CSotD: Scents and Sensibility
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Yeah, I'm back at Rhymes With Orange barely a week later. As I've said before, I could feature this strip three or four times a week and I'd still be holding back.
Today's panel, however, touches on three things: Two that fascinate me and one that infuriates me. I'll try not to let discussion of #3 get out of hand.
The first is women, sexuality and the sense of smell.
A number of years ago, I was listening to a CBC radio show on which they were discussing the fact that Harlequin Romances (a Canadian company, for anyone keeping score at home) was branching out with a more erotic imprint, and the guest was saying that, although romance novels are typically written by a stable of freelance hacks under various female pen names, you could tell which of the books in this new line were, in fact, written by men and which were actually written by women.
The love scenes written by women included references to smell. The ones by men did not.
I already knew that women gave disproportionately high scores for simple personal hygiene, and, in particular, for showering before coming to bed after a day of work or sports. But I had rather assumed it had to do with sharing space for the next eight hours, not quite so specifically the first 20 minutes.
I had also known that women, as Hilary Price suggests here, are apt to keep a sweater or shirt from an absent lover and treasure it for the nostalgic pleasure of its smell, but I had not appreciated the depth of that emotional/sensory connection.
(And let me pause here to say that I love the idea of "romeopathic medicine." In fact, I think when I go to Hilary's open studio next month, I'll bring her a homeopathic cocktail to celebrate the pun — a drop of bourbon in a tumbler of water.)
The second part of this fresh understanding also came from a talkshow on the CBC, on a different day, when the topic was the emotional connection between women and clothing. This fresh understanding had more significance than just learning how to make women better enjoy sleeping with you, because it tied into a basic and profound disconnect between men and women.
Women on this show were talking about important events in their lives and what they were wearing. And not just weddings and other landmark dress-up events, but what they were wearing when their husbands proposed, or on a day when something good or bad happened to them at school, or when they got a piece of very good or quite tragic news.
Some of these memories were of completely unremarkable items of clothing, but the indelible memories were inextricably bound up with them, and the apparent obsession women seem to have with scrap quilts is inexplicable if you don't recognize this connection between memory and clothing.
This made me realize how unfair it is for men to dismiss women's attention to style as vanity and shallowness. Obviously, it can become that, but there is an organic, perceptual difference that needs to be recognized and respected.
I can recall, for example, the green silk dress a high school sweetheart wore to prom, and I remember another girlfriend who, on an evening of dinner and dancing, wore a light blue sheath with some kind of white brocade design. But I promise you, either woman could go into much deeper detail, assuming either woman remembers the evening in question.
However, let me add a monumental caveat by pointing out that my recollections of those two dresses are purely visual memories, based in large part on how beautiful the women looked in them and — wait for it — on how impressed other people must surely have been.
With me, for having such a beautiful woman on my arm.
I can also describe any trophies and ribbons I ever won. And, no, I can't tell you what I was wearing when I was awarded any of them.
Let me here blunt some of that shallow vanity by putting those moments in perspective: In the first case, the prom was not only our last date but the last time I ever saw her. She started dating someone at Buffalo State and that was that. The second girlfriend took up with my roommate within two weeks of the evening I remember. And that was certainly that.
But the moments of beauty were there.
Which leads to Item #3, this advertisement that has been in heavy rotation on both ESPN and the NFL Network:
I find this to be particularly annoying because of the insult to Leslie Gore's breakthrough song of high school feminism and largely because of the hostility towards men, but mostly because, yeah, I think guys have an emotional/sensual attachment to women in the oversized jerseys of our favorite teams.
Those are our jerseys, hanging in our closets, which they wear to breakfast in the morning.
The two of you, alone in the kitchen, cobbling together a breakfast after an evening of utterly spontaneous joy. If the relationship lasts, there may be a toothbrush in the medicine cabinet and a robe in the closet, but on this early, serendipitous, surprising, unplanned, unforgettable date, the jersey will have to do.
And any guy who doesn't admit to later taking a little whiff of the perfume that lingers in that jersey is lying.
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