by Mara Altman
To find out what “everyday vaginal odor” meant, I interviewed many women, but most had trouble describing their scent to me. At least four women paused, looked up toward the ceiling, and then said something along the lines of, “I don’t have the words.” There were a few others who ventured a description: “Metallic.” “Like a fine wine.” “Musky and earthy.” “I’d say briny, but not, like, overtly briny.” “Earthy and yeasty.” “Astringent.” My favorite adjective was “Youwantmetodescribewhat?”
The odor is different for everyone and changes throughout our cycles, but it’s the stuff that those douching companies would have us believe leaves us with that “not-so-fresh feeling.”
I talked to a gynecologist, Dr. Jenny Hackforth-Jones, and she said that no matter the smell, if it’s a healthy vagina, you shouldn’t be able to catch a whiff of it if you’re more than a foot away.
I asked if that rule held true even if, hypothetically, you biked for twenty minutes, took a yoga class, and then sat in your yoga pants for five hours while researching vaginal odors, and then got a beer at a bar and just happened to cross and uncross your legs a couple of times.
“A slight odor, right?” Dr. Jenny asked, concerned. “Not excessive?”
“Just vagina smell,” I said. “What I think of as vagina.”
“Someone couldn’t smell it across the room, right?”
“As far as I know, I was the only person who could smell me.”
“It’s nice that you’re doing yoga,” she said, treading carefully, “but let things breathe, if you can.”
I actually think that yoga pants—in all their overpriced and camel-toed glory—are out to sabotage us, but I’ll save that for my book about conspiracy theories.
* * *
While we each have a natural scent, sometimes the vagina can get funky in a bad way. This usually occurs because there is a bacterial imbalance—outsider bacteria battle and begin to gain a foothold against the predominant lactobacilli—or an infection. The everyday yeast infection can make a vagina smell like it’s whipping up a loaf of sourdough, which is why, when my friend’s vag gets yeasty, her boy friend lovingly calls it “The Bread Factory.” The much more offensive and notorious fishy smell comes from a condition called bacterial vaginosis (BV), a diagnosis that sounds like a code-blue genital emergency but is really only an imbalance of bacteria in the vagina.
In her most erudite scientific jargon, Nelson, my vaginal odor expert, explained the resulting scent: “It’s really disgusting.”
That really disgusting odor is caused by the offending bacteria, which expel two chemical compounds: putrescine and cadaverine.
“That’s really what they’re called?”
“Yup, it’s kind of ridiculous,” she said, “putrescine and cadaverine.”
The scientists who named them could not have been less creative with their nomenclature if they had coined them grossicine and yuckicine. These two compounds are found not only in vaginas but also in spoiled fish and rotting bodies.
One study explained the scent as a “death-associated odor.” A high-enough concentration of these compounds can be toxic. The vagina cannot produce enough to make anyone ill, though wouldn’t that be a handy feature to have in our “Swiss Army snatch.” Instead, the vagina can make just enough to forever link our private parts with fish tacos.
About twenty-one million women suffer from bacterial vaginosis, and the stink isn’t the worst part of it; if untreated, it is also associated with pre-term birth, an increased risk of STD infection, and pelvic inflammatory disease. Some women seem prone to the condition, but the risk of getting it goes up for those who have multiple sex partners and/or use douche—two activities that tend to imbalance our bacteria. Douching is so awful, because douche amounts to staging a coup over your very close allies (the lactobacilli) and allowing those other stank-making evil bacterial soldiers to rule your southernmost cavity.
Because semen and blood decrease the acidity of the vagina, fishy smells can also occur temporarily after sex and during menstruation. Nothing to worry about there.
A Time-out for Smegma
Both men and women make smegma in their genitals. It’s a mixture of dead skin cells and fatty oils. Smegma gets a bad rap for being disgusting, but the fresh stuff actually helps protect our goods and lubricate our parts during sex.
Smegma—a word that when said aloud can send the most composed among us into the fetal—greases the gears. For men, especially those who are uncircumcised, it enables the foreskin to slide away from the head of the penis without chafing. We women, on a smaller scale, enjoy the same benefit when our clits slip free of their hooding.
There is smegma backlash, because it’s kind of like a dairy product—it has an expiration date. After a long day in pants or too long waiting in traffic, the smegma can build up and turn opaque. This white gunk stows itself away in our elegant and elaborately layered labial folds. At that point, it can develop a funk. To get rid of it, all it takes is a quick wash.
So smegma is many things—gross, helpful, terrifically malodorous, but most important, perfectly normal.
“You can’t just stick yogurt up there to fix it, either,” said Nelson, responding to a popular myth that the probiotic breakfast food that can make you (and Jamie Lee Curtis) “regular” can also help bacterially balance your lady parts. There are many different types of lactobacillus—the ones that live in your vagina are not of the same strain that lives in your top-shelf Greek yogurt. Nelson explained that putting yogurt up there would be like shoving Dobermans up your vagina when what you really need are pugs; the right species but the wrong breed.
“Studies have been done,” she reported.
Sometimes BV will go away without any outside help, but it’s best to visit the doctor for a proper diagnosis and a dose of antibiotics.
