Sexy Saturdays: A Scent for Sore Nostrils

 

Happy Sexy Saturday again, my kiddos! I'm pleased to bring you a second post from my friend Menzies. Hopefully you'll remember his post I Like Pie in which all of my female readers needed a backup set of panties. You can imagine why. If you can't, well, go read. 

I'm so happy he's back to bring you another delicious post. This smartypants kid had become a good friend and I love nothing more than to give him a hard time and challenge his extra large brain. I won't say much more because I think my first intro of him was pretty on the money. Plus? Don't you just want to read already? Enjoy!

Hello again! Can't tell you how flattered I was that Andy saw fit to have me write again, so I'll try not to disappoint.

Like the last time, I have to start with an admission: I have a bad nose. A horrifyingly bad nose. Like, “categorically opposed to working properly” bad. It spends eleven months out of the year clogged, unless I take medication. More maddeningly, it makes me deathly afraid of over-spicing my food whenever I cook for anyone else.

So when I say that my sense of smell is nonetheless extremely important to me when it comes to sex . . . well, you can rest assured I'm not kidding. It's a subtle beastie, to be sure, but it's always there.

Nor am I talking purely out of my ass here, because there is some science underlying what I just said. By this point it's well attested that smell is a much more important sense than we'd been giving it credit for, intricately tied to the way we form memories. Furthermore, it turns out that unless you are wearing zee out-RAGEOUS perfume, or lotion, or some other pleasantly odorous accoutrements, you get used to your own scent pretty quickly. Both of these make sense from an evolutionary perspective: being able to smell everything would render you pretty useless as a hunter.

So it's not surprising that smell is such an important part of sex, and I've definitely gotten lucky there when it comes to my partners. Though I assure you I care very, very deeply about my personal hygiene, I have kind of simple tastes when it comes to soap, shampoo, deodorant and similar products and I tend to reserve perfume for important occasions like dates or interviews. I've apparently also gotten lucky in terms of myself – I can't vouch for this, but apparently I actually smell fairly good most of the time.

As a result, I'm far more acutely aware of the scents on my partners before, during, and after any sexy-time activities. Don't get me wrong, the natural smell of another human body is great on its own – I maintain that a couple hours after showering is optimal for restoration of natural odor – but sometimes, if you're just sleeping beside your girlfriend, the fact that that natural scent is accentuated with hints of pomegranate, or sweet pea, or some fruit I've never heard of and is only found in the most remote parts of the Amazon rainforest, and knowing that that smell is probably sticking to you until you next shower, somehow enhances the experience.

Then there's what happens when you do things other than sleeping with your girlfriend, and amidst all that sound and fury you suddenly realize that smell has changed. A lot. It's no longer woman-plus-pomegranate, or woman-plus-sweet-pea, or what have you – it's suddenly very much woman. Everything that makes that natural smell great is now exponentially more intense, full of pheromones, and if you've been doing it right, at least partly infused with sweat and other bodily fluids. It's the kind of smell that, were you to perceive it without knowing it was related to sex, you'd probably consider horrifying, but in this situation, you can't help but love it. It's hot, it's raunchy, and by God, it is quite the aphrodisiac.

I know I should have a name for it, being a linguist – but I can't even begin to think of a way to put it in English. I resort to euphemisms: “essence,” “perfume,” “scent.” None of them, though, properly signify what it is – that lusty fragrance, that heady balm so unique from person to person, that chaotic, seemingly imperfect, ultimately ambrosial mixture of secretion and production.

Whatever you call it – and I'd love to hear your suggestions – it's certainly a scent for sore nostrils.