<\/div>\n\nThe smelliness of you
\nby John Timpane in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania <\/p>\n
You\u2019ve all met him.
\nStanding in line in front of you at the local K-Mart.<\/p>\n
Uncle Gus.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s a large man, large past the point of being able, or willing, to do anything about it. Uncle Gus (not his real name) is wearing a T-shirt with some objectionable slogan on it, plus a pair of Bermuda shorts in an ill-advised plaid.<\/p>\n
Arrayed around Uncle Gus like organ pipes are a group of people, all with rodent faces, all with the look of a shared burden they can\u2019t avoid. Should you glance at them \u2013 you try not to, but should you \u2013 they fire out a glare that says, \u201cIf you do or say a thing about Uncle Gus, we will rip your face off.\u201d<\/p>\n
It takes a minute, but you come to realize why they have that look. They are Uncle Gus\u2019s family. Which means they have to be around him. Which means they constantly have to experience what you are now experiencing, the worst you\u2019ve ever experienced from a human being, Uncle Gus puttin\u2019 it out, whatever it is, but it is unnameable, unmentionable, unprecedented. It makes your face warp, your nose cave, your eyes water, and it\u2019s fillin\u2019 up the whole store.<\/p>\n
Uncle Gus is the stinkiest human being you have ever known.<\/p>\n
Uncle Gus is a metaphor for what you and I are secretly afraid of.<\/p>\n
I, like many of you, live in the hard-showering industrialized West. I therefore am afraid.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m afraid I am \u2026 stinky.<\/p>\n
I hold my breath in elevators. I avoid close face-to-face. I chew gum even in my sleep. I try not to stand too near. I have had entire conversations holding my breath, like this. Few people have ever told me I offend, but the few times they have, it has been atom-bomb devastating.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m in the prime of life and practice the normal, industrialized-West, obsessive-compulsive, acid-bath, seek-and-destroy, scrub-with-steel-wool hygiene we\u2019re all taught to practice from the moment we can talk. I worry constantly. These days, I worry about noneal. That\u2019s the chemical secreted in greater and greater amounts in your sweat after age 40. Yes, that\u2019s right: I\u2019m worried about old man smell.<\/p>\n
But other people must be worried too: the Japanese cosmetics maker Shiseido markets a whole line of anti-old-man-smell products. <\/p>\n
Worry, worry, worry. Everyone has a smell complex. And boy, is there money in it. The national obsession with body odor and bad breath are the godchildren of the advertising juggernaut. The term \u201cB.O.,\u201d standing for \u201cbody odor,\u201d was first used in 1919 ads by makers of the woman\u2019s deodorant Odo-Ro-No. Think of the very name of that product! A cry of horror at the notion one might have a smell \u2013 any smell at all. Odo-Ro-No ads encouraged consumers to do \u201cthe Armhole Odor Test.\u201d<\/p>\n
I just did it.<\/p>\n
Oh my God.<\/p>\n
Horror at the human body and its uncivilizable ways! And the notion of halitosis, or bad breath, was leveraged by the makers of Listerine to the music of millions of dollars: from 1921 to 1927, Listerine sales went from $100,000 to $4 million plus.<\/p>\n
Actually, my armpit wasn\u2019t that bad. Most people\u2019s sweat, fresh sweat, is fine. Kind of nice, a lot of the time. And the rest of you usually smells quite different from your armpit. So much for the Armhole Odor Test.<\/p>\n
These were early examples of \u201cneed creation,\u201d the practice of persuading millions they have a pressing need for something that has never crossed their minds before. But this odor-angst was not totally made up. Odo-Ro-No and Listerine made money because these obsessions already existed, deep in our culture.<\/p>\n
Different cultures have different tolerances for these matters. The Japanese are far and away the most insistently fastidious society anywhere. France, however, isn\u2019t. In the sweltering summer of 1974, I was kickin\u2019 around the streets of Paris, noticing a particular thing about French people. They dressed nice, but . . . but . . . man, was it hot! I was about to enter a bank, when a mesmerizing, miraculous woman in a gauzy summer dress asked me what time it was. As I looked at my watch and tried to remember the French for 1:43, a breeze crossed from her to me, and . . . I just could not believe . . . it had been a few days for her, obviously . . . instead of showers, she just slopped on a different perfume every day. The resulting rank, entangling brew blew my shirt off and threw my shoes after it. <\/p>\n
Americans go too far the other way, of course. I once asked a dermatologist whether we needed to shower daily. \u201cNope,\u201d he said. \u201cSoap\u2019s bad for your skin.\u201d He told me that most folks could go with only light cleaning for days, and no one would notice, and we would be perfectly healthy. He didn\u2019t recommend the once-a-year bath of the medievals, to loosen the crust, but he laughed when he said, \u201cHey, face it: We overdo it.\u201d<\/p>\n
We do overdo. Our sub-rosa neurosis about smell suggests that we are afraid of knowing others and having others know us. Meanwhile, another part of us wants to know others and wants others to know us. A good point of comparison is dogs. Smell is the main way they know the world. Canine eyes aren\u2019t that good \u2013 but then, they don\u2019t need them. Why? Because the nose knows. From miles away. And it asks nobody\u2019s permission. It\u2019s the cub reporter of the body \u2013 it seeks information and brings it on back. Why do dogs greet you the way they do? That very friendly way? Because it tells them what they need to know: whether they know you, where you\u2019ve been the past couple of days, what other animals have been around you, and most important of all, what there is to eat \u2018round here. So, next time you\u2019re a bride, and a friendly pooch ruins the wedding photo by sniffing you, remember: It\u2019s only doing its job.<\/p>\n
