People Smell: Get Used to It

Anatoly Karlin, speaking of the trouble with Russians, writes:

Walk into any crowd of decent size in Moscow or (probably) any other Russian city in the summer and you’ll get the distinct impression that most people haven’t yet heard of deodorant.

What he seems unaware of is that if you walked into any crowd of any size in any place prior to around 1950, you’d have got the distinct impression that most people hadn’t heard of deodorant.

And the thing is, that the cleanness that is possible only for very rich Americans and a few others, is really the anomaly. People, like all animals, smell. I distinctly recall the smell of people when I was a child in late 1940′s Britain. Then, nine out of ten houses had no indoor toilet, let alone a bathroom. If people bathed at all, and many did not, they did so in a tin tub before the kitchen stove, usually no more than once a week.

And the thing was, that the smell of people was then just a natural thing, something rarely to be remarked upon, and not necessarily unpleasant either. In fact, the general failure of America marriage, and the failure of white Americans to achieve anywhere near a replacement fertility rate, may well be due chiefly to a combination of deodorants and the pill, which prevent women signalling sexual receptivity by smell. 

On the basis of deodorant use alone, one may expect, therefore, that the Russians may have more luck restoring their fertility to the replacement rate or better, than those so very clean Euro-Americans. 

In fact, the problem for many people today is that they wash so much that their natural skin flora is disrupted, which can result in colonization by particularly odious bacteria, which create an effluvium worse than that of the totally unwashed unless copiously treated with antibiotic deodorants and synthetic aromatics.

In any case, if you live with the unwashed for long enough you will likely get used to the smell a human crowd, which in time will seem as natural as the smell of the cow barn or chicken run.