Saturday 4 December 1999

Pic of the day: Snow has returned to our lands. Children roll in the white fluff, dogs do other things in it, and cars slip and slide. The merchants rub their hands, and Christmas decorations are fetched from the cobwebbed cupboards. It is December, people!

Yesterday I washed and fluffed my hair. It is a bit short for fluffing yet, but I can feel it just a little. Also I love the smell of the shampoo I use. Despite rinsing well, the smell follows me around for a day or two. Today it was on my pillow as I woke up. But of course, as always there was no one else but me there to smell it.

And, me being me, I started to think. I thought about the strange thing that we paint our body with smell. We wash our slate clean and paint with soaps and perfumes and deos and (at least the X-chromosomally challenged half of the population) after-shave and such. Yet ... You may know it by the name of God or Evolution, but something made butterflies like the smell of flowers and brown flies like the smell of manure and blowflies like the smell of flesh. And this same force has made smell attract mates, too ... from the Colorado beetle to the great apes. And certainly humans too. Yet we humans - at least in the high-tech world - go to extremes to eradicate our smell. And then we add other smells that are attractive. What in the name of truth are we doing? Do we really prefer the smell of money, or are we wearing masks because we would rather be rejected for our mask than for our face?

I don't know about y'all, but I like the smell of sweaty woman. It's not all that often that I chance upon it, our workplace is densely populated with women but they are generally adequately protected against the moderate physical workload. Hmm. Was that English? I mean, the work is not so hard that they sweat away all their perfume. But now and again in my long life I've happened to sniff sweaty girls and it isn't the end of the world. (Of course, it is still a good idea to change sweat now and again, not just keep the old one on for weeks.)

I am led to understand the women have even more sensitive noses than us males. (Unlike our friends the insects.) For instance, there was this research going on over in the States, where some researcher found out that his female lab mice could smell the degree of relationship between various bloodlines of fellow mice simply by the smell of their urine. Now this was pretty impressive, and the guy saw fit to share this discovery with some woman who was working there too. At which time she pointed out that she too could smell the difference between the different strains of mice.

One of the most fascinating things about female sniffing is that their sniffing preferences reverse when they take contraceptive pills. Both women on the pill and pregnant mice prefer the smell of close relatives, while otherwise they prefer the smell of males who are genetically different. Or so I've read in Scientific American and New Scientist. I've never arranged any controlled experiments myself. But since some of my readers are women on the Pill, they probably know whether or not there is something in this.

And myself, I spend the fall of night indoors: Alone with my scented candles and the stark black letters on the screen in front of me; instead of going out on a Saturday night to smell women, of whom there are millions. But I politely retract my senses into the shell created by my mind. So much for theory and practice.

Not that I'd want it otherwise. :)