Which should remind us that although most dogs aren\u2019t as smart as we are about our worlds, they live in an incredibly intricate world about which we can only guess. Smell helps enrich it. Oliver Sacks, in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, tells of a man whose brain\u2019s smell centers were unusually acute. This is one person who found out what a dog\u2019s life is really like. The problem is, the human brain isn\u2019t built to absorb the world doggie-style. The crash of new information, coming to this poor man on the wind from miles away, bore down on him. He couldn\u2019t handle it. Depression. Mental problems. The doctor helped him, and he got better \u2013 but also he missed that richer way of knowing the world.<\/p>\n
Generally, our noses aren\u2019t as acute as those of doggies. But we have retained a profound reliance on smell. We downplay it in favor of the other senses, but that\u2019s our hang-up, not smell\u2019s. Studies show that human beings sample everything and everybody else nasally all the time. Most of this activity is instantaneous and unconscious, but we\u2019re doing it.<\/p>\n
We don\u2019t need much to go on. Scientists once thought human beings didn\u2019t use pheromones, or smell-cues, with one another. Now we know we do. It\u2019s just that they are very subtle, very tiny amounts, and quite beneath the radar of consciousness. Sure, we can smell another person and really like (or really not like) the result. When single, I routinely walked through the wakes of pretty girls for that purpose. But that\u2019s a voluntary, conscious affair. Turns out that human beings just need the slightest of whiffs to make all sorts of judgments and adjustments. The conscious mind is not consulted. We\u2019re just these homing missiles, jiggering and counterjiggering.<\/p>\n
And you would not believe what we use smell for. We use it to mark genders, for the genders smell different to each other. So do the races. Cavalry officers were as appalled by the smell of an Indian teepee as Indians were by white men\u2019s houses. Malcolm X writes in his Autobiography that he could never get over the strangeness of the way white people\u2019s homes smelled. And here it comes: we use smell to mark class, for there is a large gulf between the antisepsis of the office worker and the frank, raw sweat of the laborer\u2019s body. I fix you by your smell, and I don\u2019t even know it.<\/p>\n
Smell exists right on the border between our genetic, biologic selves and our cultural selves.<\/p>\n
All human beings have at least two lives. One is your voluntary life, the one you control . . . OK, the one you believe you have some hope of controlling. This is the life of social interaction, career, family, choices. In our social lives, we don\u2019t crowd people. We sequester our biologies. When we have to be biological, we leave the table. We cover our mouths when we cough or eat or clear our throats. In this world, smell is not civilized and not polite. Think of your list of \u201cThe Most Humiliating Social Occurrences That Could Ever Happen to Me,\u201d and it is likely that some of the items involve smell. We are not supposed to smell or be smelled. We flee smell and the intimate news it is here to tell us.<\/p>\n
But we all have an involuntary life. You didn\u2019t volunteer to have it; you just do. That nervous system of yours? It represents the nervous systems of billions of other beings, their successes and failures, their ways of knowing the world. It knows a lot more about the world than you do. And it changes much, much more slowly than culture or morals do. In this world, smell is crucial. It tells us tales of gender, origin, social hierarchy, sexual availability, whether that steak has cheese or not. In this world, smell is king. And, just beneath that ol\u2019 conscious radar, you are smellin\u2019 everyone. And you have no control over it, because you don\u2019t even know it.<\/p>\n
In your involuntary, not-conscious life, you crave intimacy, closeness. You crave the body. But social life is based on a tacitly-agreed-on system of pretense. Social life masks the biological. It has to, because biology, never having heard of society, tends to mess things up.<\/p>\n
I began by telling you about Uncle Gus, Number One on my nasal destruction list. I will close by telling you about Number Two, a man named Max (not his real name). Max happened to me two nights before I filed this column. I\u2019m serious. As my punishment, evidently, for writing on this subject, when I got on my train home, Max fell heavily into the seat right in front of me. Max was a tremendously large man. He was a man who had, how shall I put it?, been places. It took a few minutes, but as the train car warmed up, I began to realize the truth about Max. His person told tales of a life lived out of doors and down at heel. His story told itself in tones of vinegar, sulfur, and methane, a tale of the death of self-image, of misfortune and neglect. The train kept warming, and soon Max filled the train car. I sat behind him, my brain centers screaming. I felt like the wildcat in those nature films who gets sprayed by a skunk and starts hitting its nose to stop it from hurting him. Everyone in the car knew Max really deeply and traded looks in the fellowship of suffering.<\/p>\n
I moved to another car, but in a few minutes Max was there, too. In a few minutes, Max was everywhere. He got out at the station, and everywhere he went people\u2019s faces went loose with shock and dismay. Two women looked at each other as if to say, \u201cHow can I stop what\u2019s happening in my nose?\u201d Young men just laughed. Max passed through the station, but even after he left, Max stayed. I had that man in my nose and mouth for hours.<\/p>\n
You and I are neither Uncle Gus nor Max. Yet we live in a social world that teaches us that if we\u2019re not careful, Uncle Gus and Max are what we\u2019ll be. We live perpetually in conflict with the deeply contradictory selves within us, covering up what we\u2019re advertising, seeking what we abjure, flying from what we crave. We can\u2019t solve these dilemmas, but we can reframe the way we think of them. I like the solution suggested in Moira Egan\u2019s poem \u201cLove Stinks.\u201d Her poem ends by seeing the quest for intimacy, dirt and all, as a quest for ultimate reality, a search for the divine. She writes:<\/p>\n
I hate those theologians\u2019 dualities,
\nthe head v. heart, or spirit versus flesh:
\nI\u2019m on a limbic-driven quest for god. He
\nlives, post-coital, sweaty, in the body. <\/p>\n
\nJohn Timpanewrites his column, Sketchy Species, in each issue. He is the Commentary Page Editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer and holds a Ph.D. in English and a Ph.D. in Humanities from Stanford.<\/p>\n
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