Winter Storm! Musk! Ocean View! Mountain Range! Bear Glove….
I Hate the Smell of Health. In which we discuss tantalizing scents and sexy pheromones. Listen to hear our thoughts on how the orgasmic olfactory system contributes to what we find attractive. Smell ya later…
We are all able-bodied, cisgendered white women. We know our background and experiences only cover a percentage of those around us which is why we want to supplement this with guest speakers, research, and you. If you have opinions and experiences you’d like to share we would love to hear it! If, however, you just want to spew hate at us then we can’t stop you but instead we invite you to suck our collective clitorises. Hater. This podcast also contains mature sexual themes and swearing. No, clitoris isn’t a swear word.
Smell References
- Ilana’s in depth masturbation ritual
- Pure Romance’s Basic Instinct Pheromone Perfume #NotAnAd
- Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari
- Please take this book with a grain of salt. Aziz Ansari is an understandably controversial figure but he basically acts as the conduit for the more interesting and substantial research of Eric Klinenberg, who didn’t become an internet scandal.
- Sissel’s textbook from her Biology of Sex college class
- How thirsty are you? Better known as Period tracker apps
Maisie‘s Comprehensive Smell Notes!
Pheromones
Do Pheromones Play a Role in Our Sex Lives?
The term “pheromone” itself came about in 1959
Scientific American | c.2012
Odors given off by the breasts of breast-feeding women, for example, can render childless females downright randy—although a particular chemical messenger remains unidentified. H.H.U.’s Pause, meanwhile, has demonstrated that humans can sense alarm scents in anxious or fearful people’s perspiration. Yet more studies with sweat have
explored the strongest isolated candidate so far for a human pheromone, known as androstadienone, which derives from the male hormone testosterone. The presence of this compound has been reported to make women feel more relaxed.
Whether or not pheromones initially affect sexual attraction, other research has indicated that humans might be using a different set of subtle smell cues to help select our mates. Variation in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), an important set of immune
system genes, imbues each of us with a unique “odorprint,” like a fingerprint. “With the exception of identical twins, no two individuals are likely to have the same odorprint,” Wysocki says. In nature, the sexual union of unlike MHCs yields offspring with more diverse and thus more robust immune systems. Instinct may also guide us in this manner: Previous research has revealed that human females preferred the musk of sweaty T-shirts worn by men with suitably different MHC genes.
Evidently, the complex cloud of aromas we emit needs a lot more parsing before science closes the book on pheromones. The olfactory cues of many insects remain better understood than our possible covert realm of social and sexual chemistry. “The real problem,” Wyatt says, “is simply a lack of knowledge so far as humans are concerned.”
Wysocki agrees: “There’s no good literature in the biomedical field to support that sexual-attractant pheromones exist,” he says. “But that is not to say they aren’t out there.
Do human pheromones actually exist?
Martha McClintock, a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Chicago in Illinois who is widely credited with (and sometimes criticized for) elevating AND and EST (compounds believed to be male and female pheromones) to pheromone fame, along with the heavily contested idea that women living together will sync their menstrual cycles, says the findings only really negate an overly simplified view of AND and EST having an almost mystical ability to attract partners. She still thinks the compounds can affect behavior—just in a much more nuanced way than most people think. Her most recent research, for example, has examined how inhaling AND, perhaps from another person’s sweat, might influence someone’s emotions. “There’s no doubt that this compound, even in tiny amounts, affects how the brain functions,” she says.
Science Mag | c. 2017
Sex differences in response to physical and social factors involved in human mate selection: The importance of smell for women
A survey study examining the relative importance of various social and physical traits in heterosexual attraction was conducted. Data from 198 male and female heterosexual college students revealed that women ranked body odor as more important for attraction than “looks” or any social factor except “pleasantness.” Moreover, in contrast to response to fragrance use, liking someone’s natural body odor was the most influential olfactory variable for sexual interest for both men and women. Men rated a woman’s good looks as most desirable and as more important than any other factor except pleasantness. Sex differences in the relative ranking of several social factors were consistent with prior research.
Science Direct | c. 2004
Mate Selection
Sexual imprinting in human mate choice
Animal and human studies have shown that individuals choose mates partly on the basis of similarity, a tendency referred to as homogamy. Several authors have suggested that a specific innate recognition mechanism, phenotypic matching, allows the organism to detect similar others by their resemblance to itself. However, several objections have been raised to this theory on both empirical and theoretical grounds. Here, we report that homogamy in humans is attained partly by sexual imprinting on the opposite–sex parent during childhood. We hypothesized that children fashion a mental model of their opposite–sex parent’s phenotype that is used as a template for acquiring mates. To disentangle the effects of phenotypic matching and sexual imprinting, adopted daughters and their rearing families were examined. Judges found significant resemblance on facial traits between daughter’s husband and her adoptive father. Furthermore, this effect may be modified by the quality of the father–daughter relationship during childhood. Daughters who received more emotional support from their adoptive father were more likely to choose mates similar to the father than those whose father provided a less positive emotional atmosphere.
