by Mara Altman
The ads freaked out young fertile ladies with headlines like “No Wonder Many Wives Fade Quickly with This Recurrent Fear,” “Can a Married Woman Ever Feel Safe?” and “The Fear That ‘Blights’ Romance and Ages Women Prematurely.” It was pre-internet clickbait. If I didn’t know the context, I would think these were teasers for a horror film about uterus-eating goblins.
In the mid–twentieth century, Lysol became the leading pregnancy-preventative douche. When we use Lysol to scrub the bathroom floors today, we often wear gloves, but back in the Comstock days, women put the mixture straight up their vaginas. I had no idea that you could do that and not immediately die. Lysol ads claimed to be good on “sensitive female tissues,” but they also urged people to use the same antiseptic liquid as a gargle, nasal spray, household cleaner, and dressing for burns.
“After disinfecting themselves, women could use Lysol to clean the garbage pail and toilet bowl,” wrote Tone.
A competing company stated that its douche could be used both for “successful womanhood” and for athlete’s foot. When things sound too good to be true—e.g., birth control that also cures an external fungal infection—they usually are. I’m not sure how effective the liquid was at cleaning the toilet seat, but as a method of birth control, these douches were worse than the pullout method.
In a 1933 study conducted at Newark’s Maternal Health Center, it was found that 250 out of 507 women became pregnant despite using Lysol douche. When I learned that women still got pregnant while using that stuff, I had much more respect for sperm.
The douche, finally, was deemed a horrible and useless form of birth control, and yet it still didn’t go away because douche, it turns out, is like the villain who doesn’t die in a superhero movie. From what I could gather, it seems that when other, superior contraceptive methods such as the pill came onto the market, douche advertisements began to shift—touting it instead as a product with no other purpose than to make our crotches not actually smell like crotches anymore.
Douche, in other words, pivoted into a new market, focusing now on the noblest of misogynistic causes: to make women feel self-conscious and stinky. Here is a nice sampling of ads from the era: “Unfortunately, the trickiest deodorant problem a girl has isn’t under her pretty little arms.” “Why does she spend the evenings alone?” “The world’s costliest perfumes are worthless—unless you’re sure of your own natural fragrance.” Then there were the notorious Massengill commercials that depicted mother-and-daughter walks on the beach—the duo look out at the briny ocean full of fish, while they claim to not feel quite right in the groin. The douching companies waged a crotchtacular smear campaign and it seems, to some extent, to have worked. In less than a century, vaginas went from fragrant to not the right kind of fragrant.
When I pass the feminine hygiene aisle at the drugstore, where boxes of douche are lined up on the bottom shelf just below the pregnancy tests and vaginal-itching creams, I often wonder why companies don’t try to corner the male demographic with a parallel product for their balls. “Don’t end the night by scaring her off with your scrotum.” “Do you want her to give your balls bitch face?” “Size really doesn’t matter if she can’t breathe when you pull your zipper down.”
Sheri Winston, the author of two books about women’s sexuality, wasn’t surprised by this disparity at all. She, in fact, believes that denigrating women’s bodies is even more deeply rooted in our society. “Of course fear and loathing and negativity are attached to our earthy, musky, wet, you know, fertile fecund vaginas,” she said. “In western culture, anything associated with women’s sexuality has been vilified.”
Douching fell out of favor when researchers discovered that the concoctions wreak havoc on our vaginal health, yet the Centers for Disease Control’s National Survey of Family Growth found that among women aged fifteen to forty-four in the United States, about one in five still douches today. The practice is more common among African American and Latina women.
A nurse, Irene Raju-Garcia, who works predominantly with Latina women in New York City and is half Puerto Rican herself, explained that the women she encounters douche because it’s ingrained in their culture. “Sex is big and important,” she told me, “and women are raised to think that in order to keep a husband they have to not only look good physically, but they also can’t have any smell other than perfume, flowers, or so forth.” Many women come to see her when they have the slightest bit of discharge or even when they detect their own natural scent. “They can’t wrap their minds around the idea that it’s totally normal,” she explained. Lemisol, she told me, is a favorite douche brand for the demographic.
I looked up the “feminine wash” online and found a bundle of rave reviews. One that stuck out was from Danielle M., who wrote that her “papi” turned her onto the product: “He said it would keep the taco smell out of my burrito and he was right. It brings all the boys to the yard and repels mosquitoes. Double win!”
Despite the few remaining douche loyalists, it is now much more common to come across a person who is a douchebag than the kind of douchebag that was made to hold vaginal douching liquids.
To find out how the douchebag made yet another transition—how it evolved into an insulting term for obnoxious assholes who manspread on the subway or rev their Harleys too loud—I contacted Taylor Jones, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania.
“A lot of languages will use female genitalia to build insults,” he said, “and the ‘douchebag’ has all the right components—the association with female genitals, bodily effluvia, and uncleanliness.”
“So you’re saying it’s a shortcut for calling someone a dirty pussy?” I said.
“Yeah, something like that.”
