There is a particular summer weather that I – and perhaps I alone – love. Hot, overcast and damp. The days when the air feels like the breath of a particularly big and lusty dog. The days when thunder is always imminent. The days when you start to use a council tax bill as a makeshift fan across your neck on the train.
Why am I so drawn to this heavy, expectant clamminess? This overcast sense of excitement? Because – and this is not the time for euphemism – I am a sweaty woman. I contain rivulets. Along my temples, under my breasts, across both armpits, behind my knee; I am as slick and shiny as a pebble on the seashore. And when the weather turns humid, you all simply meet me where I stand.
Suddenly, I have comrades, complaining that their thigh has become welded to their plastic chair; dabbing at their top lip with a sleeve; staining their ill-planned shirts with continent-shaped sweat patches. You people become my people; slipping through life on a sweaty sheen.
One of the reasons I sweat is because I move around a lot. I cycle to meetings, arriving with a rucksack imprint of damp across my back in both July and January. When I run, I feel the slickness trickling down my belly and I do not care. Take me out dancing and I will show you a woman who refuses to take a breather just because her mascara is dripping off her chin. In life, when given the choice between poise and motion, I will always pick motion. Such is my health privilege, as a physically able woman. But so is my choice, as someone who rails against a particular, misogynistic view of women as placid, passive and pretty.
Sweating has rarely been encouraged – particularly among women. The ancient Egyptians daubed themselves with incense and scented wax to cover the smell of their perspiring bodies, while Britons were dousing themselves and their clothes with various scented powders and pomades, even when washing fell out of favour. In 1888, the first commercial deodorant – tellingly called Mum – hit the market, quickly followed by Everdry antiperspirant in all its aluminium chloride glory. For as long as people have beaded and dripped, it appears that we have tried to hide it.
Teenage girls in the 90s (you may identify us by our amoebic eyebrows and continuing faith in the transformative power of conditioner) were implicitly told that pretty much all normal physical processes (eating, menstruation, weight fluctuation, masturbation, yawning, illness and of course sweating) were somehow unfeminine, uncool and – most serious of all – unattractive. Now, I’m not going to slide out here on a tsunami of elbow sweat, and claim that body odour and dripping foreheads should be recognised as the throbbing aphrodisiacs they truly are because, well, I’m not convinced. I like cleanliness. I also like people who smell like washing powder. But it is worth saying that the sooner you can come to accept the expirations of your own body, the easier it will become to like it. And the more you like your body, the easier it will be for other people to express their affection or admiration for it too.
Finally, in a time of increasing global temperatures, we are simply going to have to lose our fear of sweat. To sit under the arctic blast of an air conditioner as the world burns under the weight of motorised cooling is not how I want to go. In economically developed countries we are going to have to learn from the global south about coping in heat and managing sweat. The fabrics we wear, how we build our homes, when we rest and what we eat are going to have to change, of course. But ventilation, siestas, cotton and trees will only get us so far. We are also going to have to stop feeling queasy about perspiration. Looked at from an engineering point of view, isn’t it remarkable that our bodies know to dampen the surface of our skin to cool the core temperature? It is amazing that we have, within our biology, a ready-made coping strategy.
So, stop flinching away from the realities of climate and your corporeal body. Accept that sweat, like blood, milk and tears, are what keep us alive. And if you see a woman cyclist wiping her forehead on a Plants of New Zealand tea towel at the traffic lights, just say nothing.
• Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood
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