The Royal Society | c. 2004
Resources, Attractiveness, Family Commitment; Reproductive Decisions in Human Mate Choice
According to recent evolutionary theory, males and females have been selected for different kinds of mate preferences as behavioral adaptations in our ancestral past. These psychological algorithms, however, are open to ecological/cultural changes in the contemporary societies and, as a consequence, there are permanent tradeoffs between the possible behavioral outputs in mate choice. Using 1000 lonely heart advertisements, we made an attempt to provide a detailed analysis of traits males and females offer and demand in the ‘bargaining’ of reproductive values. Striking differences between the sexes have been found in many of the 42 measured traits associated with physical attractiveness, financial condition, occupational status, domestic virtues, length of relationship, and marital status. We have revealed not only that females were more likely than males to prefer resources in mates, and that females offering cues of physical attractiveness made higher demands than those who did not, but the better physical conditions the females offered, the greater the financial and occupational status they required in potential mates. Similarly, males increased their reproductive success through choosing females of greatest reproductive value: the more resources they had, the greater the demands they made about the potential partner’s physical attractiveness. Surprisingly, women valued traits associated with family commitment of potential partners more than cues of resources, which is regarded as an adaptive answer to a particular cultural condition. A remarkable trade-off in males between direct and indirect methods of paternal investment has been found; the fewer resources they had, the more traits indicating domestic virtue they offered. Contrary to cultural powerless hypothesis, women with higher status valued resources in mates even more than lower-ranked women. Males seeking short-term mates demanded physical attractiveness more, and female seeking short-term mates preferred mates with many resources, compared with those pursuing long-term mating. In the context of long-term mating, both sexes placed a greater emphasis on cues of family commitment rather than on those of resources and physical condition. Finally, it was found that as both males and, surprisingly, females age, they prefer relatively younger mates than themselves.
Wiley Online Library | c. 2010
Sexual Strategies Theory: An evolutionary perspective on human mating
Proposes a contextual-evolutionary theory of human mating strategies. Both men and women are hypothesized to have evolved distinct psychological mechanisms that underlie short-term and long-term strategies. Men and women confront different adaptive problems in short-term as opposed to long-term mating contexts. Consequently, different mate preferences become activated from their strategic repertoires. Nine key hypotheses and 22 predictions from Sexual Strategies Theory are outlined and tested empirically. Adaptive problems sensitive to context include sexual accessibility, fertility assessment, commitment seeking and avoidance, immediate and enduring resource procurement, paternity certainty, assessment of mate value, and parental investment. Discussion summarizes 6 additional sources of behavioral data, outlines adaptive problems common to both sexes, and suggests additional contexts likely to cause shifts in mating strategy.
APA PsychNET | c.1993
Mate choice turns cognitive
Evolutionary psychology has revolutionized research on human mate choice and sexual attraction in recent years, combining a rigorous Darwinian framework based on sexual selection theory with a loosely cognitivist orientation to task analysis and mechanism modelling. This hard Darwinian, soft computational approach has been most successful at revealing the adaptive logic behind physical beauty, demonstrating that many sexual cues computed from face and body shape are not arbitrary, but function as reliable indicators of phenotypic and genetic quality. The same approach could be extended from physical to psychological cues if evolutionary psychology built stronger ties with personality psychology, psychometrics and behavioral genetics.
ScienceDirect | c. 1998
Thoughts & Conclusions
This is a very informal, very brief, internet database-based meta-analysis of heterosexual human sexual attraction, for the purpose of mating and producing viable offspring.
Pheromones as advertised by the media probably don’t exist like that in reality, but there is research to support that olfactory chemical signaling does play a part in sexual attraction. Females typically select males because they have to invest more in the offspring and thus they have more to lose than the male. This might be why women react more to male scent, vs men reacting more to female appearance, as females need to be sure of more factors while males typically just want a healthy fertile female.
Besides chemical signaling and genetic drivers (for more genetically diverse offspring instead of inbreeding), in modern society there are other factors (epigenetic or unconscious ones) that also drive mate selection, especially with modern parenting and marriage models, and certain societal/cultural restrictions e.g. religion, ethnicity, politics. NB Freudian theory supported by research showing opposite-gendered parent provides model for child’s spouse’s appearance.
Traits in short-term sexual partners vs long-term are different. Olfactory cues may play more of a part in short-term attraction while personality traits indicate better suitability for long-term partnership.
Maisie