He explained that people have the same impulse in India. “A common insult there is calling someone ‘a crispy snack fried in vulva sweat,’” he said.
I didn’t argue, but that sounded like it could also be a term of endearment. “So does this happen because language is inherently misogynistic?” I asked.
“I don’t know that I want to make too many statements about that,” he said, “but historically in English and cross-linguistically, yeah, that’s kind of a thing.”
A profanity enthusiast, Reinhold Aman, over email, gave me pretty much the same breakdown. “Even if a douchebag is brand-new or clean, there’s the underlying association with a dirty, smelly pussy,” he wrote. “Thus ‘douchebag’ is used as a term of abuse.” He was also sure to mention that douchebag is rather tame when compared with the worst malediction he’d ever heard, which he called “a shocking combination of blasphemy, scatology, and anal intercourse.” The Hungarian lamentation he spoke of could be translated as follows: “Oh God, stop slapping me in the face with your cock all covered with shit from fucking Jesus.” Reinhold was right; after I heard that, douchebag never sounded more like a fresh spring morning.
It was interesting, though—in a sense, each time we utter “d-bag,” as fun as it is to say, we are, in an abstract way, proliferating the idea that pussies are dirty and gross.
* * *
After I’d looked at the history, it seemed like the fact that multimillion-dollar companies waged an all-out war against our vaginal odors was significant, but I wondered if that was enough to change one’s perceptions of her own scent.
I knew I wasn’t alone in the insecurity I’d experienced, after all. Many women have concerns that their crotches don’t taste or smell like fresh-pressed unicorns. More than one gynecologist I spoke to revealed that she’d experienced a patient coming in after having poured Clorox bleach into her genitals.
In a New York Times article, the journalist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz crunched data culled from Google search engines. He found that while men were most concerned about their penis size (surprise!), women, when it comes to their vaginas, were most concerned about odor.
“Women are most frequently concerned that their vaginas smell like fish, followed by vinegar, onions, ammonia, garlic,
cheese, body odor, urine, bread, bleach, feces, sweat, metal, feet, garbage and rotten meat,” he wrote. In other words, many women believe that between their legs, they are baking a casserole from hell.
That’s when I spoke to Rachel Herz, a scientist who has spent her career studying our olfactory sense. I probably wouldn’t have believed what she said if she wasn’t a professor at Brown University who had published more than forty articles in high-ranking science journals and written two books, including The Scent of Desire, about our sense of smell, but she explained that when we are born, our sense of smell is a blank slate, meaning we have no inherent likes or dislikes. She said that we learn the quality of scents both through personal experience and by what we are taught.
“Think about infants who have no problem playing with their poop,” she said. “They have to learn it is not good, and once they learn that, the distinction becomes hardwired.”
It was very hard for me to be convinced, but she said that something even as seemingly heinous as the smell of vomit could be appreciated for its complex sour notes simply if someone had taught me from infanthood that it was exquisite stuff.
Two parts of our brain, she said, are responsible for helping us acquire scent associations—the amygdala and the hippocampus. They are the first two relay stations to receive olfactory information, and those two areas of the brain process emotion and associative learning.
“As soon as we smell something,” she said, “it becomes emotionally assigned to the experience we are having right at that moment.”
When we smell the scent again, those associations are reignited. Our feelings about a scent will differ from the cultural norm in two cases: Either we have a personal experience prior to learning the cultural connotation or we have a personal experience that is so powerful it overrides the cultural connotation.
Herz told me the former happened to her in the case of a skunk. The first time she encountered the animal, her mother told her that it was a lovely aroma, and because of that, she attached a positive connotation to the scent. She didn’t realize that was a culturally unfortunate thing to confess until several years later when she told her friends and was ridiculed. “If I didn’t have that experience with my mother,” she explained, “I would have acquired the dislike response.”
Herz also gave the example of a woman who hated the smell of roses. Even though roses are culturally a very positive smell, this woman’s first experience of the scent was at her mother’s funeral. “That smell to her will always be very unpleasant and only associated with a sad, traumatic event,” said Herz.
“So if we grow up hearing derogatory comments about vaginas or we see douche commercials that tell us we don’t smell fresh,” I asked, “is that enough to make us believe that the smell is bad?”
“The answer to that is absolutely yes,” she said. She explained that being told that our vaginas smell like fish might even make us perceive the smell of fish when that scent is not actually present. “It’s hard to overcome the connotation even if there is no actual connection to the slur,” she said.
We also assign meanings to an odor, even before we’ve smelled the scent. If we hear vaginas smell bad, we are likely to perceive it as so once we put our noses down there.
Still, I was having a tough time getting this all through my head. “So you’re saying that really, we have no inherent feelings about body odor?”
“There is historical evidence that deodorants of all kinds evolved because manufacturers wanted to sell people a product,” she said. “It wasn’t humans who had a predisposition that was negative toward their own odors.”
Maybe that explained the disconnect; while many of us are concerned about our odor, there exists an actual market for women’s dirty underwear. Vaginal scent is often vilified, but it is also put up on a pedestal. Companies tell us through subtle ads to get rid of our scent—“Be fresh”—while heteronormative masculine men are expected to profess a deep and abiding allegiance to ripe vaginas. It’s all very confusing.
