by Mara Altman
I may have, not purposefully, put him on the defensive. I couldn’t help it; I viewed him as an unwitting villain. He was normalizing the ouster of sweat from our everyday lives. He was why everyone with sweat glands is expected to be dry.
“You’re a sweat murderer,” I said.
“Okay, well sure, that’s one way to put it.”
I went on to ask him more about the people who depend on his products.
“Why is there such a demand?” asked Brier. “Because there’s a problem. Why is there a problem? It’s just the way God made us.”
If there is a God, and we’re getting hypothetical now, it’s doubtful that the all-powerful one would invent something just so that us humans could come along and obstruct it with a chemical compound and cotton padding.
* * *
In order to give sweat the respect I felt it deserved, I clearly had to go back to the very beginning. I had to put sweat back into its most original context—before the antiperspirant ads and the Renaissance doctors. I had to show sweat at its most innocent and vulnerable, when it was a newborn and free from any connotation. To do this, I contacted Daniel Lieberman, a paleoanthropologist and the resident sweat theorist at Harvard University. He has spent his career trying to figure out why the body functions the way that it does.
I started out with the simplest of questions: “So why did we start to sweat?”
Lieberman explained that for many millions of years, mammals have been sweating, but mostly from their paws. “When we get nervous, we sweat on our palms, too,” he said. “That’s part of our ancient heritage for escaping.”
He explained that the wetness created traction so that animals, when in danger of being eaten, could climb up a tree or scale a cliff. “Think about how you lick your finger when you want to turn a page in a book,” he said of how the traction works.
This information caused me to revisit the question: If you could go back in time, where would you go? I used to think I’d go back to witness Michael Jackson’s Victory Tour, but now I’d go back to when palm sweat was for champions. These days, sweaty palms have no cachet. After shaking hands with someone, I always have to pretend that I just went to the bathroom and care about the environment. “I hate wasting paper towels,” I say as my victims try to nonchalantly dry their hand on the side of their pants. If it were three million years ago, no one would be grossed out; they’d call me a survivor.
Lieberman told me that this kind of sweating—the clammy-hand kind—originally had nothing to do with regulating our temperature.
“So we sweated from nervousness before we sweated to cool down?” I asked.
“Millions and millions and millions of years before,” he said.
That must be why I’m so phenomenal at nervous sweat; when giving a public talk, I’ve been known to leak through a quarter-inch-thick sweatshirt.
Way back then, to stay cool, we would have panted like dogs and monkeys. Then at some point, though no one knows exactly when, our internal air-conditioning model shifted: We stopped panting, lost our fur, and became much more sweaty.
Lieberman has spent many years considering why this occurred—possibly even as many as I’ve spent considering how to hide underarm sweat while wearing a long-sleeved button-down denim shirt, but luckily, he’s been more successful. While I have two such shirts, still with tags on, hanging in my closet, he’s come up with two viable theories.
In one, he noted that when we began walking upright—on only two legs instead of the customary four—we also became a lot slower. “It was dangerous to be in open habitats,” he said. “We were vulnerable.” To survive, he believes we evolved the ability to sweat so that we could forage at times of day when other animals couldn’t. “Lions, hyenas, and all the predators that like to kill can’t be active when it’s very hot,” he said. Sweating, in other words, gave us a niche. We could gather food in peace because our panting predators couldn’t handle the midday heat.
His other hypothesis was much more specific. He suggested that thermoregulatory sweat began two million years ago, at the same time that we began endurance running. “When you run, you generate much more heat,” he said, “so you need to have the ability to dump that heat much more effectively.”
Because sweating allowed us to run great lengths in hot temperatures—a unique trait matched by very few species, such as horses—our Paleoproterozoic grandparents back in Africa were able to do something called persistence hunting (it’s such an important development that anthropologists often refer to it by just its initials, PH, like it’s a famous rapper or a popular drug that makes people eat their own faces). What would happen is that during the hottest time of day, early humans tracked and chased big bloodthirsty beasts. These animals, though powerful, weren’t built to do something as simple as pant and gallop at the same time, so they couldn’t cool down, and therefore tender, scrawny, perspiring meat bags such as ourselves were able to run these animals to death. After overheating, they’d become our meal.
