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Extremely frivolous stuff, but there's a fun debate going down over on Aella's twitter about personal hygiene. In short, as a true empiricist, she measures lots of stuff about her daily routine (iirc, using an app called Daylio), and recently revealed her stats for 2023. What is causing a kerfuffle is not the number of days she had sex (63), took Adderall (126), or escorted (6), but the number of times she showered, namely 37 [sic].
Aella insists she doesn't smell (and says she's consulted with others to confirm this), but I think that's a very relative statement; some people seem to have a high baseline tolerance for stank of various kinds, to the point that even strong odours don't register to them as stank, while others like myself are very smell sensitive; at the risk of TMI, my wife was amused that I could tell when our kids in their diaper days had done a pee, because I could always smell it almost immediately even when she had no idea. Back in my online dating days, there were several dates I simply couldn't follow up on because the person I was with had bad personal hygiene. I'm not talking about a mild healthy body odour here, but when you're having sex doggy-style and get hit by bad ass-stench it's an instant boner kill. And I'll be honest, I've had a crush on Aella for ages; she's a very attractive nerdy woman, and as a sexually confident and charismatic female Rationalist, she is a very horny unicorn among horses. But I've got to say, learning that specific factoid about her life had a similar effect on my idle long-distance lust as an F150's tires do on a small rodent (not that she should care, of course - just putting it out there).
That said, I am a bit of ablutomaniac - I shower and/or bathe 2-3 times a day. I don't think it's a hygiene thing per se. I shower when I get up because it helps me feel awake and ready for the day; I often have a shower or bath in the late afternoon/early evening after a workout because it feels great to soak sore muscles; and I sometimes shower just before bed, because I find it really nice to get into a bed with clean, fresh-smelling sheets having just come out of the shower smelling clean and fresh myself. I also routinely use (carefully chosen, subtle) cologne on my body as well as both fabric conditioner and scent booster when washing my clothes.
Anyway, Aella's feed is pretty funny right now, to the point that she's holding polls about showering, and I was curious what folks here think about it. Obviously me and Aella are at different ends of the ablutic spectrum, but what's a healthy normal number of times to shower/bathe per day? How much of it is down to personal preference?
Think it's dependent on your lifestyle as well.
If you're a desk jockey in reasonable weight and live in a cool climate you can probably get away with infrequent showering. If you're slaving away on a plantation you're going to have issues.
Honestly the whole phenomenon of people being superadverse to body odor and such confuses me, since like... 99.999995% of human history would ostensibly have been totally intolerable to people in 2022. In my father (who's in his mid 70s now)'s upbringing, baths were a weekly thing and more than that was considered extravagant. Obviously trends like the reduction in smoking would increase olfactory awareness, but it still seems absurd how precious most people are about scents.
I'll obey hygiene conventions, but personally tend to just be unbothered by sweat (within reason) due to having done a lot of contact sports and thus have never understood the sheer vehemence some people have towards very minor amounts of sweat.
I do think people of younger generations are simply not aware of how much effort taking baths were, before all houses had bathrooms with an indoor bath (and later showers, the extravagance!)
Heating up enough water for a bath takes a lot of fuel and a lot of time, then you have to fill the bath (if it's the old style stand-alone tub) and then you have to tip out the dirty water afterwards. Even if you have an indoor bathroom, can you afford the cost of heating the water (old-style back boilers running on coal-burning fireplaces, immersion heaters on electricity) - if you don't have (relatively) cheap and convenient methods, then a weekly bath is a big deal. Daily washing by boiling a kettle of water to fill a basin is easier to manage.
There's also associated necessities, like having a house that is heated enough that the bathroom, bedroom, etc. are warm so that you're not wet in a freezing cold room; able to do laundry so that you have clean, dry towels and not have sopping wet items piling up; a lot of things people don't really think about. We've gone in a generation or two from "maybe the living space doesn't even have a bath" to "houses with two bathrooms" or even more, depending how you count them.
Yeah. My dad was from a very poor corner of the North of England in a very large family and a bath was a weekly phenomenon in which the water'd be shared between the extended family.
People are generally unaware of how staggeringly modern a lot of expected current conveniences are.
Also, I imagine if you couldn't afford the luxury of a bath, but you lived in a city, you might have been able to go to a communal bath. Nowadays, that sort of thing only still exists in, what, Japan?
Hence the San Francisco bathhouses 😀 But yes, public baths and wash houses for the working class were indeed a fixture of large cities.
And the gay bathhouses have a provenance in the Middle Ages in Europe, where public baths became places of assignation (at best) or de facto brothels. You would be spending pretty much the entire day there and if you already had your clothes off...well.
Things like that helped in the condemnation and closing down of bath houses, as well as something this article points out: there weren't the kind of chemicals we use today to keep pools sterile, and if the owners/operators of baths weren't too scrupulous about changing the water, it was no wonder people began to associate frequent bathing with risk of disease.
The pop culture idea of the past simply being dirty because they were dirty, and also Christianity thought bathing was sinful, isn't correct but it's something that seems to be embedded in the popular imagination (the dung-coloured Middle Ages notion persisting even in Amazon's Rings of Power, where we can tell Bronwyn is an Important Character and Strong Empowered Woman because she's the only one dressed in bright colours).
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