* * *
When I had spoken with Sheri Winston, the sexpert, she was absolutely adamant that our vulvas expel fumes that act as an aphrodisiac. She told me that our crotches smell for the same reasons a flower does—to lure our pollinators. “It’s our own distinctive smell designed by Mother Nature to attract mates,” she said.
Besides being a little skeptical of her metaphor—I’ve never seen a flock of horny people swarm around a woman with intense vaginal odor—I thought Winston brought up an interesting point. Is vaginal odor just an inescapable facet of being human, like tartar buildup on our teeth, or does it play a special role in getting laid?
I’d heard of sex pheromones and the like, but wasn’t sure of what was true, so I went forth to see what science may have found on this front.
Very little, it turns out.
“There haven’t been many studies about vaginal odor as an attractant,” said Margo Adler, a researcher at the Evolution and Ecology Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. Apparently, it is difficult to find women who are willing to drop off their vaginal secretions every morning at a lab. It is also apparently taboo to design a study in which a group of naked women get sniffed one by one by blindfolded men as they rate their corresponding horniness on a scale of 1 to 10.
I spoke with George Preti again, too. He’s the scientist from Monell Chemical Senses Center who’d tried to explain to me why Chucho, my dog, kept ending up with her snout in my groin. Early in his career, he also spent many years investigating female secretions. His ultimate goal at the time was to find pheromones. Pheromones are chemical compounds that some animals release—often in the form of oils or sweat—which other animals of their kind respond to physiologically. In essence, it’s a type of chemical communication. Really cool sex pheromones have been found in other species like the male pig. The boar releases a substance called androstenone, which causes a sow in heat to arch her back and present her lady parts. I wish I emitted marastenone that would make Dave rub my back and do the dishes. This stuff works so well that it’s been bottled and sold as Boarmate to aid pig farmers in artificial insemination.
So far, in humans, nothing so conspicuous has been found, but that is not to say that pheromones for sure don’t exist in our genitalia. “We don’t know yet,” said Preti, “a lot more work needs to be done in this field.”
Then Preti had a small but I’m sure totally valid rant about the difficulty of getting funding in science these days. The funding is just not there for vaginas.
Despite the sparse research, there were some academic researchers who were willing to entertain my questions and take an educated guess. One was Gordon Gallup, an evolutionary psychologist who hails from the University of Albany. He’s known for his out-of-the-box theories about body parts. He developed the “semen displacement theory,” which explains why the human penis looks like it’s wearing a Darth Vader helmet. He believes this distinctive ridge is an inverted shovel, made to scoop the sperm from sexual rivals out of the vaginal canal before a man shoots his own load inside. I’ll never look at Darth the same.
“Do you think vag odor can help attract a mate?” I asked him.
Gallup does not look at evolution as survival of the fittest: “It doesn’t matter whether you live or die”—it’s whether or not you pass on your genes before you drop dead. He therefore looks at vaginal odor from the perspective of how it might help us successfully reproduce.
He referred to one of the two studies conducted about vaginal odor as an attractant. Both were conducted way back in the ’70s, and because the sample size was so small—only four women’s vaginas—some scientists, like Adler, dismiss these studies altogether. Nonetheless, the researchers found that vaginal odors, in the parlance of the study, were “less unpleasant” during ovulation.
“Males tend to rate vaginal odor samples that are taken during the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle as being more attractive,” said Gallup. “Isn’t that interesting?”
Some animals, like kangaroos, on the other hand, find out when a potential mate is ovulating by taking intermittent sips of her urine. If you ever thought it would be fun to be a male kangaroo, now might be the moment to adjust that opinion.
“So basically, when you boil it all down,” I said, “vaginal odor is more pleasant during the ovulation stage, which might make the man and woman more likely to mate during that period and therefore be more likely to conceive a baby.”
“That’s exactly right,” he said, “but I think body-odor cues had much more salient properties and much more profound effects during human evolutionary history than they do now.”
Now we deodorize and lock up all that pubic potpourri inside our pants. A flower, in other words, though fragrant and beautiful, can’t attract a bee if it’s all boxed up.
* * *
Saying that vaginas smelled better during ovulation was not the same thing as saying that men were actually attracted to the scent. Because of the lack of research, I decided to conduct my own small study. I wrote a post on both the Los Angeles and New York City Craigslists asking men if they would be open to being interviewed about women’s vaginal odors. I kept refreshing my in-box, but did not get one response. The next day, I tried arguably the most open-minded demographic in the United States when I posted the same question to the San Francisco Craiglist’s “casual encounters” page. I knew it was biased from the get-go, like doing a survey of fashion and using respondents only from Milan or one about the benefits of juggling and querying only professional clowns.
I could have just asked my husband or culled evidence from past relationships, but clearly, I wanted fresh, unbiased discourse with men who were stalking casual sex on the internet. Before my post was flagged and removed two hours later, I got fifty-three responses. I spoke to six of the men.