On Scented Minipads
Before I invested in a car one of the most harrowing experiences I had to submit to daily was the rush-hour bus or metro. It wasn’t the waiting in line, the hideous crush of humanity, the standing for what seemed like hours that particularly distressed me, it was the smell. There is nothing quite so devastating as the stench of coagulating deodorants. People smelled like rancid chocolate. I especially remember the cumulative shock wave of Old Spice which made my nostrils crumple like newspaper. But that was only the men. The women were in another olfactory dimension entirely. The odor of wilted gardenia was omnipresent. I would stand beside pretty young women who stank like urinal pucks of rosewater, sandalwood and antiseptic. Others smelled like perambulating lemons, acrid, with a hint of Windex lingering about their persons. It was worse in the early mornings when people reeked like corpses doused with the failed discretion of embalming fluid. Now and then there would rise in the air a suspicion of fart fledged with the ethereal plumage of Chanel or Fabergé. That was how I knew these slumped unmoving forms were still alive.
I wonder what it is we are ashamed of. Is Old Spice the child of the New Testament? Is Lady Speed Stick the lineal descendant of Pauline theology? Do all these gels and applications confess to a secret contempt for the flesh as being somehow too primitive, too pagan, too animal, too unruly, too present? We enjoy our bodies too much to give them up. A passionate fling, a pneumatic eiderdown, coffee and oranges in a sunny chair (to quote Wallace Stevens), the long, easy, meditative, peristaltic flex of the bowels—who can deny such experiences are inherently pleasurable? Yet hundreds of years of Presbyterianism are not flung aside with a Belmondo shrug. When everything has been factored out by historical analysis, there remains the guilt. The old resentment of the body continues to rankle and fester but the intransigent love of the body persists with countervailing strength. From this tension, this conflict, the cosmetics industry has always profited.
Today we need no longer splash perfumes about indiscriminately to make up for the lack of sanitary facilities. Everybody in the civilized world can enjoy at least a simple ablution at almost any moment of the day or night. One might think if there ever were a time in which deodorants should appeal to nobody but perverts, it would be right now. Yet the opposite is the case. Could the reason be that as the manifold delights of the flesh become more and more available, the endocrinology of guilt abides with us even more tenaciously. Thus the deodorant explosion. We have bodies but we don’t have bodies. We become our own fragrant Gardens of Eden. We are the resurrected flesh promised by the Book of Revelation and the Koran.
Misanthropic porn? Is there such a thing? Or are we channeling a little Jonathan Swift?
Does his lordship also have a doo-doo obsession by any chance? Inquiring minds want to know.
Dude…TMI
Perhaps we should just stop showering altogether? While we’re at it, let’s get rid of bathroom exhaust fans, toothbrushing (gah!) and waste collection. Throw it out in the streets! Let us extoll the virtues of stink!
This Solway guy is creepy. What a fool.
Roger, you pay for this kind of writing?
Don’t worry, David. Your beautifully written imagery puts the finger on a sign of rottenness in the culture, a portend of disastrous decay no meaner than those in the court of Louis XV
Yikes! Usually we hear the special ones complaining about the unwashed masses. Maybe try therapy – it just seems kind of unfair and bigoted to blame your olfactory neurosis on the Protestants, mkay?
Actually there is a scientific reason humans smell worse today than at anytime in history. Yes, even worse than in the days of the French Revolution…
Man changed his diet. We went from hunter/gatherers to farmers/hunters. The step itself was not that large and the smell did not change much. But the refined flours that became available to make bread that would rise also caused a rise in the stink.
Onward and upward to 1942 and one Norman Borlaug. Inventor of high yield semi-dwarf wheat. A wheat strain that proved to the industrial food complex that you could modify plant DNA and get away with it. Unfortunately for the world the powers that should have been there to protect and serve were alas out having a donut.
See, Wheat Belly by William Davis, MD, A life changing book if you can quit the addiction to wheat.
There is a direct correlation between these epidemics and the introduction of modern wheat into almost everything we a sold at the grocery.
1. Obesity
2. Heart disease
3. Diabetes Millitus 2
4. Celiac
5. Autism and ADHD
6. Schizophrenia
7. Dementia
8. Inflammatory auto-immune disorders (Rheumatoid Athuritus et al)
The list goes on, but suffice it to say that if you are Fat, Sick or nearly DEAD and no matter how hard you exercise or how much you cut calories you just don’t get better. You really need to read that book.
