u/Timbucktwo1230

On holiday, Bahamas, circa 1982

Excerpt:

The UK should introduce a maximum temperature for workplaces to protect people as heatwaves intensify due to climate change, the government's adviser has said.

The Climate Change Committee (CCC) said that rolling out air conditioning and other cooling technologies in schools and hospitals should be one of the government's highest priorities.

It warned that increasingly extreme heatwaves, droughts and floods were threatening the British "way of life", from sports matches to music festivals.

The government said it would carefully consider and respond to the committee's advice, adding it was already investing in flood defences.
But Baroness Brown, chair of the CCC's Adaptation Committee, criticised the "woeful" performance of successive governments in tackling the present and future threats facing the UK from climate change.

"We need to recognise that there are aspects of our British way of life which are now really under threat from climate," she said.

"It's not rocket science - we know what to do [… but] we haven't yet seen a government that's prepared to prioritise adapting to the change of climate [... and] protecting the people and the places that we love," she added.

The CCC does not suggest a maximum temperature for workplaces but points to the example of Spain, where the maximum legal working temperature indoors is 27C for sedentary work and 25C for light physical work.

The CCC warned that the "UK was built for a climate that no longer exists today", adding that it is now inarguable that climate change is reshaping our weather.

Last year was the UK's warmest year on record, with drought and low water levels affecting much of the country.

That came shortly after one of the UK's wettest winters on record in 2023-24, which triggered widespread flooding.

The CCC stresses that reducing carbon emissions is essential to limit climate change, but it says that further consequences for the UK are inevitable.

The world has already warmed by about 1.4C compared with pre-industrial times - before humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels - and global efforts to keep warming to well below 2C remain off track.

The CCC points to the twin threats of winter flooding and summer droughts, with increasingly wet winters and dry summers expected on average with further climate change.

By the middle of the century, peak river flows in some catchments could be up to 45% higher during periods of very heavy rain, it warned.

Meanwhile, shortfalls in England's public water supply could surpass five billion litres per day without stronger action, linked to hot, dry summers and a growing population.

🔗: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2p1j4y0kro

@violetcakeslondon Instagram

A series of photos by Alok Vaid-Menon exploring the connection between body hair removal and white supremacy in the US.

For accessibility the text of each photo is below. In parenthesis I have included the image reference listed at the very end.

Photo 1: The racist history of body hair removal in the US. (Image 1)

Photo 2: A picture of the book “Plucked: A History of Hair Removal” by Rebecca M. Herzig. It depicts a small green vial with a cork top and the title on its label. A pair of tweezers is in front of the bottle.

Photo 3: More than 99% of US American women voluntarily remove their body hair. More than 85% do so regularly. While body hair removal practices have existed across cultures across time, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was an unprecedented effort to make body hair removal mandatory for women in the US. As white men became increasingly fixated on controlling white women's beauty regimens, hairlessness became re-signified as a symbol of racial progress and superiority. (Image 2)

Photo 4: Despite the wide range in hairiness within races, 19th century European thinkers argued that hair was a marker of racial difference. New instruments like the trichometer were designed to quantify hair differences among races. After 1859, many scientists misused Darwin's theory of evolution to argue that race was an evolutionary continuum where “savages" (racialized people) were closer to animals and white "civilized" people were the most evolved form of human. In this view, body hair was seen as a marker of animality and degeneracy (an indication that a people had not evolved into civilized humanity. (Image 3)

Photo 5: Maintenance of white women's "proper" physical appearance became about maintaining the "health" of the white race in the face of migration and racial unrest. One of the prevailing eugenic ideas upheld by scientists was that more "advanced" civilizations had more of a visible difference between males and females. Mandating that white women remove their hair emphasized the visual contrast between white men and women. This allowed white thinkers to argue that the white race was superior to racial others who were demonized as sexually ambiguous. Over time, any hair on a white woman's body became seen as excessive. Body hair became symbolically associated with dirtiness because of its cultural association with racialized people. (Image 4)

Photo 6: In 1876 the American Dermatological Association began to be concerned with "hypertrichosis" (a condition that pathologized extensive body hair) focusing specifically on white women. Magazines promoted models of white, hairless feminine beauty and campaigns that discussed hair removal as "remedying" evil and removing racial markers. Jewish, Italian, and Eastern European migrants in particular were targeted by advertising for X-ray epilation under the idea that body hair removal would allow them to integrate into Anglo-dominant whiteness. This led to hundreds (if not thousands) of women dying from these procedures. (Images 5 and 6)

Photo 7: Hairy people became put on display in “freak shows" across the country to reinforce that white "civilized" people had advanced from this "primitive state." These racial politics continued into the Cold War when body hair was linked to evidence of "foreign" contamination. In the 20th century with the expansion of white women into the workplace, men's economic dominance over women and the distinction between sexes was challenged. Men had long defined their supremacy by their exclusive labor power. Women's economic mobility challenged this equation. (Image 7)

Photo 8: Regulating women's appearance was a strategy to maintain control over women and heighten the contrast between men and women (which was still understood as a marker of civilization). "Hairy women" became synonymous with "failed women." In other words, throughout the 19th and 20th century, compulsory body hair removal for women became a form of gendered social control to stabilize the sex binary in the face of imminent collapse. (Images 8 and 9)

Photo 9: We must end the idea that femininity = hairlessness and the societal expectation of women's hairlessness. Body hair has no gender. People should have the choice to maintain or remove their body hair and this shouldn't influence how they are treated. There is #NothingWrongHair (Image 10)

Photo 10: Image Credits
Image 1- Cat Huang (@cathuangart)
Image 2- Image of woman shaving armpit via crfashionbrook.com, and images of assortment of hair removal tools via Google Images
Image 3- 19th century American naturalist Peter Browne's collection of hair samples included one from former President George Washington.
Image 4- 1923 ad for ZIP hair remover
Image 5- Ad for Silkymit Hair Remover, the Australian Women's Weekly
Image 6- Electrolysis image via cosmeticsandskin.com
Image 7- Annie Jones Elliot poster via Wikimedia Commons
Image 8- Ad for a book titled, "How to overcome the superfluous hair problem" by Annette Lanzette, c. 1930s
Image 9- Ad for Dermatino Hair removal by the Dermatino Company in St. Louis, Missouri, 1902. Jay Paull, Getty Images.
Image 10- Queen Esther (@queen\_esie)
Image 11- Cover of British "Woman" magazine, c. 1940s (on this page)