John Timpane - The smelliness of you
Sketchy Species 
The smelliness of you
by John Timpane in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
You’ve all met him.
Standing in line in front of you at the local K-Mart.
Uncle Gus.
He’s 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.
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’t avoid. Should you glance at them – you try not to, but should you – they fire out a glare that says, “If you do or say a thing about Uncle Gus, we will rip your face off.”
It takes a minute, but you come to realize why they have that look. They are Uncle Gus’s family. Which means they have to be around him. Which means they constantly have to experience what you are now experiencing, the worst you’ve ever experienced from a human being, Uncle Gus puttin’ it out, whatever it is, but it is unnameable, unmentionable, unprecedented. It makes your face warp, your nose cave, your eyes water, and it’s fillin’ up the whole store.
Uncle Gus is the stinkiest human being you have ever known.
Uncle Gus is a metaphor for what you and I are secretly afraid of.
I, like many of you, live in the hard-showering industrialized West. I therefore am afraid.
I’m afraid I am … stinky.
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.
I’m in the prime of life and practice the normal, industrialized-West, obsessive-compulsive, acid-bath, seek-and-destroy, scrub-with-steel-wool hygiene we’re all taught to practice from the moment we can talk. I worry constantly. These days, I worry about noneal. That’s the chemical secreted in greater and greater amounts in your sweat after age 40. Yes, that’s right: I’m worried about old man smell.
But other people must be worried too: the Japanese cosmetics maker Shiseido markets a whole line of anti-old-man-smell products.
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 “B.O.,” standing for “body odor,” was first used in 1919 ads by makers of the woman’s deodorant Odo-Ro-No. Think of the very name of that product! A cry of horror at the notion one might have a smell – any smell at all. Odo-Ro-No ads encouraged consumers to do “the Armhole Odor Test.”
I just did it.
Oh my God.
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.
Actually, my armpit wasn’t that bad. Most people’s 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.
These were early examples of “need creation,” 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.
Different cultures have different tolerances for these matters. The Japanese are far and away the most insistently fastidious society anywhere. France, however, isn’t. In the sweltering summer of 1974, I was kickin’ 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.
Americans go too far the other way, of course. I once asked a dermatologist whether we needed to shower daily. “Nope,” he said. “Soap’s bad for your skin.” 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’t recommend the once-a-year bath of the medievals, to loosen the crust, but he laughed when he said, “Hey, face it: We overdo it.”
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’t that good – but then, they don’t need them. Why? Because the nose knows. From miles away. And it asks nobody’s permission. It’s the cub reporter of the body – 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’ve been the past couple of days, what other animals have been around you, and most important of all, what there is to eat ‘round here. So, next time you’re a bride, and a friendly pooch ruins the wedding photo by sniffing you, remember: It’s only doing its job.
Which should remind us that although most dogs aren’t 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’s smell centers were unusually acute. This is one person who found out what a dog’s life is really like. The problem is, the human brain isn’t 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’t handle it. Depression. Mental problems. The doctor helped him, and he got better – but also he missed that richer way of knowing the world.
Generally, our noses aren’t 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’s our hang-up, not smell’s. Studies show that human beings sample everything and everybody else nasally all the time. Most of this activity is instantaneous and unconscious, but we’re doing it.
We don’t need much to go on. Scientists once thought human beings didn’t use pheromones, or smell-cues, with one another. Now we know we do. It’s 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’s 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’re just these homing missiles, jiggering and counterjiggering.
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’s houses. Malcolm X writes in his Autobiography that he could never get over the strangeness of the way white people’s 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’s body. I fix you by your smell, and I don’t even know it.
Smell exists right on the border between our genetic, biologic selves and our cultural selves.
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’t 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 “The Most Humiliating Social Occurrences That Could Ever Happen to Me,” 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.
But we all have an involuntary life. You didn’t 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’ conscious radar, you are smellin’ everyone. And you have no control over it, because you don’t even know it.
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.
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’m 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.
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’s faces went loose with shock and dismay. Two women looked at each other as if to say, “How can I stop what’s happening in my nose?” 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.
You and I are neither Uncle Gus nor Max. Yet we live in a social world that teaches us that if we’re not careful, Uncle Gus and Max are what we’ll be. We live perpetually in conflict with the deeply contradictory selves within us, covering up what we’re advertising, seeking what we abjure, flying from what we crave. We can’t solve these dilemmas, but we can reframe the way we think of them. I like the solution suggested in Moira Egan’s poem “Love Stinks.” 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:
I hate those theologians’ dualities,
the head v. heart, or spirit versus flesh:
I’m on a limbic-driven quest for god. He
lives, post-coital, sweaty, in the body.
