Smelling Others
click to read
part of
Design Interactions, RCA Degree Show
Royal College of Art, London, June 2007
following links within the coverage, you'll read of bees' nasal acuity, choosing partners based on genetic suitability (whatever this is going to mean), and paying attention to the rise of GSA/genetic sexual attraction as a consequence of reproduction techniques such as infertility treatment and genetic screening.
Some of this information overlaps with
.... Research that has demonstrated (2001 article by Alison Motluk) that women taking the contraceptive pill decrease their ability to detect odours, preferring genes similar to their own, and eventually choose a mate who is not genetic-suitable.
Tim Jacob briefly records overlapping research by Martha McClintock on women detecting male immunotype by smell, here.
Susana Soares' Sniffing Others developed from her previous exhibit Genetic Trace, postulating that we can have, and use, tools to collect genetic material, detect one's genetic family, thus avoiding "wicked relationships" while also addressing issues specific to Donor Offspring (from donor eggs or sperm).
The collection of genetic material could be extended to physical contact like handshakes or kisses. While touching the hand of the other person you would use your "brushy" nails to scrap some genetic material from his or her palm. Similarly women facial hair would finally be useful because they would allow you to grab genetic information (saliva or dead cells containing DNA) after a kiss. Soares
I like the idea of growing bee whisker antennae on human eyebrows, acting as additional sensors.
Why not? Women already wear false eyelashes. One can't move through a department store cosmetics area without being told you can receive a free eyebrows consultation and fix-up (at least in Los Angeles).
People can get back to fairy roots!
My informal research (begun in the 1960's due to circumstances of who I grew up with and who came through our home) shows that many hormone-changing birth controls for women not only affect the woman's sense of smell (thus her accurate sniffing out of a proper mate) but also makes her body think she is already pregnant.
When this happens the woman's system says, "Making baby, make nest, make nest, make nest!" This is different than being on the prowl with natural hormones that say, "Mmmmmmm, sniff, sniff, are you the one? Are you the one? Are you the one who makes my blood sing?"
I would change jimi hendrix's lyrics from "Wild Thing you make my heart. sing. You make my everything, Wild Thing, I think you move me ... but I want to know for sure ...."
to
Wild Thing you make my blood sing, you make my hormones sing ... I think I love you.
Enjoy the links!
Another thing about hormonal birth controls is the small print side effects lists: in addition to helping skinny girls have bigger breasts and helping some women lessen their zits, the 50+ side effects of hormonal birth controls include jaundice, nausea (prolonged morning sickness), changes in smell and taste, and ... death*. mmmmmm that'll put zip in your prowl.
* maybe every breath we ingest includes the disclaimer up to and including death.
When Margaret Sanger correlated poverty with unwanted pregnancies and early maternal deaths, her research took her to the development of modern day birth control. There was resistance. Her work was taken over by a consortium of men from around the world who changed her work (with end results that do not benefit women's long and short-term health). Sanger succinctly stated that the end results were absolutely not what she had worked towards and developed.
The latest advertisements for hormonal birth-controls show women in glee over having to not bleed for as many days now. Perhaps this helps not-reveal evidence that women do bleed more when exposed to toxicities, externally and internally (including side effect symptoms of medications; agricultural, pesticide, hospital and lab exposures, bleach in tampons, etc.).
Instead of women's external blood, the blood we get to see outside of bodies can come from war. #evolution ?
I know that many women, and men, want to be sexually active without human progeny the end result. I know that many men do not like wearing condoms. I know that women's birth controls insert metals or hormones; metal into areas that we know metal should not be allowed to stay and irritate; ingested or inserted hormones that change blood, body, sensing and thinking.
We'll figure it out. Or, maybe we won't.
Illustration: Continuity Lura Astor
Whisker nails for collection of DNA data: Susana Soares
I love Lyall Watson's Jacobson's Organ!
Don't worry, you have one, and you and you and I ... we play them marvelously ... lovely smell music.
Published in 2000, Jacobson's Organ: and the Remarkable Nature of Smell from another interdisciplinarian, is a delight to read.
We think because we smelled ~ Lyall Watson
Smell is governed more by instinct than intellect, moving through our lower brain while other senses take a different freeway, transmitting via one's upper brain.
Dr. Watson passed in June of 2008 at the age of 69. He answered many of the questions I have begun to raise on this site.
First Smell
In his commentary on Patrick Suskind's book Perfume I found kindred perspectives. On people's surprise that the main character, orphan turned murderer, Grenouille, has powers of extreme smell receptivity, Watson says, "He produces all the evidence of what we call 'second sight' by the exercise of what we might instead call 'first smell'.
yes!
And, in my opinion, importantly Watson writes
"I believe that where Perfume ultimately fails is in its emphasis on the dangerous savagery inherent in the sense of smell Suskind lingers on the details of fragrant, hapless maidens stalked by an obsessive maniac who sniffs out his prey, instead of exploring everyone else’s untouched potential. This is a little disheartening. It really is time we stopped denigrating the power and influence of smell in all our lives. And yet, smell has been culturally suppressed for so long that one has to wonder. Perhaps heightened olfactory consciousness really would be dangerous to the established social order. Think what we could do with it!"
To that I respond, more heartening, lifely ... fun and funny things.
Lyall Watson addresses smell's effect on our hormones, which dovetails with earlier posts here addressing some precarious side effects of birth controls, especially in relation to smelling and truth in mating.
