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nor of woman are usually beautiful in the eyes of the opposite sex, and
their exhibition is not among us regarded as a necessary stage in
courtship. The odor of the body, like its beauty, in so far as it can be
regarded as a possible sexual allurement, has in the course of development
been transferred to the upper parts. The careful concealment of the sexual
region has doubtless favored this transfer. It has thus happened that when
personal odor acts as a sexual allurement it is the armpit, in any case
normally the chief focus of odor in the body, which mainly comes into
play, together with the skin and the hair.
Aubert, of Lyons, noted that during menstruation the odor of the
armpits may become more powerful, and describes it as being at
this time an aromatic odor of acidulous or chloroform character.
Galopin remarks that, while some women's armpits smell of sheep
in rut, others, when exposed to the air, have a fragrance of
ambergris or violet. Dark persons (according to Gould and Pyle)
are said sometimes to exhale a prussic acid odor, and blondes
more frequently musk; Galopin associates the ambergris odor more
especially with blondes.
While some European poets have faintly indicated the woman's
armpit as a centre of sexual attraction, it is among Eastern
poets that we may find the idea more directly and naturally
expressed. Thus, in a Chinese drama ("The Transmigration of
Yo-Chow," _Mercure de France_, No. 8, 1901) we find a learned
young doctor addressing the following poem to his betrothed:--
"When I have climbed to the bushy summit of Mount Chao,
I have still not reached to the level of your odorous armpit.
I must needs mount to the sky
Before the breeze brings to me
The perfume of that embalsamed nest!"
This poet seems, however, to have been carried to a pitch of
enthusiasm unusual even in China, for his future mother-in-law,
after expressing her admiration for the poem, remarks: "But who
would have thought one could find so many beautiful things under
my daughter's armpit!"
The odor of the armpit is the most powerful in the body,
sufficiently powerful to act as a muscular stimulant even in the
absence of any direct sexual association. This is indicated by an
observation made by Féré, who noticed, when living opposite a
laundry, that an old woman who worked near the window would,
toward the close of the day, introduce her right hand under the
sleeve of the other to the armpit and then hold it to her nose;
this she would do about every five minutes. It was evident that
the odor acted as a stimulant to her failing energies. Féré has
been informed by others who have had occasion to frequent
workrooms that this proceeding is by no means uncommon among
persons of both sexes. (Féré, _L'Instinct Sexuel_, second
edition, p. 135.) I have myself noticed the same gesture very
deliberately made in the street by a young English woman of the
working class, under circumstances which suggested that it acted
as an immediate stimulant in fatigue.
Huysmans--who in his novels has insisted on odors, both those of
a personal kind and perfumes, with great precision--
has devoted
one of the sketches, "Le Gousset," in his _Croquis Parisiens_
(1880) to the varying odors of women's armpits. "I have followed
this fragrance in the country," he remarks, "behind a group of
women gleaners under the bright sun. It was excessive and
terrible; it stung your nostrils like an unstoppered bottle of
alkali; it seized you, irritating your mucous membrane with a
rough odor which had in it something of the relish of wild duck
cooked with olives and the sharp odor of the shallot. On the
whole, it was not a vile or repugnant emanation; it united, as an
anticipated thing, with the formidable odors of the landscape; it
was the pure note, completing with the human animals' cry of heat
the odorous melody of beasts and woods." He goes on to speak of
the perfume of feminine arms in the ball-room.
"There the aroma
is of ammoniated valerian, of chlorinated urine, brutally
accentuated sometimes, even with a slight scent of prussic acid
about it, a faint whiff of overripe peaches." These
"spice-boxes," however, Huysmans continues, are more seductive
when their perfume is filtered through the garments.
"The appeal
of the balsam of their arms is then less insolent, less cynical,
than at the ball where they are more naked, but it more easily
uncages the animal in man. Various as the color of the hair, the
odor of the armpit is infinitely divisible; its gamut covers the
whole keyboard of odors, reaching the obstinate scents of syringa
and elder, and sometimes recalling the sweet perfume of the
rubbed fingers that have held a cigarette. Audacious and
sometimes fatiguing in the brunette and the black woman, sharp
and fierce in the red woman, the armpit is heady as some sugared
wines in the blondes." It will be noted that this very exact
description corresponds at various points with the remarks of
more scientific observers.
Sometimes the odor of the armpit may even become a kind of fetich
which is craved for its own sake and in itself suffices to give
pleasure. Féré has recorded such a case, in a friend of his own,
a man of 60, with whom at one time he used to hunt, of robust
health and belonging to a healthy family. On these hunting
expeditions he used to tease the girls and women he met
(sometimes even rather old women) in a surprising manner, when he
came upon them walking in the fields with their short-sleeved
chemises exposed. When he had succeeded in introducing his hand
into the woman's armpit he went away satisfied, and frequently
held the hand to his nose with evident pleasure.