Before we got off the phone, I had one more question. “Can you change your smell by what you eat?”
I’d always been curious. I’d heard rumors for a number of years that there is a magical elevator in your stomach that brings pineapple and other sweet delicacies down to Vaginal Level for your lover to consume.
“So far, there is no evidence of that,” she said, “but you can screw things up by smoking cigarettes.”
She pretty much said that smoking cigarettes is like punching yourself in the vagina. It screws with your bacteria, making it more likely that you will stink down there—not like an ashtray, but like a salmon two days past its prime. (Yet another reason to switch to pot.)
The best thing to improve our pussy smell, counterintuitively, is to do absolutely nothing at all. Some water, sure, but you don’t really need any soap. I’m positive most of us have heard this by now: “The vagina is its own ecosystem and the best thing to do is to leave it alone.”
Personally, I prefer to think of my vagina as a self-sufficient adult who doesn’t need my help—unlike me, she’s got a job and knows how to clean up her own apartment.
* * *
When I think about this situation—that between my legs there lies a distinctive aroma—I’m reminded of an old philosophical question: If there’s a vagina in a forest and no one is around to sniff it, does it make a smell? That is another way to say, I didn’t think twice about my vaginal scent until I found out it was something I was supposed to share with someone else.
In high school, I was blown away when I learned that other people, people I liked romantically, were supposed to enjoy diving nose-first into the depths of my loins. It’s not that I thought mine smelled bad (I didn’t even really take the time to investigate it all that thoroughly); it’s more that I thought all crotches must smell bad. They are the Mariana Trench of the body, the deepest and most mysterious crevasse, after all.
From basic sex ed, I knew that oral sex was not going to make a baby. From basic evolutionary science, I knew that all animals’ foremost goal was to procreate. Therefore, I developed my own theory about vaginal odors: Maybe it was actually the body�
��s way of warning a dude that he was approaching the hole from the wrong direction.
I’m not sure where my insecurity came from, but having a boyfriend sniff my vulva made no more sense to me than telling him to make out with my shoes. I wasn’t worried about him, but rather about what he’d think of me after being exposed to my most intimate and possibly (you never quite know what a prospective mate is going to be into) formidable fumes.
Because of this, for the first decade that I was sexually active, I did not experience one face in my crotch. I made sure of that. I used my thighs to clamp onto and halt any midsection that dared move southward while making out. I’d like to report that I was constantly turning eager men away, so much that I built up Arnold Schwarzenegger quads, but that wouldn’t be true, so I can’t. Of the men who tried, though, I appreciated their attempts to pleasure me even though it may have been confusing for them when I went full-on WWE.
During that time in my life, I often wondered why my clitoris couldn’t be located more conveniently—why not, for example, near the very accessible, arid, and odorless elbow?
To get over my fear of having my vulva go face-to-face (so to speak) with a face, I went a bit extreme. (Though it made a lot of sense at the time.) I recruited a sex surrogate, a person who is trained to address sexual and intimacy issues via physical means, to sniff me.
For one, I figured that since he was a professional, out of integrity, he would tell me the truth about my odor. Also, I liked that no emotions were involved—it would be very liberating not to care about whether or not this guy, after experiencing my aroma, would call me the next day.
His name was Eric Amaranth and I went over to his home one winter evening. We talked for quite a while—he wanted to make sure I was comfortable—before I took off my pants. I lay down with my underwear still on and braced myself. He asked me if I was ready, and as soon as I gave him the go-ahead, he clinically stuck his large proboscis between my legs and took a couple of expert whiffs. When he reported back, he smiled and then likened my scent to a “twinkle.” I felt like I’d just won on The Price Is Right, and if there had been a studio audience, I would have run up and down the aisles high-fiving everyone. I put my pants back on and left.
It was only later that I realized “twinkle” was not actually a scent. It meant about as much as saying my armpits smell like a “thump” or a “crackle.” It didn’t matter, though, because by allowing him to smell me and realizing that it did not cause the heavens to open up and rain frogs and leeches, I had already broken through the cunnilingus barrier.
I planned to spend the next five years making up for lost time by sitting on everyone’s face, but only a few months after that great first huff, I met Dave, the man who would become my husband.
In the years since, I’ve become more comfortable. I’ve come around on my own scent—I play it cool when pockets of myself waft toward me in downward-facing dog—but I am still not completely liberated when it involves someone else. I happily allow visitations, but never without being a bit of a freak show.
When Dave and I are together, I make him reassure me that I smell like 100 percent fresh and pasteurized vagina. We’ll be in the middle of something and then I’ll pop my head up and say, “Everything okay? Are you okay?” He has to stop what he’s doing and either say, “Yup,” or give me a thumbs-up.
I’ve convinced myself that I don’t like oral as much as finger stimulation, but it’s entirely possible that’s because I don’t want to have to deal with feeling vulnerable. Then I feel shame about having shame. This is an era of female empowerment; it’s so ’80s to care about what your vagina smells like. I should be selling my dirty underwear for coin, dammit.