"We know that the odour of a strange male’s urine lowers the level of pituitary hormones in pregnant female mice and results in miscarriages. It has been shown that strange male urine can even shift the hormonal balance so far that female hamsters never become pregnant at all. And the same results in rodents have been produced by androgen-rich human urine. But no one seems to be looking at the possible role of smell on the fertility of women who work, perhaps as cleaners, n surroundings where they may be exposed to the urinary odours of unfamiliar men.
We should worry about such things. They represent real risks to any woman who is both pregnant and has an intact Jacobson’s Organ. An informal survey among my own friends suggests that young wives do often have difficulty conceiving for the first time when living in the home of their husband’s family, surrounded by the odours of brothers and fathers-in-law. They often fall pregnant within months of finding a home of their own."
I remain vividly aware of scent and color.
Watson, ".... I believe that there may be still other ways of olfactory knowing. These involve synesthesia, not taking away a sense and allowing others to compensate for the loss, but adding one sense to another in ways that reinforce them both."
A bit of the organ's historical context and lore:
"This elusive feature is the Organ of Jacobson, named after the sharp-eyed Danish anatomist who discovered it nearly two centuries ago. It is easy to miss. The external evidence consists simply of a pair of tiny pits, one on either side of the nasal septum, a centimeter or two above every human nostril. But the fact that it does exist changes everything.
Far Smell
1780, an obscure civil servant on Ile de France (now Mauritius) wrote to his Minister of Marine and announced that he had discovered a way of detecting ships while they were still below the horizon. He called it nauscopie, and describe it as ‘anticipating by means of smell’, the olfactory equivalent of ‘far sight’, a sort of ‘far smell’. Unfortunately we know no more details about his technique, but history records that it enabled him to win a great deal of money in wagers."
There is so much more in the rich books he has left us; mine them.
For now, I leave you with this:
"I don’t believe we have even begun to come to terms with our sense of wonder. We still have a lot to learn, particularly from those parts of the sense housed in the rhinencephalon the old ‘smell brain’.
Mysteries abound there, and reveal themselves only when we have the courage and the imagination to ask the proper questions.
Jean Jacques Rousseau says,
The sense of smell is the sense of imagination.
It greatly disturbs the brain.
Indeed, and it still does."
Images: Circle Fumes/Woman/Wind/Under Beauty/DNA Egg Lura Astor Art
This smell abstract follows up my earlier post Nothing in Nature Abstains
Published in 2001, it addresses rhinomanometric and olfactometric outcomes of oral contraception. I believe this affects men and women, as cross research reveals.
Care and concern in developing safe, effective birth "control" is required, for as a culture, we are affecting base responses to socio-sexual cues, recreation, procreation and care of progeny. Perhaps going back to basics is required. Investigative pharmacognosy research into native plant uses, uses by midwives prior to witch accusations, and B.C.E.; and investigation into surviving oral and written information can help adjust current research to homeostatic balance.
In 1996 I edited an obstetrical/gynecological paper for publication in JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association, for a doctor concerned with radical increase in bleeding with the variety of hormonal introductions into women's systems. The newest forms of birth control that stop, or radically reduce, external bleeding is the other extreme of the range. A sane balance is needed. Balance between body and health, plant wisdom and technology. I request going back to basics. Clues to start: wild yam, quinine ...
Personally, I frame this within the sense of smell, as this is key way of moving through life, consciously and unconsciously.
Affecting the senses is power. If you believe it is a mild side affect that women dull their sense of smell (see article) hormonally, imagine living with a cold or allergy that takes away all your pleasure of eating any of your favorite dishes. Study anosmia.
tagline from 1960's ad campaign It's not nice to fool Mother Nature.
There is always a price.
Another sub-cultural extreme is using abortion as birth control. As a recent guest lecturer at Chapman University, Santa Maria campus, California, I mentioned that abortion affects men as well as women, extrapolating the numerous ways, to rapt attention. This was delivered to a class within the sociology department, on cultural movements of the 1960's and their relevance today.
Smell is intelligence.
The new birth control degenderizing of women is dangerous. Natural cycles of lust, recreation, procreation and just plain creation are messed with when we fear the women's internal bloods so much we don't want the externalization. Such sanitization as we spill others' blood onto the earth for such stupid, greedy non-reasons is officially out of balance.
Numerous hormonal birth controls have women thinking they are pregnant all the time, struggling with 50-plus side effects, up to and including death. No wonder the women then need and want to nest, even if prematurely, with that particular man. Rather than enjoying her sexual well-being, the body continuously says, "baby coming, make nest, baby coming, make nest". And, the sense of smell changes.
We can categorize time in calendars that disregard lunar cycles and circadian rhythms at a cost. It is documented that Daylight Saving Time causes havoc, including sleep disturbances. Sleep Study institutes reveal sleep deprivation to be a main cause in many "accidents" including major oil spills on the oceans.
Nothing In Nature Abstains
One can call something not sex, can call it something else, can term anal sex, oral sex, armpit sex, etcetera, as forms of abstinence, but again, at a cost. Saying something is not sexual does not make it so. Additionally, this remove diminishes aspects of foreplay and carress, and ... the relational.
You can say 2 plus 2 is 5, but, is it?To mother earth may all your sexy little beings get better and better at love and loving.
From whence all came Wu Wei
re-member
the male
the female
Smelling Others