John 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.
The smelliness of you
by John Timpane in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
You’ve all met him.
Standing in line in front of you at the local K-Mart.
Uncle Gus.
He’s 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.
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’t avoid. Should you glance at them – you try not to, but should you – they fire out a glare that says, “If you do or say a thing about Uncle Gus, we will rip your face off.”
It takes a minute, but you come to realize why they have that look. They are Uncle Gus’s family. Which means they have to be around him. Which means they constantly have to experience what you are now experiencing, the worst you’ve ever experienced from a human being, Uncle Gus puttin’ it out, whatever it is, but it is unnameable, unmentionable, unprecedented. It makes your face warp, your nose cave, your eyes water, and it’s fillin’ up the whole store.
Uncle Gus is the stinkiest human being you have ever known.
Uncle Gus is a metaphor for what you and I are secretly afraid of.
I, like many of you, live in the hard-showering industrialized West. I therefore am afraid.
I’m afraid I am … stinky.
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.
I’m in the prime of life and practice the normal, industrialized-West, obsessive-compulsive, acid-bath, seek-and-destroy, scrub-with-steel-wool hygiene we’re all taught to practice from the moment we can talk. I worry constantly. These days, I worry about noneal. That’s the chemical secreted in greater and greater amounts in your sweat after age 40. Yes, that’s right: I’m worried about old man smell.
But other people must be worried too: the Japanese cosmetics maker Shiseido markets a whole line of anti-old-man-smell products.
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 “B.O.,” standing for “body odor,” was first used in 1919 ads by makers of the woman’s deodorant Odo-Ro-No. Think of the very name of that product! A cry of horror at the notion one might have a smell – any smell at all. Odo-Ro-No ads encouraged consumers to do “the Armhole Odor Test.”
I just did it.
Oh my God.
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.
Actually, my armpit wasn’t that bad. Most people’s 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.
These were early examples of “need creation,” 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.
Different cultures have different tolerances for these matters. The Japanese are far and away the most insistently fastidious society anywhere. France, however, isn’t. In the sweltering summer of 1974, I was kickin’ 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.
Americans go too far the other way, of course. I once asked a dermatologist whether we needed to shower daily. “Nope,” he said. “Soap’s bad for your skin.” 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’t recommend the once-a-year bath of the medievals, to loosen the crust, but he laughed when he said, “Hey, face it: We overdo it.”
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’t that good – but then, they don’t need them. Why? Because the nose knows. From miles away. And it asks nobody’s permission. It’s the cub reporter of the body – 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’ve been the past couple of days, what other animals have been around you, and most important of all, what there is to eat ‘round here. So, next time you’re a bride, and a friendly pooch ruins the wedding photo by sniffing you, remember: It’s only doing its job.
Which should remind us that although most dogs aren’t 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’s smell centers were unusually acute. This is one person who found out what a dog’s life is really like. The problem is, the human brain isn’t 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’t handle it. Depression. Mental problems. The doctor helped him, and he got better – but also he missed that richer way of knowing the world.
Generally, our noses aren’t 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’s our hang-up, not smell’s. Studies show that human beings sample everything and everybody else nasally all the time. Most of this activity is instantaneous and unconscious, but we’re doing it.
We don’t need much to go on. Scientists once thought human beings didn’t use pheromones, or smell-cues, with one another. Now we know we do. It’s 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’s 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’re just these homing missiles, jiggering and counterjiggering.
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’s houses. Malcolm X writes in his Autobiography that he could never get over the strangeness of the way white people’s 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’s body. I fix you by your smell, and I don’t even know it.
Smell exists right on the border between our genetic, biologic selves and our cultural selves.
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’t 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 “The Most Humiliating Social Occurrences That Could Ever Happen to Me,” 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.
But we all have an involuntary life. You didn’t 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’ conscious radar, you are smellin’ everyone. And you have no control over it, because you don’t even know it.
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.
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’m 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.
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’s faces went loose with shock and dismay. Two women looked at each other as if to say, “How can I stop what’s happening in my nose?” 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.
You and I are neither Uncle Gus nor Max. Yet we live in a social world that teaches us that if we’re not careful, Uncle Gus and Max are what we’ll be. We live perpetually in conflict with the deeply contradictory selves within us, covering up what we’re advertising, seeking what we abjure, flying from what we crave. We can’t solve these dilemmas, but we can reframe the way we think of them. I like the solution suggested in Moira Egan’s poem “Love Stinks.” 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:
I hate those theologians’ dualities,
the head v. heart, or spirit versus flesh:
I’m on a limbic-driven quest for god. He
lives, post-coital, sweaty, in the body.
John 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.