Despite not looking like much of an athlete these days, I used to play basketball year round in high school. I was quite good and I was devoted to the sport, so I spent a lot of time in gym clothes getting very, very sweaty over the course of my high school career. Looking back now, I don’t know how I ran that much.
Due to all the exertion and sweat, strong deodorant was an absolute necessity. None of us girls ever made fun of someone who came to practice with a heavy duty stick — we all had at least two deodorants in our gym bags at any time. And we all used men’s deodorant. We just thought it worked better.
We did, on the other hand, dog on girls who showed up with women’s deodorant. For whatever reason, we thought it weaker and feminine in an unacceptable way. Floral scented? Who wants that when you could have a deodorant that smells like a husky outdoor man? I distinctly remember that one of the deodorants I used was called “Hawkridge”… what does that even mean? A quick google provided me with the other names from that collection, the Wild collection: Bearglove and Wolfthorn. Badass.
I hope no one takes this the wrong way, but I do think that men sweat more. Whether that’s because of their tendency to choose more physically demanding jobs or because it’s something to do with their physiology, they tend to produce more sweat than women, broadly speaking. What I don’t know for sure, though, is if men’s deodorants are any more effective at preventing perspiration/ odor than women’s deodorants, but that’s the way companies make it seem in advertising.
Women get the flower-fruit-cleanlinen deodorants while men get the spice-backwoods-warlord deodorants. If you want to keep sweat at bay while you run 4 miles in a hot gym, which would you choose???
I would choose the husky, outdoorsy, woodsy smelling deodorant. I think it’s funny that companies try to dictate how a man and a woman should smell. I was a swimmer growing up and all of us girls would wear the men’s deodorant because we thought it was stronger/worked better. But, yeah, I agree with you I think they work the same. I think that we chose the men’s deodorant because it looked ‘tougher’ and we wanted to seem just as tough and strong as the boys. We all had the ridiculous notion that you couldn’t be an athlete if you wore flowery perfume or deodorant. Overall, I think it boils down to companies reaffirming social norms (i.e. men should smell like tough-macho-warlords and women should smell like delicate flowers and freshly laundered clothes), which is kind of ridiculous and sexist in my opinion.