(One young female scientist I met, who had done research with Dr. Pfaus, explained one of these studies to me while we were at a reception in an imposing academic building. She is a charming and well-bred twentysomething who was wearing, for that occasion, a summery batik maxidress. Holding a glass of white wine with slender fingers, her bearing impeccably ladylike, she remarked, “This finding is why farmers are paying people to fist their cows.”)
Women know that they go into something like a trance state during really powerful sex, and this trance state is an encounter with the self on another, higher level. We misunderstand women if we see their interest in romance as being only about the “other”; if a male or female lover can help a woman get to this trance state, that love is not just compelling to her because of the “other”: it is compelling to her because, through this sexual experience, she is awakening and engaging with profoundly important dimensions of her own self.
HUG HER, CUDDLE HER, TAKE HER SLOW DANCING: THE SECRET LIFE OF THE MALE ARMPIT
I think about going through his bureau drawers, pull one open and bring a folded t-shirt to my nose. I can still smell him in so many places, and wonder what it will be like when that, too, is gone.
—Sally Ryder Brady, A Box of Darkness18
When you really listen to what many heterosexual women feel they are missing sexually, you often hear them speak about sexual longing in metaphors involving scent. One woman with whom I spoke, a vibrant Portuguese literature professor in her thirties, spent years in a relationship with a supportive, “safe” man who was perfect for her on paper; but she returned obsessively to the fact that they did not “match” as physical types. She fixated on the sense that there was something about his smell that was wrong for her. “I once read a novel in which the hero said, ‘She perfumes my days.’ I want that; I want to feel that a man ‘perfumes my days’ and that I do his.”
The smell of men has powerful effects on the mood, hormonal levels, and even fertility of heterosexual women. Ivanka Savic of the Carolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, found that when women and gay men inhaled a hormonal component in men’s sweat, a PET brain scan showed lit-up areas around the hypothalamus, suggesting that the female and gay male brains had a sexual rather than an olfactory response to the stimulus.19
Denise Chen, a psychologist at Rice University in Houston, and her colleagues, speculated that if humans do produce and respond to sweat pheromones, then a woman should respond to male “sexual sweat” more than to the control sweat.
Chen and her team asked twenty heterosexual men to stop wearing deodorant and other scented grooming products for several days. The researchers then put pads under the men’s armpits, and wired the men to electrodes, as the men watched pornographic videos. The researchers analyzed the “aroused” male sweat and also analyzed pads collected from under the arms of the same men when they were not sexually aroused.
Then, nineteen heterosexual women smelled the men’s “aroused” and “unaroused” sweat pads, while they themselves underwent brain scans. The women’s brains reacted very differently in response to the “aroused” male sweat.
The “sexual sweat” activated the women’s right orbitofrontal cortex and the right fusiform cortex, but the “unaroused” sweat did nothing for them. These are the brain areas that help us recognize emotions and engage in perception. Both areas are in the right hemisphere, where smell, social response, and emotion are mediated.
Chen concluded that her findings bolster the idea that humans do communicate via subconscious chemical signals.20 To me this finding also suggests that women’s bodies know categorically and uncompromisingly when a man is or is not sexually interested in them, even if everyone in the couple is saying the “right” things. This may have been what my friend, who has a strong sex drive, and whose partner did not “perfume her days,” may have been experiencing: his sexual interest in her was not strong enough for her. This finding suggests that she could not will that relationship to be a success if she had tried to forever. She couldn’t smell enough of his arousal—a scent that would in turn have aroused her.
Specific scents have been found to boost vaginal blood engorgement: cucumbers and Good & Plenty candies both are at the top of vaginal-engorgement-activating scents, according to one study (and both are phallic in shape).21
It is not just men’s arousal levels that women can subconsciously smell. Another study shows that women are attracted to the underarm sweat of men whose DNA is unlike theirs, and repelled by the smell of men whose DNA is too much like theirs. There is an important exception to this preference—when women are pregnant, they prefer the smell of men whose DNA is like theirs; researchers suggest that this finding may be the result of pregnancy being a time when women wish to be near kin.
A study, by Virpi Lummaa and Alexandra Alvergne, “Does the Contraceptive Pill Alter Mate Choice in Humans?,” should give us pause and lead us to take very seriously the impact of the Pill in terms of men’s smell and its effect on female mate selection. “Female and male mate choice preferences in humans both vary according to the menstrual cycle. Women prefer more masculine, symmetrical and genetically unrelated men during ovulation compared with other phases of their cycle, and recent evidence suggests that men prefer ovulating women to others. Such monthly shifts in mate preference have been suggested to bring evolutionary benefits in terms of reproductive success. New evidence is now emerging that taking the oral contraceptive pill might significantly alter both female and male mate choice by removing the mid-cycle change in preferences,” they write.22 This study suggests that when women are on contraceptive pills, they smell men in a different way than they do when they aren’t, because the Pill tricks women’s bodies into believing that they are already pregnant. So while they are “on the Pill”—and hormonally pregnant—but dating, these young women prefer men who smell like their own kin. Then—married—they go off the Pill in order to start their families. Hormonally not pregnant again, they get their normal scent responses back—and the young marriages are suddenly in terrible trouble. The women find themselves to be sexually repelled by their husbands—saying things like, “I can’t stand for him to touch me”—at just the moment when the new couple wishes to conceive. Anecdotally, many therapists say these young wives tell them identical stories: they feel suddenly that they have married the wrong man; specifically, the young wives report that they can’t bear their husbands’ smell.