After long
hesitation Féré asked for an explanation, which was frankly
given. As a child he had liked the odor, without knowing why. As
a young man women with strong odors had stimulated him to
extraordinary sexual exploits, and now they were the only women
who had any influence on him. He professed to be able to
recognize continence by the odor, as well as the most favorable
moment for approaching a woman. Throughout life a cold in the
head had always been accompanied by persistent general
excitement. (Féré, _L'Instinct Sexuel_, 1902, p.
134.)
We not only have to recognize that in the course of evolution the specific
odors of the sexual region have sunk into the background as a source of
sexual allurements, we have further to recognize the significant fact that
even those personal odors which are chiefly liable under normal
circumstances to come occasionally within the conscious sexual sphere, and
indeed purely personal odors of all kinds, fail to exert any attraction,
but rather tend to cause antipathy, unless some degree of tumescence has
already been attained. That is to say, our olfactory experiences of the
human body approximate rather to our tactile experiences of it than to our
visual experiences. Sight is our most intellectual sense, and we trust
ourselves to it with comparative boldness without any undue dread that its
messages will hurt us by their personal intimacy; we even court its
experiences, for it is the chief organ of our curiosity, as smell is of a
dog's. But smell with us has ceased to be a leading channel of
intellectual curiosity. Personal odors do not, as vision does, give us
information that is very largely intellectual; they make an appeal that is
mainly of an intimate, emotional, imaginative character.
They thus tend,
when we are in our normal condition, to arouse what James calls the
antisexual instinct.
"I cannot understand how people do not see how the senses are
connected," said Jenny Lind to J.A. Symonds (Horatio Brown, _J.A.
Symonds_, vol. i, p. 207). "What I have suffered from my sense of
smell! My youth was misery from my acuteness of sensibility."
Mantegazza discusses the strength of olfactory antipathies
(_Fisiologia dell' Odio_, p. 101), and mentions that once when
ill in Paraguay he was nursed by an Indian girl of 16, who was
fresh as a peach and extremely clean, but whose odor--"a mixture
of wild beast's lair and decayed onions"--caused nausea and
almost made him faint.
Moll (_Untersuchungen über die Libido Sexualis_, bd.
i, p. 135)
records the case of a neuropathic man who was constantly rendered
impotent by his antipathy to personal body odors. It had very
frequently happened to him to be attracted by the face and
appearance of a girl, but at the last moment potency was
inhibited by the perception of personal odor.
In the case of a man of distinguished ability known to me,
belonging to a somewhat neuropathic family, there is extreme
sensitiveness to the smell of a woman, which is frequently the
most obvious thing to him about her. He has seldom known a woman
whose natural perfume entirely suits him, and his olfactory
impressions have frequently been the immediate cause of a rupture
of relationships.
It was formerly discussed whether strong personal odor
constituted adequate ground for divorce. Hagen, who brings
forward references on this point (_Sexuelle Osphrésiologie_, pp.
75-83), considers that the body odors are normally and naturally
repulsive because they are closely associated with the capryl
group of odors, which are those of many of the excretions.
Olfactory antipathies are, however, often strictly subordinated
to the individual's general emotional attitude toward the object
from which they emanate. This is illustrated in the case, known
to me, of a man who on a hot day entering a steamboat with a
woman to whom he was attached seated himself between her and a
man, a stranger. He soon became conscious of an axillary odor
which he concluded to come from the man and which he felt as
disagreeable. But a little later he realized that it proceeded
from his own companion, and with this discovery the odor at once
lost its disagreeable character.
In this respect a personal odor resembles a personal touch. Two
intimate touches of the hand, though of precisely similar
physical quality, may in their emotional effects be separated by
an immeasurable interval, in dependence on our attitude toward
the person from whom they proceed.
Personal odor, in order to make its allurement felt, and not to arouse
antipathy, must, in normal persons, have been preceded by conditions which
have inhibited the play of the antisexual instinct. A certain degree of
tumescence must already have been attained. It is even possible, when we
bear in mind the intimate sympathy between the sexual sphere and the nose,
that the olfactory organ needs to have its sensibility modified in a form
receptive to sexual messages, though such an assumption is by no means
necessary. It is when such a faint preliminary degree of tumescence has
been attained, however it may have been attained,--for the methods of
tumescence, as we know, are innumerable,--that a sympathetic personal odor
is enabled to make its appeal. If we analyze the cases in which olfactory
perceptions have proved potent in love, we shall nearly always find that
they have been experienced under circumstances favorable for the
occurrence of tumescence. When this is not the case we may reasonably
suspect the presence of some degree of perversion.
