Something To Make Your Nose Gay

So, if it's Tuesday, it must be Demystifying Divas Day, eh? Actually there's no question about it: it is Demystifying Diva Day, and the topic we're manhandling this week are scents.

The nose is a particularly funny looking part of our bodies. I mean, honestly, have you ever actually looked at your nose? It is, by all aesthetic rights, a silly thing. It sticks out, for no apparent reason. It could be big, it could be small. It could be wide, or it could be so small that when your nostrils flare on an angry exhale, you look like a pissed off chihuahua. But what the hell is it there for? Why do we have this incongrous thing sticking out of the middle of our faces? The answer, my dear friends, is to smell things. Because we need our sense of smell, as it is necessary to our survival as human beings as our hearing, sight and taste.

It's easy to forget nowadays, when everyone is so very interested in making everything smell like nothing (or everything, as the case may be) that we need that big proboscis on our faces to keep ourselves alive. After all, how can you tell if your food or drink is spoiled when it looks perfectly fine? How can you tell when you're in trouble? Because you smell the fear coming off your comrades---and yourself---in the form of body odor. You can smell sickness. And since it's generally an unpleasant smell, you know to stay away, hence keeping yourself from catching a nasty illness. You can also smell the putrid odor of the decay of death and you know to stay away from that as well. Smell is as crucial to human beings ability to survive as the ability to see the bus that's barrelling at you at 45 m.p.h. These drastic examples aside, smell is also crucial to the survival of the human race for another reason: it helps you find the person you're supposed to mate and reproduce with.

Now, personally, I believe that in this day and age we are too obsessed with scent---and not in a good way. How many ads do you see for a product that appeal to your sense of smell during your favorite one hour tee vee show? Think about it for a minute. Just off the top of my head I can think of laundry detergent, fabric softener, cleaning products, air fresheners, shower soap, lotion, arthritis rubs...and this doesn't even count the ads for actual perfume. A primary selling point of these products is that they appeal to your sense of smell in a positive way. We like things to smell nice: our clothes, our houses, our air, but most importantly, our bodies. We want these things to smell nice because it's not fun, in this day and age, to have things that don't smell nice, because that will bring social ridicule upon us. Hence I believe we go a bit overboard in an effort to avoid said ridicule. People make fun of other people who don't wash on a regular basis, hence we find a soap that not only makes us clean, but gives off a fragrance to cover up any body odor we might give off during the course of the day. In fact, the anti-bacterial properties of soap are there, primarily, not to keep you from being sick or becoming infected, but because bacteria is the stuff that makes us smell perhaps not so fresh. You can sweat all day long, but you won't start to smell unless that sweat combines with bacteria. We find a fabric softener that not only keeps the static cling away, but also radiates a powerful flowery fragrance, because that smells better than our own natural smell, which can and will cling to clothes. Fragrance, these days, is just as powerful a marketing factor as the primary purpose of whatever product the fragrance is attached to. As such, I think we've lost quite a bit, and perhaps---just perhaps---are making life more confusing for ourselves. After all, would you rather know what a potential mate smells like, and be able to discern what you find attractive by that, or would you rather judge them by the smell of the fabric softener they use? How can you tell nowadays just what a potential mate smells like when they're bathed, head to toe, in loads of different fragrances?

Now, speaking for myself, I like a man to smell like, well, a man. I refer you to a passage I wrote for the never-finished, forever-being-tweaked manuscript. I'm not going to set it up for you: you don't need to know. Surprisingly enough, this passage hasn't been tweaked too much and has survived a few ruthless edits simply because I like the way I put it the first time round:

"...but to smell him? That was a thing of beauty. He smelled like a man should smell: of utilitarian soap, small, minty traces of the shaving cream he’d used, the wool of his damp overcoat, the starch the drycleaners had used on his shirt, the one whisky he’d allowed himself at the party, and the beginnings of sweat and hormones. She could remain in that miasma for hours and feel nothing but pleasure."

I can conjure all those smells from memory, separately and I can also throw them together as well. Can you? I'm pretty sure you can, and you probably have your own notions of what will and does smell good on your own potential mate. I'm not a big one for men dousing themselves with cologne. I think a man who simply washes on a regular basis smells good. Yet, I will shamefully admit, there was a time that I would gladly follow a man around, like I was the village idiot, when they wore this. Oh, God did that stuff ever smell good to my eighteen-year old nose. I would like to think---ahem---that it was because it accentuated what I thought smelled good on a guy naturally, but that would just be my brain trying to justify my actions. The stuff, in all actuality, appealed to my baser instincts. My hormones ran over whenever I caught a whiff of that stuff. That stuff was ambrosia. I'm getting shivers even now just thinking about it. (Meeeeow!) Not to put too fine a point on it, let's just say that my good sense went straight out the window when a man who was wearing Drakkar walked by. He could have been a complete and utter troll: I didn't care. He was wearing the stuff that appealed to my hormones. And, in that shameful admission, I believe we find the answer to why we're so busy trying to deceive our noses with all the fragrances we use: because they might make us more attractive, more appealing to the opposite sex; they might cover our flaws; they might level the uneven playing field that is the battleground to find a mate---they allow us to think maybe we've got the high ground. What's sad, however, is that you may, in all reality, be down in the swamp and you might not know it because you can't smell it over all the fragrances wafting around you.

Ok, enough with the longwinded bullshit. Now it's time for you, my devoted Cake Eater Reader, to go and read what the other DeliciouslyDiabolical Demystifying Divas have written. Make sure you go over and welcome one of our Divaesque Ladies, Ruth, at Chaos Theory, who has chimed in as well today. As always, in the spirit of equality, make sure to check out what the fearsome foursome that is The Men's Club---Puffy, Phin, Zonker and The Wiz---have produced on this topic as well.

Posted by Kathy at May 3, 2005 11:57 AM