Word: scent
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Philosopher Gustav Jäger insisted that man's soul lies in his smells. Wilhelm Fliess, a Berlin doctor and friend of Freud's, regarded the nose as the most important sexual organ. Pop Sexologist Alex Comfort predicts sex signals will be found in underarm odors. In Scent Signals, Author Janet Hopson says "sexones," or sex odors, guide human sexuality...
...right track. The recent identification of numerous pheromones, or scent signals, in insects and other animals has given odor research new legitimacy. Scientists now know that different organisms use pheromones to gather food, send out sexual cues, mark territory, maintain social pecking orders, sound alarms. Male dogs, for instance, use urine scent to say, in effect: watch out, a tough mutt just passed...
Other researchers are making a connection between sexuality and odor. The University of Colorado's Richard Doty conducted more than 100,000 sniff tests to determine changes in the ability of volunteers to detect a chemical called furfural, a scent found in cloves and cinnamon. One clear result: women have the greatest ability to detect the odor midway in their menstrual cycle, presumably because of a correlation between estrogen in the body and sensitivity at the nose...
...menstrual cycle. That raises the possibility that odor tests may one day help develop a new contraceptive, an idea supported by the monkey studies of Monell Primatologist Gisela Epple. She found that the dominant male and dominant female in each social group spend much of their time smearing their scent around the cages. Surprisingly, subdominant females do not get pregnant when they mate with the top male. Epple suspects that a scent signal from the dominant female suppresses the fertility of her rivals...
...fragmenting of personality and time, Durrell fortunately remains a devotee of Scheherazade. Livia stands comfortably on its own as a polished romance filled with bright, interesting characters. They gather in the 1930s at Avignon, home of the medieval and mysterious Knights Templars. The air is "full of the scent of lemons and mandarines and honeysuckle" and of something else: dread of the future that Hitler is planning across the border in Germany. Durrell is still prone to overripe passages, but some of his audacious effects work memorably. He describes the madam of a French brothel sitting in her establishment, "enthroned...