In the oft-quoted case of the Austrian peasant who found that he
was aided in seducing young women by dancing with them and then
wiping their faces with a handkerchief he had kept in his armpit,
we may doubtless regard the preliminary excitement of the dance
as an essential factor in the influence produced.
In the same way, I am acquainted with the ease of a lady not
usually sensitive to simple body odors (though affected by
perfumes and flowers) who on one occasion, when already in a
state of sexual erethism, was highly excited when perceiving the
odor of her lover's axilla.
The same influence of preliminary excitement may be seen in
another instance known to me, that of a gentlemen who when
traveling abroad fell in with three charming young ladies during
a long railway journey. He was conscious of a pleasurable
excitement caused by the prolonged intimacy of the journey, but
this only became definitely sexual when the youngest of the
ladies, stretching before him to look out of the window and
holding on to the rack above, accidentally brought her axilla
into close proximity with his face, whereupon erection was
caused, although he himself regards personal odors, at all events
when emanating from strangers, as indifferent or repulsive.
A medical correspondent, referring to the fact that with many men
(indeed women also) sexual excitement occurs after dancing for a
considerable time, remarks that he considers the odor of the
woman's sweat is here a considerable factor.
The characteristics of olfaction which our investigation has so far
revealed have not, on the whole, been favorable to the influence of
personal odors as a sexual attraction in civilized men.
It is a primitive
sense which had its flowering time before men arose; it is a comparatively
unæsthetic sense; it is a somewhat obtuse sense which among Europeans is
usually incapable of perceiving the odor of the "human flower"--to use
Goethe's phrase--except on very close contact, and on this account, and on
account of the fact that it is a predominantly emotional sense, personal
odors in ordinary social intercourse are less likely to arouse the sexual
instinct than the antisexual instinct. If a certain degree of tumescence
is required before a personal odor can exert an attractive influence, a
powerful personal odor, strong enough to be perceived before any degree of
tumescence is attained, will tend to cause repulsion, and in so doing
tend, consciously or unconsciously, to excite prejudice against personal
odor altogether. This is actually the case in civilization, and most
people, it would appear, view with more or less antipathy the personal
odors of those persons to whom they are not sexually attracted, while
their attitude is neutral in this respect toward the individuals to whom
they are sexually attracted.[51] The following statement by a
correspondent seems to me to express the experience of the majority of men
in this respect: "I do not notice that different people have different
smells. Certain women I have known have been in the habit of using
particular scents, but no associations could be aroused if I were to smell
the same scent now, for I should not identify it. As a boy I was very fond
of scent, and I associate this with my marked sexual proclivities. I like
a woman to use a little scent. It rouses my sexual feelings, but not to
any large extent. I dislike the smell of a woman's vagina." While the last
statement seems to express the feeling of many if not most men, it may be
proper to add that there seems no natural reason why the vulvar odor of a
clean and healthy woman should be other than agreeable to a normal man who
is her lover.
In literature it is the natural odor of women rather than men which
receives attention. We should expect this to be the case since literature
is chiefly produced by men. The question as to whether men or women are
really more apt to be sexually influenced in this way cannot thus be
decided. Among animals, it seems probable, both sexes are alike influenced
by odors, for, while it is usually the male whose sexual regions are
furnished with special scent glands, when such occur, the peculiar odor of
the female during the sexual season is certainly not less efficacious as
an allurement to the male. If we compare the general susceptibility of men
and women to agreeable odors, apart from the question of sexual
allurement, there can be little doubt that it is most marked among women.
As Groos points out, even among children little girls are more interested
in scents than boys, and the investigations of various workers, especially
Garbini, have shown that there is actually a greater power of
discriminating odors among girls than among boys. Marro has gone further,
and in an extended series of observations on girls before and after the
establishment of puberty--which is of considerable interest from the point
of view of the sexual significance of olfaction--he has shown reason to
believe that girls acquire an increased susceptibility to odors when
sexual life begins, although they show no such increased powers as regards
the other senses.[52] On the whole, it would appear that, while women are
not apt to be seriously affected, in the absence of any preliminary
excitation, by crude body odors, they are by no means insusceptible to the
sexual influence of olfactory impressions. It is probable, indeed, that
they are more affected, and more frequently affected, in this way, than
are men.
Edouard de Goncourt, in his novel _Chérie_--the intimate history
of a young girl, founded, he states, on much personal
observation--describes (Chapter LXXXV) the delight with which
sensuous, but chaste young girls often take in strong perfumes.