Not an advert and no I am not paid to post. I am in the middle of the process and can tell you from personal experience that it does work.
Those are the sort of “curses” we get when our life expectancy jumps from 60 to 75 and our calories become very easy to come by. Frankly, I prefer it to the alternative.
Pure nard, this article was not. If PJM were mine I would not invite you back.
My grandfather was a WASP of the first order. Heritage going back to the time of the Mayflower.
He once saw me using deodorant and couldn’t believe it. He would never use such “chemicals” on his body.
By the way, he “stank” on many occasions.
This is something better left to the privacy of your own thoughts.
Not everything needs to be shared. Not everything needs to be made public.
There is still the quaint notion of modesty.
I have instructed my daughter that her monthlies are “cleaning the baby house.” The Chinese word for womb translates into “baby house.” Our experience is a celebration of future blessing and present power of fertility. She is healthy and beautiful and has excellent personal hygiene. Herein is normality exemplified: place it alongside your article, then contrast and compare.
Am I correct in assuming that you are homosexual? Gays can’t reproduce, perhaps this is the dark well from whence your article has sprung. Will you next do an article on childbirth?
“Herein is normality exemplified”
Sorry, I strongly dispute that “normality exemplified” can refer to a father waxing poetic about the hygiene of his pubescent daughter’s “baby house”…..
Or assuming that a man who’s sensitive to chemical odors must be homosexual (???).
Why do you assume the poster is a male and a father? I immediately thought the posting was from a mother, and I do see her view of feminine hygiene as normality exemplified.
Granted, her assumption of homosexuality was gratuitous but Solway’s strange fixation on human odors and the masking thereof is just plain creepy.
I believe if a normal mother wanted to make that point, she’d have referred to her own “baby room”, instead of making a public example of her daughter’s. You can believe whatever you like…..
Solway’s reference to over-advertised, in-your-face, industrial-stength lilac-scented minipads was a single example, amongst other non-sexual examples, including deodorants and cheap perfumes.
The message of the article that I heard was a roar against artificial advertising-industry taboos that brainwash people into mindless conformity in the modern era… is that, or is that not, worth stopping your automatic-advertising-industry-programmed shock reaction, to consider?
I too thought ‘Anonymous’ was female. My god-daughter’s mother used a very similar analogy when she was getting her up to speed on the joys of being female…
Orion
“There is nothing quite so devastating as the stench of coagulating deodorants.” Indeed.
Hey ladies and gentlemen, lighten up, stench is stench whether it is synthetic or natural. As with those who would tax and tax when is it enough stench enough?
There are limits. Might “natural law” have precedence here?
To those people who attacked the author- Would you have rather he used foul street language? The article is written at a very high level with some word choices that made me smile. I was glad to understand most of the article without a dictionary. Overall, I was amused.
Yes, high level words, and Lizzie Borden’s axe was a high level alloy steel. Yup, Lizzie Borden, the original whack job.
Lizzie Borden was innocent.
You are right.
Few can write like that, and few can understand such language.
A marvel.
From what I have read over the years, a lot of our perception of our environment/communication with each other—who we instantly take a liking to, who we dislike on first meeting, who we pursue and select as a potential mate–occurs below the conscious level via pheromones i.e. body odors.
So, what does it say that we make all of these efforts to over them up, or eliminate them?
Ugh.
The author has lost his mind. This article is both stupid and disgusting.
Dfuq did I just read?
You sir, have won the thread.
While I enjoyed the author’s skill at employing the language, I have to echo your sentiments.
I’ve done the big city thing, I’ve done the country thing, I’ve even spent time on farms. Given the choice between the fragrance of nature and a LIGHT scent of roses or leather, I’ll take the roses and leather every time. Call it a case of cultural conditioning if you like, but methane and other ‘all-natural’ body odors make my nose recoil.
Orion
An elaborate cityscape of bull offal is still offal.
People wear scents because they don’t want to stink at the end of the day. Women wear scented pads because they don’t want to stink at the end of their cycle.
Odd that he should have such a nose for the artificial scents and managed to miss the corruption and ill-health at the end of the day. (And that’s from someone whose eyes water at the memory of the Engineering crew heading out on liberty– a bottle of Old Spice would last maybe a week.)
It’s as silly as someone ranting against wearing clothes in a building that can have atmospheric controls. It isn’t about denying nature, and it’s not even just about style.