I’m not the only one with conflicted feelings. I was recently talking to my friend Jenny, who said that she was ashamed that she didn’t like it when a guy went down on her and then tried to kiss her afterward. “Do you think that’s symbolic of me not loving myself?” she asked.
I wondered if it meant that as well, but I felt like being supportive. “No,” I said. “It means you have boundaries and that’s totally cool.”
The odd thing about all this is that I have no idea where this insecurity came from. I can’t trace it back to anything specific—no one ever told me that I reeked, and my parents were very open and over-the-top sex positive. My mom was so down and open about the crotch that she would even put lube on the family’s grocery list. I did have a male friend complain that he was with a woman who smelled like fetid two-week-old tilapia, which I’m sure added fuel to my fire, but I can’t blame my insecurity on him because I was concerned long before I heard his story.
To get some context and hopefully come to understand how these conflicted feelings developed, I decided to look into the history of women’s relationship to vaginal odor. I had a feeling that, as with most body shame, it stemmed from some bullshit buried in our cultural history.
Unfortunately, no museum exists with a wing dedicated to the Preservation of Pussy Odor Perspectives from Antiquity. For the next best thing, I called Karen Harris and Lori Caskey-Sigety, coauthors of the 2014 book The Medieval Vagina: An Historical and Hysterical Look at All Things Vaginal During the Middle Ages. My idea was to go back and try to pinpoint when women began to second-guess their own odor.
Quickly, I found that medieval times was not that time, rather it was more of a renaissance for vaginal funk. “After two years of research, we have come to the conclusion,” said Harris, “that vaginal odor was not a priority for medieval women.” According to the authors, women were cool with their own personal scent. They had bigger things to worry about, like the plague.
The authors suspect that in the Middle Ages a strong, gamy female scent was sexy to a man, a delicacy like oysters. “Or maybe they were just nose-blind,” said Caskey-Sigety. “You have to understand, the ambient smells were rancid—spoiled food, raw sewage, trash, and a plethora of body odors.”
“A vagina was probably a wonderful respite,” said Harris.
I felt like the authors had just given me a pro sex tip: Next time I really want to impress my husband with my vaginal scent, I’m going to make him perform oral near a landfill.
“And they didn’t get to bathe that often, right?” I asked.
“Yeah, there are some records of people only bathing once in their life.”
The women during this era did douche, but the liquids were not used to “improve” scent. Instead, the mixtures were used to prevent pregnancies and disease. As Harris so cringingly explained, it was also used to “wash out the pus from their STD-ridden sexual partners.”
Totally sexy, no?
One favorite douche of the era was made up of garlic and wine. “Wine-filled douchebags were probably the number-one go-to douchebag,” said Caskey-Sigety. These ancient ladies were impressive: They were willing to share booze with a body part that couldn’t even appreciate the flavor.
Though wine was often favored by women, gynecologists from that era—a.k.a. men who believed that the vagina was just a penis turned inside out—recommended that women stave off infections by squirting acacia, olive oil, pomegranate pulp, tobacco juice, honey, and ginger inside their genitals.
Coincidentally, that recipe doesn’t sound too different from the fifteen-dollar “rejuvenation smoothie” from the juice place down the street.
In comparison with ancient Egyptian contraception, what the medieval ladies experienced was practically paradisiacal. Egyptians were instructed to stuff their canal with alligator dung. It is nice to think that there was once a whole nation of people who got excited when their lover brought home feces. Instead of slipping a condom out of his wallet, he would wink and then reveal a palm full of crap.
In any case, if you’re consciously putting poop in your vagina, you are probably not overly concerned about how you’re going to smell.
I was not able to find any record that throughout the next several centuries women felt self-conscious about their vaginal odors—no pa
pyrus scrolls full of hieroglyphics lamenting the gases coming from underneath the female toga nor any ancient manuscripts directing women that “thy nether regions better smell like the flowery armpits of a wee newborn cupid.” The Boston Tea Party happened, then the Battle of Bunker Hill, people traveled the Oregon Trail—throughout all that turmoil, nothing suggests that women thought twice about the scent that wafted from their Bermuda triangles. But also, be aware, we are sorely lacking in vaginal-odor historians.
The next big milestone for vag odor I came across didn’t occur until 1832. An American physician named Charles Knowlton began promoting his own douching mixture as a form of birth control. The douche was a water-based solution that women spritzed up their canal after a hot night of loving; it included salt, vinegar, liquid chloride, zinc sulfite, and aluminum potassium sulfite. Clearly, Knowlton just dumped his leftover lab chemicals into a vagina.
Though not very effective, douching became popular for the same reason the Chicken McNugget, though not very delicious, became a favorite—it was cheap.
Now, as far as I can tell, this is where it starts to get bad for pussy odors. In 1873, Congress got uptight and passed the Comstock Law, making it illegal to use the U.S. mail to disseminate any information or paraphernalia regarding “erotica, contraceptives, abortifacients, or sex toys.”
Douching companies, looking for a loophole in the new law, found a sneaky way around the censorship. They began to market birth control by rebranding it under a new label: “feminine hygiene.”
In Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America, Andrea Tone explained that though douche executives could no longer claim that their products had contraceptive value, they implied it by using ambiguous language in their advertisements.