Men Who Don't Use Soap

Well, when I work on a car engine, I use something like Gojo to clean up. Washing in just water or regular soap&water doesn't cut it. But my Gojo use was always rare.

When I go swimming, the pool requires washing with soap before entering the pool, to avoid urea in the sweat from reacting with the pool chemicals and making that pool smell.

Post-COVID I now wash my hands with soap and water far more often than I did before.

I had surgery, and had to wash with an antibacterial soap beforehand. I had lice and used a lice shampoo treatment.

From all accounts, the people who avoid normally washing with soap would still use soap for these occasions, which all count as a caveat or exception or asterisk.

I don't think the point is to avoid soap at all costs, but to point out that soap is used far, far more often than is required. Searching just now, https://www.nateliason.com/blog/soap "You don’t need to use soap 90%+ of the time you’re using it right now, assuming you’re not regularly doing some kind of dirty laborious work. Water and a towel will do fine."

Even Hamblin, who this article says started the modern dialog back in 2016, says to use soap to wash your hands. (About 5 minutes into https://archive.org/details/theaspen-Clean_-_The_New_Science... ).

At https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/what-happens-if-you-stop... we can read an interview with Hamblin: "And if you think Hamblin’s wife may just be flattering him, he put his co-workers and friends on the spot while he was working on the book, asking them to say so if they ever thought he smelled bad (what are friends for, eh?). “As people knew I was doing this, they wanted to take part because they want to tell you you smell,” he said. “That was honestly the whole book tour. So I didn’t conduct a clinical trial here, but I asked enough people regularly enough, and I have enough self awareness to know I’m not offensive to people.”"

Also looking around, I see page upon page of people who are disbelieving and disgusted by the idea that some people rarely use soap, so I can also well understand why people who rarely use using soap don't want to be public about it.

The reduced soap argument seems to be (from https://bigthink.com/health/james-hamblin-doctor-didnt-showe... ): #1. An obsession with soap might be creating allergies; #2. Your skin is crawling with mites which 'potentially act as natural exfoliants' and without them 'you might even be more susceptible to breakouts and infections'; #3. Marketers convinced the public that everyone should buy a lot of soap; #4. The skincare industry is largely unregulated; #5. Disinfection isn't a simple panacea, and #6. The marketing machine makes us feel incomplete ("B.O." is a marketing term created to sell soap) — so we have to buy products that make us feel whole.

(Yes, #3 and #6 seem the same.)