readers are more likely to work from home than the general public. They aren't going to try to villify their reader base.
Forbes is all about business. Deodorant sales were down during lockdown and are recovering now that people are returning to work. That's noteworthy if you own stock in Proctor & Gamble, for instance, and makes for an interesting bit of information even if you don't. It makes me wonder about other industries affected by the return to work.
But if you really want to read it that way, go ahead. Just don't be surprised if you have to repeatedly explain the extremely tenuous connection between this article and western oppression.
It's Fortune, but I see what you mean. I won't say I'm letting go of the beliefs I have right now about expectations in the workplace, but I'll read more on them. If my points aren't making sense, that's on me and maybe I need to read and better refine my points.
I don't think those magazines are a bastion of morality, but they do get more mainstream attention than day Jacobin or other left-leaning publications.
I don't think it matters that the article itself has an explicit stance. Taking a moral stance in the text isn't where the narrative comes from. It's the fact that this story being published in the first place, and the associations people would make (wfh being unhygienic by a lack of deodorant and other grooming). It doesn't matter if the article says being hygienic is good or bad. Pointing out the lack of deodorant use and connecting it to work from home was a deliberate choice.
Think instead if the article or headline described the phenomenon of wfh as saving money for the average worker because they don't need to buy shaving cream.
At the end of the day, it's a magazine owned by a major corporation using its reputation to talk about events in a certain way.
I don't see the article as being pro worker from what framing I can see. It's not the article itself, but its existence in a space where the media narrative is 'people don't want to work anymore.'
I'm not gonna continue trying to convince you, but I would ask that you consider what a magazine supported by wealthy people would stand to gain from publishing this story instead of say, a story about the health benefits of working from home.
I hope you have a good night and I thank you for giving me a reason to reevaluate how I'm communicating my arguments.
Standards of hygiene and beauty are arbitrary
Come on it's literally the first part of the first sentence.
They're making shit up, aren't they? Like this is too on the nose of saving the unwashed masses from themselves.
You also tend to stink less and be much more hygienic when you aren't forced to walk to and from the metro and get packed with a ton of people in it, touching all of the filthy handle bars together
Inside me, there are two wolves:
Damn, I can't remember the last time I put on deodorant. Eh, who cares.
Oh god, I probably smell like a comic book store/anime convention/etc
I started working from home at the beginning of the pandemic and have not returned to an office (or a school, in my case) ever since
My standards of personal hygiene did not fall even a little bit. I stay clean, shave my beard or trim it if I want it to grow a bit, and I wear deodorant even if I'm alone inside my home, which is the case 99.9% of the time. I shower every day. In fact, I usually shower twice because I typically split my workout in two parts, to fit it in my very irregular work schedule.
The idea of skipping showers, smelling bad, wearing dirty clothes, not brushing my teeth or simply skipping any part of my personal grooming is unthinkable to me. It's not about looking good or following hegemonic standards of hygiene or something. I just feel like shit if I'm dirty. It feels nice to look and smell good and wear clean clothes, that's all there is to it. Am I oversimplifying this?