Lieberman kept talking, but I wasn’t listening anymore. This was it! Sweating, as he’d just noted, was a tremendous progression for humankind. Because of sweat, we were able to hunt big prey, which means that for the first time, we regularly ate meat. As a result, our teeth got smaller, as did our stomachs, while our brains got huge. If it weren’t for sweat, I wouldn’t be writing this right now. I’d be crouched in a field, using a rat’s tail as a thong while ingesting bark with my caveman sweetheart, Oog.
“I get it,” I said. “Without sweat, we wouldn’t be the intelligent, big-brained social animals that we are today.”
I was reveling in my revelation—pursing my lips and nodding my head with pride. If there were a flag for humanity, it should be of a face with a sweat droplet rolling down its temple.
But Lieberman, I soon realized, was a man who did not appreciate joy. He was not at all down with my proposition. “Sweat helped us become who we are,” he said, “but we didn’t have to be the way we are.”
“But if we weren’t us, then what would we be?”
“If we hadn’t evolved to be the way we are,” he said, “then we would have evolved to be something else.”
“But then we wouldn’t be us, right?”
“We would be us, but a different us.”
Maybe he was saying we would have grown air vents on our behinds or sprouted five-speed fans from our shoulders. Whatever it was, it didn’t happen. We do sweat and I finally had perspective. “Pit stains aren’t repulsive,” I said, trying to get him onboard, “they are our legacy.”
Showing up to a meeting with sweat blotches on a fresh blouse and an upper lip dense with water beads is actually a symbol of our fortitude as humans and a gift that binds us to our prehistoric ancestors. When we look upon a hot mess of a woman, we should bow down to her shiny complexion, for it is that sheen of liquid that brought us steaks, feather mattresses, and even the internet.
“There are so many components to our bodies that to ever say that one thing is what makes us the way we are is just facile,” Lieberman said.
“But—”
“Would we be the way we are if we didn’t have feet? Language? Cooking?” He told me that everything is contingent in evolution, so you can’t focus on just one aspect. “This is very sloppy thinking,” he said.
This Harvard professor’s condemnation of my critical-thinking process made me start to spout water from my more occluded regions. By the time we got off the phone, I’d built up enough traction to shimmy up the trunk of a palm tree. It was going to be hard to rebrand sweat as the pride and joy of our species if Lieberman wouldn’t back me up.
I went back and thought about sweat long and hard, so long and hard that I saw a breach in my logic. I’d preached for people to embrace sweat, yet if I’m being honest, I have to say that I myself have difficulty when I see someone gushing in public. I thought about a meal I once had in the Mexico City airport. My waiter at the Chili’s outpost sweated profusely from his head.
I felt concern—was he going to have a heart attack or drip into my food? Neither option sounded good. After all this talk of acceptance, I had to recognize that I was just like the homophobic male senator who is secretly having an affair with his male page—a total hypocrite. Maybe there was something deeper to the aversion. Could it really just be the fear of creating an odor and the unsavory connotations attached to sweat—illness, laziness, deceitfulness—that repulse us, or is there something more complex going on?
For this, I had to move away from the sciences and engage with some humanities. I got in touch with social psychologist Jamie Goldenberg, a professor at the University of Southern Florida. I reached out to her because her research focuses on people’s relationship to their own and other’s bodily functions—all the good stuff like sex, poop, sweat, menstruation, and vomiting.
“So from your perspective,” I asked her, “why do we spend so much time and money trying to hide our sweat?”
Goldenberg told me about terror management theory, which looks at how we deal, often unconsciously, with our existential fears. She brought up Ernest Becker, the philosopher responsible for this line of inquiry. “His most famous quote,” she told me, “is ‘We are gods with anuses.’”
