Audacious and sometimes fatiguing in the brunette and the black woman, sharp and fierce in the red woman, the armpit is heady as some sugared wines in the blondes.”  It will be noted that this very exact description corresponds at various points with the remarks of more scientific observers.

Sometimes the odor of the armpit may even become a kind of fetich which is craved for its own sake and in itself suffices to give pleasure.  Fere has recorded such a case, in a friend of his own, a man of 60, with whom at one time he used to hunt, of robust health and belonging to a healthy family.  On these hunting expeditions he used to tease the girls and women he met (sometimes even rather old women) in a surprising manner, when he came upon them walking in the fields with their short-sleeved chemises exposed.  When he had succeeded in introducing his hand into the woman’s armpit he went away satisfied, and frequently held the hand to his nose with evident pleasure.  After long hesitation Fere asked for an explanation, which was frankly given.  As a child he had liked the odor, without knowing why.  As a young man women with strong odors had stimulated him to extraordinary sexual exploits, and now they were the only women who had any influence on him.  He professed to be able to recognize continence by the odor, as well as the most favorable moment for approaching a woman.  Throughout life a cold in the head had always been accompanied by persistent general excitement. (Fere, L’Instinct Sexuel, 1902, p. 134.)

We not only have to recognize that in the course of evolution the specific odors of the sexual region have sunk into the background as a source of sexual allurements, we have further to recognize the significant fact that even those personal odors which are chiefly liable under normal circumstances to come occasionally within the conscious sexual sphere, and indeed purely personal odors of all kinds, fail to exert any attraction, but rather tend to cause antipathy, unless some degree of tumescence has already been attained.  That is to say, our olfactory experiences of the human body approximate rather to our tactile experiences of it than to our visual experiences.  Sight is our most intellectual sense, and we trust ourselves to it with comparative boldness without any undue dread that its messages will hurt us by their personal intimacy; we even court its experiences, for it is the chief organ of our curiosity, as smell is of a dog’s.  But smell with us has ceased to be a leading channel of intellectual curiosity.  Personal odors do not, as vision does, give us information that is very largely intellectual; they make an appeal that is mainly of an intimate, emotional, imaginative character.  They thus tend, when we are in our normal condition, to arouse what James calls the antisexual instinct.