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If WFH wins, but at what cost.
(hexbear.net)
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,
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, 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? ๐
The OP is literally about deodorant lol
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.,