What a charming expression. I’m not sure why I haven’t seen it inscribed in cursive on a Hallmark card before.
“We want to be gods,” she explained of the quote, “and put ourselves on a different plane from all other creatures, but the anus is a constant reminder of our creatureliness and our eventual death.”
That resonated with me—my anus continuously disappoints me (I’ll get to that later)—but I wasn’t sure it related to the subject at hand. “So what does that have to do with trying to pretend we’re not sweaty beasts?” I asked.
“It has everything to do with it,” she said. “See, we don’t want to be beasts.”
She explained that those parts of us that are animal-like—snotty snouts, pus-filled boils, milk-laden mammaries—are reminders, often subconscious, that just like other animals, we have an expiration date.
“So we invest a lot of effort in our bodies and try to transform them from their natural animal-like ways,” she said, noting practices such as wearing makeup, clothes, tattoos, and perfumes and even engaging in practices as simple as brushing one’s hair. “It’s a defense against the anxiety associated with the awareness of mortality.”
Goldenberg’s theory sounded plausible, but I had my doubts. “Okay, but how do we know that this is all stemming from existential angst rather than a persuasive advertising campaign?”
“Why do you think people are so receptive to these types of advertisements?” she said. “I would suggest that it’s because they tap into our basic fears and yearning for self-regard. They remind us that we have physical weaknesses, the biggest of which is that we’ll eventually die.”
Coincidentally, I’ve also always considered dying a significant weakness. But suddenly, I could see why sweat was so disconcerting. We live in a world where we try to control everything, but sweat doesn’t cooperate with the mind. Sweat is a reminder that instead of us ruling the body, the body rules us—with each rivulet, we see that we are tethered to a time bomb.
To go a little deeper, I spoke to one more academic, Sheldon Solomon. He cowrote the book The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life and is a psychology professor at Skidmore. I had been hoping for sweat acceptance, but after hearing about why we might be repelled by our own orifices, I wondered what the fallout might be if we dropped all our pretenses and were able to embrace ourselves as the animals that we are.
“Would we all be better off if we could be more in touch with our sweat and maybe therefore also our own mortality?” I asked Solomon.
“I think yes and no,” he said. “Certainly I think it would not be a bad idea to realize that we have almost turned looking and smelling good into a fetish.”
We both agreed, being prolific sweaters ourselves, that it would be nice if people didn’t have an expectation of dryness, especially on hot, humid days.
“On the other hand,” he said, “I don’t think it would work out well if the only thing we did was walk around thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m a breathing piece of defecating, decaying meat.’”
* * *
A few days later, I was in the kitchen, absentmindedly rearranging magnets on the refrigerator while trying to make sense of everything I’d learned. With all the information, my mind was only getting more scrambled, so I went to bother Dave.
The poor chap was working at his desk when I barged in. He swiveled his chair around. “Can this wait?” he asked.
I sat down, ignoring what he’d just said. “It’s about sweat.”
Dave knows that I have issues with the stuff, that not only am I a profuse sweater, but that while I try to accept it and embrace it—oftentimes by refusing to use antiperspirant—I nonetheless get uptight and embarrassed when I spring a leak in public. It’s a deeply contradictory way of being that I don’t recommend to anyone.
“I get annoyed that we are expected to hide these very natural things,” I said, scooting deeper into the chair.
Then Goldenberg, the psychologist I’d recently spoken with, came to mind. “And yet, maybe hiding it helps us not think about mortality.” A couple of seconds later: “Did you know that sweat doesn’t release toxins?”
“Get it all out,” he said.
“But I do agree that seeing someone sweat in some contexts can make people uncomfortable,” I said. “Remember that waiter in Mexico?”
He nodded.
“Yet advertisements try to make us feel like crap all the time just for being normal.” I’d been wondering if advertisers began a campaign against yawning, how long it would take before we’d all begin to buy specialized masks, produced with the specific purpose to hide the involuntary reflex.
