Why do we hate body odor?

[Smallcock]

I assume that in the modern era we dislike body odor because it's a potential sign of bad hygiene (i.e. not showering every day) but the smell can't be naturally repulsive to us considering that in many ancient societies people rarely showered.

Think about how disgusting sex must have been in some ancient cultures. Imagine the look and smell of a vagina that hasn't been washed in a year combining with a cock filled with rotting smegma built up over the past year. And that's just for the genitalia regions alone. DATO on a butthole that has never known toilet paper, soap, and hasn't seen water in a year?

It's incredible that a child could be born out of such circumstances. But things like the Black Plague make all the more sense under those conditions.

 

[jcpro]

I assume that in the modern era we dislike body odor because it's a potential sign of bad hygiene (i.e. not showering every day) but the smell can't be naturally repulsive to us considering that in many ancient societies people rarely showered.

Think about how disgusting sex must have been in some ancient cultures. Imagine the look and smell of a vagina that hasn't been washed in a year combining with a cock filled with rotting smegma built up over the past year. And that's just for the genitalia regions alone. DATO on a butthole that has never known toilet paper, soap, and hasn't seen water in a year?

It's incredible that a child could be born out of such circumstances. But things like the Black Plague make all the more sense under those conditions.

It depends. I've lived with a girl in my twenties who was adamant that I would not shower before sex, even after a workout. She LOVED the smell of my sweat.

 

[LT56]

Hate body odour? You're more likely to have rightwing views

Scientists suggest authoritarian attitudes may be partly rooted in biological urge to avoid catching diseases from unfamiliar people​

People who have a greater tendency to turn their nose up at the whiff of urine, sweat and other body odours are more likely to have rightwing authoritarian attitudes, research suggests.

The study also found having a greater disgust for body odours was linked, albeit to a small degree, with support for Donald Trump when he was a presidential candidate.

The team say the findings support the idea that a feeling of disgust might partly underpin social discrimination against others, with the link rooted in a primitive urge to avoid catching diseases from unfamiliar people or environments.

“We think that authoritarian attitudes might, at least in part, be rooted in biology,” said Dr Jonas Olofsson, co-author of the research from Stockholm University and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study.

But, he stressed, feelings of disgust are not immutable. “Even though disgust is a very primitive emotion that is definitely rooted in our biological survival, it can still be altered,” he said.

Previous studies have linked levels of disgust to political orientation, with some research suggesting those who identify as conservative have greater aversion to revolting images.

Olofsson said his team were keen to explore whether the response of individuals towards scenarios linked to scent alone revealed a similar association.

“We think that olfaction might be at the root of the pathogen detection system, so body odour disgust might be the most primitive, most fundamental way to detect pathogens,” he said.

Writing in the journal Royal Society Open Science, Olofsson and colleagues report how they explored the issue across three experiments, involving a total of more than 750 participants recruited online.

Participants were presented with questionnaires on a number of topics, including their degree of social, fiscal and moral liberalism and their level of disgust towards pathogens – assessed by asking participants to rate on a seven point scale their response to phrases such as “sitting next to someone who has red sores on their arm”.

They were also asked to rate on a scale how disgusted they were by a collection of statements linked to body odours such as “You are sitting next to a friend and notice that your feet smell strongly,” and how emphatically they agreed with 15 statements linked to rightwing authoritarianism such as “Our country needs a powerful leader, in order to destroy the radical and immoral currents prevailing in society today.”

In addition, one group of participants was also asked to respond to a series of statements designed to gauge how much they supported five of the 2016 US presidential candidates, including Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

The results reveal that rightwing authoritarianism was linked to a feeling of repulsion towards body odours, and that the link also underpinned a weak association between such feelings of disgust and support for Donald Trump.

In addition, the studies showed that levels of body odour disgust showed a stronger link to authoritarianism than levels of disgust at the possibility of catching a bug. However, while body odour disgust was linked to rightwing authoritarianism, it was not linked to other measures of political conservatism – although the authors note that could be down to the nature of the questions.

“Our results show that about 10% of authoritarianism – ie how people vary in this regard – could be explained by their body odour disgust sensitivity,” explained Olofsson. About 2% of Trump support could be explained by how disgusted people were by the thought of body odours, he said.