Gnostic movements, like our “sexual revolution,” always entail a revulsion against material reality, against the body. Is sentimentalizing it — or should I say scentamentalizing it? — part of that?
Anonymous (#10) speaks of the womb as a “baby house,” but of course this is a reactionary construct. Sexuality today, as our Enlightened Ones tell us, is completely divorced from reproduction, from birth, from death, from love, from violence, from mystery, from tears, from God, from Satan, from male and female, from yin and yang — from humanity.
Interesting times!
Right. Well done.
Of course, to accept the pheromone idea as true leads one back to our primate ancestors, and to the whole notion that human society—given its physical/social/psychological roots in ancestral troops of monkeys/apes–can be seen as little more than a jumped up collection of such monkeys; we react to the same stimuli and imperatives present in those troops of primates, who lived and evolved for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years in their environments of adaptation and, yet, we wonder why we believe and act as we do, and what our deepest motives might be.
Pretty good Dave. My, didn’t you hit a nerve. LOL
Without a doubt, the weirdest thing I’ve ever read on PJMedia. No mas.
You are a really weird person.
Nice theory you’ve got there Mr. Solway. I’m not sure, though, if your argument is with the addition of scents over and beyond simply being clean.
My conjecture….being clean is sufficient for a while, however, preventive measures are taken by most folks first as a consideration for others and then for self-respect.
Years ago I worked in a five story building that our company completely occupied. There was an elderly executive – Johnny O – who was living alone since his wife had passed years earlier. Apparently he lost interest in his hygiene and his body odor was overwhelmingly noxious. I would get in an empty elevator and know instantly that Johnny O had been in it within the last few minutes. Oh! What some Old Spice may accomplished…
I think Robert Heinlein’s character ‘Friday’ in the novel of the same name put it best:
“…men prefer fragrans feminae to any other aphrodisiac even when they don’t know it – they just don’t like it stale.”
Orion
Old Spice did absolutely nothing to camouflage the intense body odor of a guy I knew in college who worked in the computer labs — it made the resulting mixture of odor worse. One knew the guy was in the office by merely being in the hallway. I doubt it would have helped elderly Johnny O much at all.
Different bodies respond differently.
In some people, this or that scent will intensify the nasty; in others, transmute it to not-that-bad. I suspect this is part of why there are “male” and “female” fragrances, even when the notes or whatever are similar– scents that one way on a man doesn’t have the same result on a woman, broadly speaking.
If you’ve ever tried a perfume you remember loving when your grandmother or aunt or someone wore it, you probably have experienced this. (Unfortunately, even the stuff my mom wears smells “different” on me.)
Huh?
That reminds me of the time I got onto an elevator one time it seems there was an Avon representative on this elevator that had a touch of gas so to disguise the odor she took out some scented spray and proceeded to spray the elevator car with it as she was the only occupant at the time, so the elevator get to the floor I am on and first a drunk stumbles into the elevator car and I was right behind him.
Then when the doors closed the woman from Avon asked if anyone noticed an odor in the car which I’ll agree there was but it was hard to define, but the drunk said “Yeah it smells like somebody just shit a Christmas Tree” to which I had to laugh because he was correct in his smelling ability and I also noticed it!
I think clean smelling people are one of the tremendous advances and advantages of civilized places.
I don’t a bit deodorant or a touch of perfume, as long as it’s low key and lightly applied. Much preferred to people who don’t bathe.
Having spent time in the Middle East, I will heartily agree with you.
Orion
False comparison. The author isn’t talking about the overscented vs. the unbathed.
I thought it was hilarious.
Yes, but then there are some like the guy in the desk next to mine, who used to “refresh” what I supposed he thought of as masculine/sexy men’s cologne by dousing himself anew every couple of hours and, let me tell you, it was pretty bad.
If you thought perfumes and colognes were nauseating, imagine what you might think when you got the full effect without the camo. Your nostrils crumpled like newspaper? At least they didn’t catch fire. I’d rather have the stink of the mask than what it disguises.
I agree with the author. As a college teacher and advisor I could always determine when a young woman in my office was menstuating due to the easily recognized eau de minipad.
Some people have a much better sense of smell than others. The author and I are two of them and we wish the world would try more of the fragrance free varieties of products.
Also can’t stand “air cleaners” and other “room deoderizers”. Some people actually develop respiratory problems in the presence of such fragrances.