Not only can women’s bodies tell by scent if men are into them sexually, and if a mate is a good match, but male armpit sweat and its pheromones can also relax women. George Preti, of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, and his colleagues found that male pheromones affect both a woman’s serenity levels and her fertility levels.23 Researchers in the study, reported in the journal Biology of Reproduction, placed pads under the armpits of male subjects. The team collected the sweat on pads from under the armpits of a group of male donors. They then extracted the concentrated chemical compounds from it, masked this compound with a fragrance, and whisked it systematically under the noses of women volunteers. After six hours of exposure, all the women reported feeling more relaxed and less tense.
When women who have long been married say that the romance has gone out of their marriages, they often use the phrase “He never takes me dancing anymore.” An ad for British railway sleeper cars shows an affluent, middle-aged man on one side of the page and his wife on the other. Under the man the caption reads: “Room service. Snoozing. Golf.” Under hers, it reads: “Candlelight dinner. Flirting. Dancing under the stars.” If the hypothetical couple’s weekend away turns out to revert to his side of the wish list at the expense of hers, the marriage will suffer, even though no one clearly sees why. She won’t be able to really relax and get deeply aroused, because she won’t have had the chance to really smell her mate, who has been out on the golf links all day—among the other aspects of the Goddess Array she needs to experience.
For if we tease ou
t this female-romance cliché—“dancing under the stars”—a bit further, the kind of dancing this hypothetical woman misses is not, generally, rock and roll or hip-hop dancing, in which the partners dance at a pheromonal remove from each other. Rather, the feminine romantic image is of some version of a touching couple’s dance with a frontal embrace, such as the waltzing scenes that signal romance in pop culture landmarks such as Gone with the Wind, or Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and Anastasia. Indeed, in many classic love stories, the heroine realizes she is in love with the hero after she has danced with him in this frontal-embrace way—that is, gotten a good long inhalation of his intoxicating pheromones, to a rhythmic melody that is activating her ANS, and secured a sense of his familiar or, better, excitingly unfamiliar, DNA.
“We never cuddle anymore” is another refrain from women in sexually and romantically frustrating marriages; and again, when we tease this out, a cuddle on the couch typically nestles the woman’s head against the man’s shoulder or chest; in bed, a cuddle often positions the woman’s head on the chest of her husband or lover. Female cuddling often means scent inhalation.
What is the unifying element for dancing, cuddling, and hugging, and why are they all vital for heterosexual women? They all have to do with activating the secret life of the male armpit, and its relationship to heterosexual female desire.
People have extraordinarily strong emotions about this. I posted an informal questionnaire about male sweat (hugs, embraces, and dancing) online, and within forty-five minutes received eighty-seven extensive answers, from both women and men. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to tell me about the male armpit.
“When I am stressed and I get a hug from my husband, it calms me down right away but it helps if I get a strong whiff of his scent,” wrote one woman.
“I sleep with my boyfriend’s T-shirt when he is away because I can’t sleep otherwise,” wrote another.
“I left a man who was perfect for me in every way because he didn’t smell right, and it was a tragedy but there was absolutely nothing I could do about it,” wrote a third.
Men, too, were amazed at the effect of this unglamorous signaling system in their armpits. “When it is winter and I don’t get as sweaty, I skip using deodorant and I notice I get far more interest from women,” wrote one man.
George Preti and his team, mentioned above, found that male sweat not only affects women’s levels of calmness and women’s fertility levels.24 That was not all—the women, after sniffing the chemicals in male sweat, would also, though the study did not highlight this, have felt much more readily aroused, for the scientists found surges of luteinizing hormones in their brains—far greater surges than in the nonsniffing control group.
Luteinizing hormone is a key building block of female sexual desire and plays an important role in triggering ovulation. What teachers usually fail to mention to eager teenage girls in eighth-grade sex education is that this hormone is also key to triggering and amplifying the female sex drive. As women approach ovulation, pulses of this hormone increase in size and frequency in the female brain, which is why you are more lustful in mid-cycle. So in the Preti experiment, when women smelled the male sweat extract, they also experienced a surge of the female-sexual-desire hormone.
But if women are away from their men all day and smell their partners mostly when they are not aroused—because both members of the couple are exhausted from work and parenting—she may “hear” him on an intellectual level say “I love you” or even “I want you”; but on a visceral level, she will have a more difficult time feeling it. So many young couples in our culture transition from courtship—when they could spend weekends in bed together, and, fully sated with scent, feel deeply in love—to dual-career work and young parenthood, when they can barely spend twenty minutes in each other’s arms in a forty-eight-hour period. At that point, it is often the women rather than the men who start to feel disenchanted, trapped, and haunted by a sense of the terrible prosaicness of life, a sense that something is missing.