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The findings, Olofsson noted, mean that it is not possible to accurately assess a person’s authoritarianism, or their political preference, based on their responses to body odour. “The effects are subtle,” he said..

Roger Giner-Sorolla, professor of social psychology at the University of Kent who was not involved in the study, said the research tied in with previous studies suggesting people who are sensitive to physical disgust are also more intolerant of lower-status social groups.

The focus on body odour disgust, he added, was interesting. “This supports a more directly social origin for this kind of prejudice – as Orwell wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier, ‘that is what we were taught – the lower classes smell’,” he said. “This adds to the evolutionary account that prejudice makes use of disgust because people outside one’s group carry unfamiliar diseases.”

https://www.theguardian.com/science...our-youre-more-likely-to-have-rightwing-views

 

[explorerzip]

Think about how disgusting sex must have been in some ancient cultures.

I think you're viewing sexuality in the modern and pleasurable context. Sex may have been viewed just as a way to continue the species in ancient times, but that also depends on what you consider to be "ancient." That's definitely the case with other mammals where they might smell terrible to us, but they still have sex. Even if sex was considered a pleasurable act to ancient societies the hygiene standards were vastly different. Before the invention of soap and personal hygiene practices everyone equally smelled bad. So "bad" body odor would not necessarily be a deterrent to having sex if everyone had bad body odor.

We also don't know when DATO became a pleasurable sex act. It could be something people simply did not do.

It is incredible that children could be born out of such filthy living conditions, but that's why people had big families. It was expected that multiple kids would die in child-birth or very young. So you had to hedge your bets so that there would be enough kids to tend the fields and look after the rest of the family.

 

[Samranchoi]

I get the feeling that back in the day in Korea, they has WF2, which evolved to SF2 before having sex.

 

[oldjones]

It's a learned response, as your own examples and the others cited all clearly show. It just means you've found another way to pick someone who fits the class you've learned to think of as attractive.

Now if we could only learn to talk about such stuff realistically and sensibly, without resorting to loaded exaggerations like 'hate'.

 

[sempel]

Generally speaking we live in a clean society - high availability of water, soap, deodorant, cleaning products, central plumbing, etc. Contrast that with either developing countries or society back in the day when some/most of these things were not available. And I'm assuming that people immersed in odors, good or bad, eventually become nose-blind to them. I'm sure farm workers hardly notice the smell of manure or cleaners hardly noticing the smell of ammonia.

Back in the day, people didn't shower/bathe often, their clothes weren't washed often, soap was a luxury item, they used outhouses, horses/manure were prevalent, and the list goes on. I'm sure the general smell in the air was pretty bad.

The other thing is you become familiar/noseblind to the scents that are around you. If you are put in a different place with different smells, I'm sure you would notice them.

I honestly can't say I've ever smelled someone's rampant BO and thought "Wow, that smells great!" It smells bad and sometimes "burns" the nose. It's always a fun (and irritating) game of "Who stinks?" when you are at the gym and you get a nasty whiff.

What I will say is that after a good shower, if you sweat, as it tends to occur during intimate activities, it isn't a stinky, smelly sweat. Sometimes it can smell pleasant.

 

[kherg007]

If you're around shit and sewage like many places in the world BO can almost smell perfumish....and yes back in the day oral sex meant kissing. I saw an interview with an old sex worker in Sydney back in the day (Appx 1990, so she was appx 70 yrs old) and she was prattling on about how in her day...1930s and 40s, with the Yanks all about Australia during the war, that "unlike the girls today we wouldn't dare get our heads anywhere near a penis" ...and she said they did a lot of stand up quickies back then as a back up birth control measure as the belief was if any got in you it would flow down and out...

 

[lomotil]

It's a learned response, as your own examples and the others cited all clearly show. It just means you've found another way to pick someone who fits the class you've learned to think of as attractive.

Now if we could only learn to talk about such stuff realistically and sensibly, without resorting to loaded exaggerations like 'hate'.

Well said, it is a way to conceal covert hostility towards those we loathe in many cases.

 

[IM469]

My personal experience is that there are degrees of body odor in the same way the running shoes smell can vary. If you have been in a gym change room after a workout there can be a bit of a stuffy smell in the place and fresh air is a welcome relief. However there are some people's underarm BO so bad that I find it hard to breath anywhere within 3 feet of them without gagging.