"Perfume and love," he remarks, "impart delights which are
closely allied." In an earlier chapter (XLIV) he writes of his
heroine at the age of 15: "The intimately happy emotion which the
young girl experienced in reading _Paul et Virginie_
and other
honestly amorous books she sought to make more complete and
intense and penetrating by soaking the book with scent, and the
love-story reached her senses and imagination through pages moist
with liquid perfume."
Carbini (_Archivio per l'Antropologia_, 1896, fasc.
3) in a very
thorough investigation of a large number of children, found that
the earliest osmo-gustative sensations occurred in the fourth
week in girls, the fifth week in boys; the first real and
definite olfactory sensations appeared in the fifteenth month in
girls, in the sixteenth in boys; while experiments on several
hundred children between the ages of 3 and 6 years showed the
girls slightly, but distinctly, superior to the boys. It may, of
course, be argued that these results merely show a somewhat
greater precocity of girls. I have summarized the main
investigations into this question in _Man and Woman_, revised and
enlarged edition, 1904, pp. 134-138. On the whole, they seem to
indicate greater olfactory acuteness on the part of women, but
the evidence is by no means altogether concordant in this sense.
Popular and general scientific opinion is also by no means always
in harmony. Thus, Tardif, in his book on odors in relation to the
sexual instinct, throughout assumes, as a matter of course, that
the sense of smell is most keen in men; while, on the other hand,
I note that in a pamphlet by Mr. Martin Perls, a manufacturing
perfumer, it is stated with equal confidence that
"it is a
well-known fact that ladies have, even without a practice of long
standing, a keener sense of smell than men," and on this account
he employs a staff of young ladies for testing perfumes by smell
in the laboratory by the glazed paper test.
It is sometimes said that the use of strong perfumes by women
indicates a dulled olfactory organ. On the other hand, it is said
that the use of tobacco deadens the sensitiveness of the
masculine nose. Both these statements seem to be without
foundation. The use of a large amount of perfume is rather a
question of taste than a question of sensory acuteness (not to
mention that those who live in an atmosphere of perfume are, of
course, only faintly conscious of it), and the chemist perfumer
in his laboratory surrounded by strong odors can distinguish them
all with great delicacy. As regards tobacco, in Spain the
_cigarreras_ are women and girls who live perpetually in an
atmosphere of tobacco, and Señora Pardo Bazan, who knows them
well, remarks in her novel, _La Tribuna_, which deals with life
in a tobacco factory, that "the acuity of the sense of smell of
the _cigarreras_ is notable, and it would seem that instead of
blunting the nasal membrane the tobacco makes the olfactory
nerves keener."
"It was the same as if I was in a sweet apple garden, from the
sweetness that came to me when the light wind passed over them
and stirred their clothes," a woman is represented as saying
concerning a troop of handsome men in the Irish sagas (_Cuchulain
of Muirthemne_, p. 161). The pleasure and excitement experienced
by a woman in the odor of her lover is usually felt concerning a
vague and mixed odor which may be characteristic, but is not
definitely traceable to any specific bodily sexual odor. The
general odor of the man she loves, one woman states, is highly,
sometimes even overwhelmingly, attractive to her; but the
specific odor of the male sexual organs which she describes as
fishy has no attraction. A man writes that in his relations with
women he has never been able to detect that they were influenced
by the axillary or other specific odors. A woman writes: "To me
any personal odor, as that of perspiration, is very disagreeable,
and the healthy _naked_ human body is very free from any odor.
Fresh perspiration has no disagreeable smell; it is only by
retention in the clothing that it becomes objectionable. The
faint smell of smoke which lingers round men who smoke much is
rather exciting to me, but only when it is _very_
faint. If at
all strong it becomes disagreeable. As most of the men who have
attracted me have been great smokers, there is doubtless a direct
association of ideas. It has only once occurred to me that an
indifferent unpleasant smell became attractive in connection with
some particular person. In this case it was the scent of stale
tobacco, such as comes from the end of a cold cigar or cigarette.
It was, and is now, very disagreeable to me, but, for the time
and in connection with a particular person, it seemed to me more
delightful and exciting than the most delicious perfume. I think,
however, only a very strong attraction could overcome a dislike
of this sort, and I doubt if I could experience such a
twist-round if it had been a personal odor. Stale tobacco, though
nasty, conveys no mentally disagreeable idea. I mean it does not
suggest dirt or unhealthiness."
It is probably significant of the somewhat considerable part
which, in one way or another, odors and perfumes play in the
emotional life of women, that, of the 4 women whose sexual
histories are recorded in Appendix B of vol. iii of these
_Studies_, all are liable to experience sexual effects from
olfactory stimuli, 3 of them from personal odors (though this
fact is not in every case brought out in the histories as
recorded), while of the 8 men not one has considered his
olfactory experiences in this respect as worthy of mention.
The very marked sexual fascination which odor, ass