So let us go back to our starting template—the numbers that show such drastically low libido among a third of Western women. The women whose libidos are dropping, whose marriages now seem tedious, and who are feeling that the world is colorless and flat, may believe that this is due to the stresses of adult life and all their responsibilities. But what if the hardworking women in our culture are also neurologically starved of worlds of scent—along with the worlds of touch, gazing, stroking, pleasure, and so on—that their very natures minimally require in order for them to feel connected, excited, hopeful, and “in love”?
Why are vacations so relaxing and so sexualizing for these same overscheduled couples? Why do so many couples who are struggling with infertility become pregnant on vacation? Is it partly because she finally has time to get to know him again—on an olfactory level? Is it because she is getting enough of the arousing and calming scent from him that reminds her that, even if he sometimes repeats his stories, or he sometimes drops his laundry on the floor, or even if his hairline may be receding, on another, entirely animal level, he can make her calm, aroused, and happy?
It is heterosexual women, not men, who are calmed by the opposite sex’s pheromones. So today, if straight men can’t smell women often or closely enough, they may not become as aroused, but this does not stress them. However, if straight women can’t smell men often or closely enough, they are both more sexually apathetic and more stressed. And you recall what stress does in turn to the female libido—further depresses it.
We have an epidemic of infertility in the United States and Western Europe: straight women are not smelling men closely or often enough, perhaps, to boost the levels of luteinizing hormone they require for optimal fertility. Marital counselors tell women and men to talk though their problems; fertility doctors send men into rooms to masturbate and then they inject the semen themselves into the vaginas of women who are suffering from irregular periods or with low fertility levels. Again, if you understand the profound nature of the animality of women, you see that these practices are incomplete. Marital counselors should start by telling men to hug women; to stroke if the women are open to that; to take women, if they are willing, ballroom dancing. Fertility specialists should make sure, before anything else, that women are getting well and regularly cuddled, and brought to orgasm, by their men.
Bob Beale, in ABC Science Online, reported on the Preti study and cited speculation by another member of the research team, Dr. Charles Wysocki, that women may have evolved to have men’s smell trigger their ovulation.25 That is, the smell of a male partner may help to trigger ovulation at the ideal time while making women more relaxed, so that they will be receptive to sex at the right time of the month for them to conceive.
I would have to argue that the phrasing of Dr. Wysocki’s conclusion shows how profoundly even scientists at the cutting edge of sexual-response research are missing something crucial about female desire—including a possibly more accurate reading of the cause and effect in the data—by having unconscious male-centered models of what sex is. In Dr. Wysocki’s conclusion, an otherwise mostly uninterested woman smells a guy, it triggers her ovulation, and then, now that she is fertile, she is also relaxed and “receptive” to his sexual approach. What if this reading is missing her sexual agency? What if she smells him; she gets a surge of luteinizing hormone; she becomes relaxed and aroused. This relaxation and arousal makes her wish actively (not “receptively”) to seek out more sex and orgasm, further smelling her man—women get lots of male armpit scent in missionary-position heterosexual sex. This additional man-smelling in turn regulates her cycle further, thus supporting her continued fertility. In other words, his smell drives her to ovulate, which drives her to seek sex, which leads her to smell him more, which further boosts her fertility. In this reading, which is more aligned with Dr. Pfaus’s more progressive, female-agency-centric view of mammalian desire, males don’t “make females fertile”; males may make females want to have sex, but
it is the female wanting-to-have sex that keeps females optimally fertile. The traditional and somewhat sexist male view of evolutionary biology is that sexy-looking females are fertile females (a hard prospect to apply practically to a lab rat, for instance); but we have to add a dimension from the latest neuroscience: it seems that lustful females who continually choose sexual agency and sexual engagement are the more fertile, and thus the more evolutionarily successful females. It is not, based on this model, how conventionally pretty you are, but how sexually questing and driven you are, as a woman, that will help you optimize the reproduction of your DNA.
One continued problem with really understanding female sexuality in our culture is that all of our language about the vagina positions women in a state of sexual passivity and casts the man in the drama as the sexual pursuer—instead of understanding that the vagina, too, is on a quest. In this model—in my version of the same story and reading of the same data—the woman’s arousal is the center of the narrative. It is not a side effect of the drama, or a momentary carrot on a stick briefly waved about by Mother Nature to allow the central player, the inseminating male, a moment’s handily timed ingress. In this interpretation of the same data, which is a more natural evolutionary interpretation, it is the woman’s needs that drive the sexual quest. In my reading of this data, the vagina is, in evolutionary terms, as many have called it in other contexts, “the Center of the Universe.”
GAZE INTO HER EYES
When Lousada begins a Tantra session, he spends many minutes—perhaps ten; it felt like an eternity to me—face-to-face with his client, gazing directly and searchingly into her eyes. Many of his clients have trouble at first tolerating this gaze, or start laughing, or must look away. But all his clients whom I interviewed—and I myself—sooner or later found this deep exchange of gazing very profound in creating an atmosphere that supported the feminine.