“Sweat is amazing, though. It helped us hunt big animals,” I said. “It’s why you are able to work on a computer right now.”
Dave looked at his computer and then scratched his temple. He leaned slightly forward. He told me that for him, it was all a lot simpler. “I don’t think that society is trying to coerce us,” he said. “I don’t see it like that. There are expectations we set for others that make life better for everyone.”
I was skeptical of his direction. It sounded like he was going to be too diplomatic.
“Like we don’t let people shit on buses,” he said, “because no one wants to be around shit on a bus.”
Did I say “diplomatic”?
“That’s how I see sweat,” he said.
“Like shit on a bus?”
“Yeah,” he said. No one, he told me, wants to be sniffing other people’s BO.
In that moment, I recognized that maybe I wouldn’t ever be able to sweat and have it not be weird, because sweat is weird. The translucent liquid arrives on its own accord and has so many different meanings; it’s not only a bodily function, but it can also inadvertently be a communication (or a miscommunication) about our emotional states. Sweat is gross, sexy, desired, loathed, and essential all at the same time.
It is also, apparently, quite a lot like shit on a bus.
Dr. Armpit
I was interested in learning more about the little creatures that eat our sweat and call our pits home sweet home, so I reached out to “Dr. Armpit,” as a man by the name of Chris Callewaert is known in professional circles. Dr. Armpit deals almost exclusively with these axilla bacteria, and because it is these little guys that transform our innocent secretions into stank, he is therefore also on the cutting edge of nasty body smells. His career goal is quite noble, up there with inhabiting Mars, extending life, and creating renewable energy sources. In his own words: “I want to solve body odor.”
Dr. Armpit has worked in this field for only a short time, but he has discovered quite a few fascinating factoids. Staphylococci and corynebacteria are most often the dominating strains that live in our pits. Staphylococci c
reate a mild smell while corynebacteria can make the owner of a nearby unassuming nose yearn for a clothespin.
Those are the basics, but from there, Dr. Armpit found one of the four cornerstones of female superiority. Scientifically, women often stink less than men (though I don’t think this is true of me—I can develop the rankness of a dirty sock left in a moldy basement for a week, but usually only in my right pit and after drinking a cup of coffee). This is because typically women’s pits are staffed predominantly with staphylococci, while men, because of their thicker skin and fattier secretions, tend to attract the more gross corynebacteria, which thrive on a rich and oily diet. We can think of them as the sumo wrestlers, in appetite not necessarily appearance, of the armpit’s bacterial kingdom.
Dr. Armpit has also conducted research about the effects of deodorants and antiperspirants. They don’t cause Alzheimer’s (as many still suspect), but surprisingly, in certain cases, they can make us smell worse. In a study, he found that consistent use of these products should not be a problem, but when used sporadically, they can actually increase the diversity of bacteria. That doesn’t sound bad until you consider that one of the new species to move in might be the type that creates an awful stench. Also, antiperspirants tend to kill off more of the good-smelling bacteria, leaving the fetid guys the opportunity to take over. Dr. Armpit’s takeaway: “If you don’t have smelly pits,” he warned, “I wouldn’t recommend messing with them much.”
In the future, Dr. Armpit hopes to make deodorants and antiperspirants that will specifically target the bad-smelling bacteria rather than meddle with the whole shebang. “We will be able to steer the microbiome,” he said, “in a good direction.”
Now this is where it gets really serious. Usually, Dr. Armpit explained to me, one’s armpit microbiome is stable—the stalwart bacteria fend off any incoming invaders—but there are times when it can become unbalanced—he’s heard of it happening in various cases such as when someone is ill, pregnant, on vacation, taking hormones, or staying in a hospital—at which point it becomes possible to inherit someone else’s bacteria and therefore also their particular armpit funk. Yes, I’ll say it again because I needed to hear it three times myself: There is actual proof that you can indeed catch someone else’s BO.
