the sixteenth-century essayist Montaigne wrote that everyone likes the smell of their own excrement, while Erasmus said the same of farts.14 These monuments of sixteenth-century culture did not learn anal repression, as we will see in chapter 3.
Smell is useful in allowing us to swiftly identify and decide whether to approach or avoid everything from food and sexual partners to predators and toxins, promoting the survival of individuals and hence the human race.15 This multifaceted sense shapes our instinct for contact or revulsion, helping forge solid social bonds, training our taste buds, and encouraging procreation to keep the species alive. Far from casting us back to the animality of our earliest ancestors, such intertwined olfactory fields are part of the rich tapestry of what it means to be human. The earliest olfactory exchanges between mother and foetus in the womb from the twelfth week of pregnancy are followed in the first days of life by a powerful bond generated by the irresistible lure of the mother’s nipple. This is in turn followed by a long period of preferential attachment, as children can identify their mothers by smell alone, starting from between two to five, until they are around sixteen.16 This vigorously contradicts the old dogma of the deodorized society some argue we now live in. It also has potential long-term consequences for the dominant note of womanhood it foregrounds. Our experiences as infants ‘could be a sort of imprint that leaves its mark on us for the rest of our lives’.17 Recent experiments have demonstrated that women can detect, identify and memorize smells better than men. There seems to be some mysterious link, as yet unexplained, between our sense of smell and human reproduction.18 Research in this area could shed light on our understanding of the widespread terror caused by the power of women’s bodies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with numerous broadsides against their stench, as chapter 4 will show. Are the sudoriferous glands, which begin producing sweat in puberty, mainly around the nipples, anus, genitalia, groin and armpits, more active in women than in men? The current norm is to deodorize these body parts. This is relatively straightforward, as the substances emitted have no smell of their own. They are, however, very rich in proteins that are ingested by bacteria that then release foul-smelling gases.19 Five centuries ago, it was a very different matter: it was impossible to rid the body of such smells, since water and bathing were considered dangerous. At best, they could be masked by powerful scents.
The eighteenth-century philosopher Diderot held smell to be the ‘most voluptuous’ of the senses. Other Enlightenment philosophers such as Rousseau and Cabanis were of the same opinion.20 Freud’s theories led the ethnologist Yvonne Verdier to research the role of excremental odours in male erotic sensibility. The sociologist Marcel Mauss posited the existence of a relationship between armpit sweat and the notion of personality, with bodily odours offering excellent clues to a potential sexual partner’s suitability.21 The exact mechanisms at work remain a mystery, since no formal scientific proof of the existence of human pheromones has been found. The most commonly accepted theories posit that such mechanisms are necessary to the survival of the species. Pleasant smells suggest excellent health rooted in a strong immune system that puts up a powerful fight against parasites and microbes, making the potential partner – male or female – a good bet. Unpleasant smells, on the other hand, are signs of disease, and therefore of danger and failure to reproduce successfully.22 Binary olfactory signals are connected to our emotions, as we have seen. The neurobiologist Antonio R. Damasio has identified six such ‘primary’ or ‘universal’ emotions: fear, anger, sadness, disgust, surprise and joy. Our emotional range is completed by secondary emotions reflecting well-being or discomfort, calm or stress. In the end, he considers biological regulation to be based on pleasure, connected to the notion of reward, and pain, aligned with punishment.23 Our first olfactory impression is absolutely fundamental, particularly when it comes to falling in love.
Finding the perfect life partner should not be seen as a bolt from the blue, but rather as a brief instant of olfactory ecstasy. The romantic quest for a Prince Charming or Sleeping Beauty takes on a surprising new dimension. We all have our own unique smell, described by scientists as our ‘olfactory fingerprint’. There are currently over seven billion such signature smells on earth. And though we are unaware of it, it is our noses that lead us to the man or woman of our dreams, the Romeo or Juliet who will help us perpetuate our genes and thus protect the future of the species. It is no surprise that all sorts of myths have sprung up to explain the mystery. Plato’s concept of androgyny, taken up centuries later with lasting influence by the humanist philosophers and poets of the Renaissance, explains our constant quest for our twin soul: humans were originally dual beings with two sexes, before being split into two separate entities, both dissatisfied with their lot.
The roots of this myth may well lie somewhere in the biological quest for the ideal partner. Men and women are literally led by the nose to the one bubble of scent that suits them best, by a process of trial and error, illustrated by a series like Sex and the City. The flood of positive emotions that washes over us when we discover someone who smells right is automatically memorized along with their pleasant scent. Coming across the same scent again spontaneously triggers the whole bundle of affective memories in a sort of chain reaction that could be called the ‘madeleine effect’, after the famous scene in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Clever investors have doubtless seen this as a potential money-spinner, which explains why ‘natural’ scents have made such a comeback in perfumes and body-care products for men and women alike. Systematically stripping away our natural odour upsets human sexuality by removing the signals that instinctively guide it. It is an insidious cultural mechanism for controlling sexuality and setting humans apart from the animal kingdom – which can only be done by turning us all into robots or denying the obvious truth that we have a highly developed sense of smell, albeit downplayed by dubious legends. There are a number of other smell-related facts about animals. Did you know, for instance, that the mammal with the keenest sense of smell is not the dog, but the cat? It might have been awkward to admit before science stuck its nose in, because household cats, the most sensuous of all the animals tamed by man, make no attempt to hide their torrid sexuality. That is, when their owners have not had them neutered, supposedly for their own good, but actually in line with an unspoken moral vision of castration that deprives children of a once common erotic apprenticeship.
Smell is also a profoundly social sense, producing binary reactions of bonding or rejection. Each human grouping has its own preferred aromatic field arising in particular from the local cuisine and collective management of smells. Lucienne Roubin’s ethnological fieldwork in the Haut-Verdon region in the south-eastern French Alps in around 1980 provides one example. The local cuisine was dominated by pairings of garlic with onion and thyme with bay leaf for protection against disease and witchcraft. Onion was also associated with virility and parsley with lactation. In the first case, the painful sensation overcome by little boys first encountering the taste of onion was given a positive slant towards the expression of masculinity, indicating how infinitely flexible our sense of smell really is. The ideal life partner has the base note shared by the wider community, the note of their gender, and their own personal ‘smellprint’. Their smell will also vary from season to season. In the summer it is sweatier, in autumn more animal, after cleaning manure from the stables. Every stage of life is saturated with scented messages. The merry month of May is when young swains court their beloved by wearing hawthorn blossom and basil, and break up with them with cypress and thistles. Rosemary expresses the joy of shared attachment. Unpleasant smells are associated with social disapproval: the custom of charivari, or ritual public heckling, at the nuptials of ill-matched couples came with the stench of a donkey carcase being burned. As everywhere, wafts of foul smells heralded the arrival of elements likely to challenge the local social order, particularly strangers, who naturally smell unpleasant.24 There is no need for words to see danger coming: it is inherent in anyone from other parts who eats other things and smells different. In Asia, Westerners are reputed to stink of butter.
In all cultures, smells are of major significance in the relationship between men and the supernatural, the gods, or God. Some three thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks laid the foundations
