Men Can Smell Concupiscence In Women
By: John Devore
Tags: Sexuality, Attraction, Masculinity, Science, Study

Men Can Smell Concupiscence In Women

Science says sexual attraction is partly based on olfactory senses

According to a new study, a man’s nose knows when a woman’s curling her toes. I regret writing that but it’s too late now.

The study from the University of Kent has concluded that women produce a unique scent when sexually aroused and men can pick up on it. The researchers discovered this by asking men to react to various women’s bouquets and then having them rate which was sexiest.

These aromas were collected during two experiments which, if I may say, sound absolutely hilarious. In both trials, scientists wearing white lab coats got women physically and emotionally sweaty.

I do not know if these scientists wore white lab coats but I like the mental image.

The horniness researchers, led by psychologist Dr. Arnaud Wisman, first asked 17 heterosexual female students to ride stationary bikes for three minutes to work up some perspiration. Then those women watched 20 minutes of 2005’s arthouse porno 9 Songs. You may not remember this X-rated indie movie about a steamy affair about two beautiful people who meet at a rock concert but it is both sexually graphic and dull. After exercise and sexy movie time, the women’s sweat was wiped with cotton swabs.

A few days later these same women rode their bikes but instead of watching 20 minutes of early aughts erotica, they watched a decidedly unsexy documentary about building bridges.

The next experiment involved 7 women, who were asked to not only ride bikes and watch 9 Songs but were also subjected to dance scenes from steamy male dancer epic Magic Mike. But wait, there’s more: these women were then asked to read passages from naughty S&M-lite bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey and given smutty photographs to gawk at. Afterward, in addition to watching the boner-killing bridge-building documentary like the first group, they were shown lame videos of men and women slow dancing lamely, given a short story to read about knitting and asked to look at photos of tropical birds.

Sorry, tropical birds, but you are not sexy.

Do you mind if I interject for a moment? ‘Magic Mike’ is an excellent twist on movie musicals that features lots of butts. But the sequel, ‘Magic Mike XXL,’ is a beautiful movie about male friendship. Back to the study.

Later, 91 men were asked to sniff every subject’s scent like creepy sommeliers holding wine corks to their noses. The findings? Men liked the smells of aroused women the most.

Basically, men were more into the sweat from the women watching Channing Tatum bump and grind than when those same women watched a nice bridge being built. Okay, then.

“We hope that the current findings encourage further research to examine the role of sexual olfactory signals in human communication,’ writes Wisman in his paper Sexual Chemosignals: Evidence That Men Process Olfactory Signals of Women’s Sexual Arousal. These results were recently published in Archives of Sexual Behavior.

(I feel like I need to take a moment to remind any men reading this that it is 100% unacceptable to smell anyone without their consent. There was a time I thought this was just common sense but better safe than sorry.)