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Dear Cory:
What's up with all these men’s fragrances? I mean, don't we have enough air
pollution?
Allergic in Arizona
Dear AIA:
Oh, correspondent, how you call a spade a spade. Cory sometimes shakes his head, pulls his long, golden locks, and despairs of mankind. We are apes in denial. Apes that are in fact better supplied with apocrine scent glands for sexual attraction (armpits, navel, genitals, circumanal region, nipples, around the mouth, lips, outer ears and eyelids) than any other great apes. What richness! Yet people have fallen pathetically for the pitch that their natural attractants are evil, must be removed immediately and replaced by synthetic chemicals with designer labels. This practice is directly correlated to complaints about lack of sex. It’s like scrubbing the paint off the Mona Lisa and complaining that people don’t want to look at it any more.
Let Cory illustrate. Have you noticed how little sexual attention people pay to you when you are completely presentable, perfumed and primped? Then one day you rush out to the Safeway in dirty sweat pants, hair askew, unshowered, unshaven and you are picked up within three minutes over the carrot display. There is a reason for this.
Men with manners do not assume that the perfume (let’s call it what it is; “fragrance” is a marketing term) they wear is pleasing to anyone but their partner or lover, whose olfactory preferences they should know. They use it sparingly and in private, if at all. Cory is frequently assaulted by a toxic miasma of girly perfume on men in elevators and elsewhere. After he catches his breath, he tries gallantly to smile and pertly observes, “I love your marinade.” Gas warfare, he might add, is against the Geneva Convention.
When Cory was a teenager, he had a friend named Jim. When Jim was excited, which he often seemed to be around Cory, a marvelous male smell emanated from him – it was like honey and very, very ripe apples. That, you may be assured, Jim produced himself. If an aroma such as Jim’s could be bottled, Cory would be in favour of spending huge amounts of money on tiny vials of it. Until then, men might shower with scentless soap, let nature do her cunning work, avoid asphyxiating others, and get laid more often.
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