I’m allergic to some of the chemicals used in deodorants and perfumes. They make my nose itch and burn, and sometimes I sneeze or get congested or both. Even the ones I’m not allergic to seem way more potent than necessary.
I use some unscented anti-perspirant in each arm pit. If I smell sweaty by 2 PM, tough. I’m a guy. I’m not a metro-sexual. I don’t care.
When I met the young lady who became my wife she was wearing a small dab of Shalimar. I will forever tolerate a woman wearing a tiny dot of it behind each ear.
Is this guy nuts or what? As we say in clinical psychiatry.
What does this stinky rant have to do with anything?
Big Gato, apparently Roger considers this kind of writing worthwhile. I assume Roger is paying some amount of $$ to Solvay, or maybe it is a gratuity or consideration from Roger to Solvay for past services.
This article is disgusting and I am dismayed to see it on PJM. I hope there won’t be similar ones to follow. Gaaack!!!
What the hell channels are on your TV?
What is this dreck?
Too bad you never worked in a hospital, Mr. Solway. If you had, you’d appreciate the “noxious” odors you encounter in other places. You need a good dose of what GI bleeding smells like.
He doesn’t even have to work in a hospital.
Just get admitted to a hospital and stay in a semi-private room with a roommate who has a GI problem. I did. My roommate had bad diarrhea and crapped all over his bed once or twice.
But even that doesn’t hold a candle to the unforgettably “sweet” aroma of the bleeding gut (as if it’s the worst, which of course it’s not, but I was trying not to be too harsh).
Solway needs to go on a camping trip or join the military or get a job where he’s on his feet for 8 hours.
which deodorants should appeal to nobody but perverts, it would be right now.. you have never been in France or any part of Europe for that matter
Used to stink
Actually there is a scientific
Life expectancy 1789 30 years.
Today 80 plus
Yes, we are regressing
I can’t believe you posted this garbage. I thought better of PJM. This guy needs to get a life and stop trying to wax eloquent about stupid garbage. If he is trying to sound intelligent, it didn’t work.
This was like one of those Yahoo articles: “I’m just here for the comments”
Funny you should mention “yahoo”. You need to peruse Book IV of “Gulliver’s Travels” Land of the Houyhnhnms.
Lighten up, David.
P.S. Yoniwear–huh-huh heh-heh!
Aren’t you glad you use Dial Soap? Don’t you wish that everybody did?
I admit, I was wondering what the he** this article could be about, so I did click and read a wee bit.. but…WTH is this all about?? What a waste of space..
Whats amatter PJ Media? You could find anything to print so printed this?
Brilliant. Thank you, Mr. Solway. So many small things around us speak volumes of this dark hour of human “progress.”
I remember when PJM used to be a serious website.
Now it prints stuff like this.
Mr. Solway, please—stick to writing about politics, not your strange obsessions about smell, cleanliness/dirtiness and the human body. You do the former well. You just come across as weird when writing about the latter. Also. . .
1. It really is difficult for people on the subway, or hurrying about during rush hour, to stop and take a shower, or try washing themselves in the nearest public restroom (which aren’t always very clean.) You’ll just have to live with the smell of deoderant. Or stay inside all the time. Given your general outlook, I strongly recommend the latter. Or therapy. The smell of unwashed, undeoderized bodies really is much, much worse—trust me on this.
2. If you’re close enough to a strange woman to be overcome by the aroma of her scented pad—you’re too damned close to her!
Meanwhile, Iran is working on getting nukes, Christians are being persecuted worldwide, we’re looking forward to a crucial presidential election in November, the Catholic Church has filed an historic lawsuit against the Obama administration. . .
But the topic of the hour is Mr. Solway’s oh so sensitive nose, and his horror about the smell of Chanel #5. Or Old Spice. Or humans in general. Or scented female pads. Or females. Ya know, I honestly couldn’t tell exactly what he objected to in that article, except that he thinks human beings don’t smell the way he thinks they should. Or something.
Not to worry, Mr. Solway.
If Iran gets its way, we may not have showers, deoderant, perfume or soap anymore. Just the unadorned, unwashed, honest reek of honest human bodies—woot!
Of course, we’ll have other things to worry about, if that happens.
By the way—is it just me, or did the last paragraph in Mr. Solway’s post make absolutely no sense whatsoever?
