If they continue this Guinness Extra Cold marketing strategy, the next thing you know is they will be trying to sell us Guinness on a stick. Give me Regular Rooster Guinness any day of the week. Yum

“Whoever heard of Erectile Dysfunction before Viagra, you ask? EVERY man who was treated for prostate cancer, thats who. Just about every man who had heart problems, including high blood pressure, that’s who. There are other examples.”

But it wasn’t called “Erectile Dysfunction,” that was my point. It was a problem, to be sure, for people with the conditions you mention but the name was made up to coincide with the introduction of Viagra. There was dementia and senility before Alzheimer’s Disease, but it took drug companies to come with a more specific name for it.

The reason we take a shower, wash our hair and make the effort to insure our underarms are odor-free is entirely the work of marketing early in the last century in an effort to sell more soap, shampoo and deodorant. Prior to that time, Americans bathed far less often.

“It’s obvious you’ve never worked around someone that didn’t use deodorant or had to ride in a hot car with someone who doesn’t use it.”

Thanks for proving my point. That you assume it must be “obvious” I’ve never smelled body odors shows how ingrained it is that they’re bad. You obviously don’t know your history. Look at old western movies where Saturday night was bath night. Did you think they took showers the rest of the week? No, they only bathed weekly. Do you really think people have always taken a daily shower throughout history? Was the bathtub invented just after the wheel? No, it’s a relatively recent invention and initially was reserved for the rich, especially indoor bathtubs. People worked on farms and in factories and especially in the summer must have been incredibly ripe by our standards come the weekend. I’m sure they smelled just as bad as the average homeless person riding the New York subway on a hot summer day. And I actually have known people who for personal reasons decided to stop using deodorant. But I wasn’t arguing we should return to a time before people bathed daily, I was just trying to illustrate that the way you so obviously feel about people with bad odors was not always as common or self-evident as you suppose. People didn’t smell better back then, those odors were simply part of the way the world was. They didn’t perceive the body odors as negatively as we did, in part because everybody smelled that way. It took advertisers and marketers to make us all so self-conscious about personal odors. There are parts of the globe you can visit where daily hygiene has still not caught on and the people there don’t seem bothered by it at all.

“The reason we take a shower, wash our hair and make the effort to insure our underarms are odor-free is entirely the work of marketing early in the last century in an effort to sell more soap, shampoo and deodorant. Prior to that time, Americans bathed far less often.”

It’s obvious you’ve never worked around someone that didn’t use deodorant or had to ride in a hot car with someone who doesn’t use it.

(Oooops – sarcasm.)

Jay, that’s a cool article.

There.

-Craig

Your pal,
Tom