(In all fairness, most of the article was pretty senseless—but that last paragraph, with its paradisal exhalations, and assertions that all we really want is a scented mini-pad—that deserves some sort of Bulwer-Lytton award!)
It made sense! I didn’t think so until I read your comment. Actually it made the entire article make sense. the white sepulcher is the little mini pad. the chemical smells are like the smell of death mixed with embalming fluid.
Cool. I have very little sense of smell. I wear deodorant by popular demand not because I can really notice my scent or anyone elses short of a bus full of sweaty athletes after a game or something.
Look again — he said ‘whited sepulchre’ — a phrase that also means hypocrite, so it’s a twofer. But I think you’re likely wasting your time on a woman who sounds like she got stuck at the table of contents of her Great Books reader, smiley faces and all.
Somehow, perhaps out of a deep love for the golden mean, I’m reminded of that letter from Napoleon to Josephine saying, in almost as many words, ‘I’ll be back in two weeks, baby, so stop bathing right now!’ It’s probably necessary to point out to those who believe one size fits all (mainly sad-sounding women schoolteachers disappointed by life, it seems)– Old Boney wasn’t joking.
David, you’ve written a true test of the failure of U.S. education.
It seems most of the commenters don’t get poetry.
A piece very well done indeed!
Actually, re-reading the article–the second-to-last paragraph is pretty senseless, too. I mean, how do you get from St. Paul to Lady Speedstick? Seriously—how do you do that? What sort of mental gymnastics do you have to perform to come up with something like that? And the New Testament is responsible for Old Spice? Okaaaaaaaayyyyyy. . .
(Ancient civilizatons, by the way, loved perfumed oils, unquents and incense and all kinds of stinky things; so I doubt the human love of fragrance can be blamed on the Gospels.)
I thought of writing something full of hysteria, and hyperbole, linking bad modern writing to the fall of the Byzantine Empire and the Council of Nicea—and modern blogsites that publish such stuff (along with such stuff like “Pixar’s absolutely bestest top 10 movies”, and “10 gifts that Bowser will bow-wow for!”); working in, perhaps, some apt Biblical quotations, and, maybe, wrapping the whole thing up with Plato’s Republic, and the religious writings of Peter Abelard—just to show what a serious person, and deep thinker I really am!
/Sarc.
But, I think I’ll just say this—Mr. Solway’s over-sensitive nose can’t be blamed on the Puritans, Western culture or even St. Paul. Neither can his over-the top, more-Swiftian-than-Jonathan-Swift writing. Also, if he got a world filled with honest, unwashed humans, he’d probably be yelling for the return of Lady Speedstick, before the day was out.
I’ve spent time in third world countries, and 2nd & 1st world countries where people don’t wash and don’t use deodorants.
No, thank you.
Perhaps someone has an unusually sensitive (READ: dysfunctional) sense of smell, and does not realize it?
Next, the Odor and Seepage Chronicles, a gentleman’s reply to the Vagina Monologues…
Heavens, the demi-monde of what that old commercial called ‘The Understains, the Ones Almost Too Difficult to Talk About’ is so far off the permissible track it’s hard to know where to start…but what an awesome piece of writing.
You’ve managed to polish a turd. It can be done. Congratulations!
Oh, and those who insist on close textual analysis, stop it. Just let it …er… flow.
Pelaut, this isn’t poetry.
This is prose. Badly written prose. “Riders of the Urple Prose,” melodramatic, over-the-top, too erudite for its own good, “ARRGH, THE FRAGRANCE OF OLD SPICE AFTERSHAVE, LAYERED OVER FARTS AND DEODERANT! THE HORROR, THE HORROR! OH, THE HUMANITY!” prose.
Really, Swift did this sort of thing a lot better. If you want poetry, try Shakespeare—or Keats—or Milton.
Actually, I should have said “OH THE FEMININITY!”, as Solway seems to have a bug up his tuchis about women.
(He also claims to know what all women think, which seems to me to be. . . unlikely, to put it kindly.)
Russia 1965: riding the subway in Moscow or Novosibirsk is an olfactory offense.
Russia 1966: one can ride the subway without holding one’s nose!
The difference? Western soaps and deodorant.
I called it “The Year of Procter and Gamble”.
The year that–at least as far as the olfactory senses were concerned–Russia joined the West.
I doubt they’ll want to go back.
Hmmm-maybe if men could reach orgasm without ejaculating, women wouldn’t need scented mini pads.