personal odors in ordinary social intercourse are less likely to arouse the sexual instinct than the antisexual instinct.  If a certain degree of tumescence is required before a personal odor can exert an attractive influence, a powerful personal odor, strong enough to be perceived before any degree of tumescence is attained, will tend to cause repulsion, and in so doing tend, consciously or unconsciously, to excite prejudice against personal odor altogether.  This is actually the case in civilization, and most people, it would appear, view with more or less antipathy the personal odors of those persons to whom they are not sexually attracted, while their attitude is neutral in this respect toward the individuals to whom they are sexually attracted.[51] The following statement by a correspondent seems to me to express the experience of the majority of men in this respect:  “I do not notice that different people have different smells.  Certain women I have known have been in the habit of using particular scents, but no associations could be aroused if I were to smell the same scent now, for I should not identify it.  As a boy I was very fond of scent, and I associate this with my marked sexual proclivities.  I like a woman to use a little scent.  It rouses my sexual feelings, but not to any large extent.  I dislike the smell of a woman’s vagina.”  While the last statement seems to express the feeling of many if not most men, it may be proper to add that there seems no natural reason why the vulvar odor of a clean and healthy woman should be other than agreeable to a normal man who is her lover.

In literature it is the natural odor of women rather than men which receives attention.  We should expect this to be the case since literature is chiefly produced by men.  The question as to whether men or women are really more apt to be sexually influenced in this way cannot thus be decided.  Among animals, it seems probable, both sexes are alike influenced by odors, for, while it is usually the male whose sexual regions are furnished with special scent glands, when such occur, the peculiar odor of the female during the sexual season is certainly not less efficacious as an allurement to the male.  If we compare the general susceptibility of men and women to agreeable odors, apart from the question of sexual allurement, there can be little doubt that it is most marked among women.  As Groos points out, even among children little girls are more interested in scents than boys, and the investigations of various workers, especially Garbini, have shown that there is actually a greater power of discriminating odors among girls than among boys.  Marro has gone further, and in an extended series of observations on girls before and after the establishment of puberty—­which is of considerable interest from the point of view of the sexual significance of olfaction—­he has shown reason to believe that girls acquire an increased susceptibility to odors when sexual life begins, although they show no such increased powers as regards the other senses.[52] On the whole, it would appear that, while women are not apt to be seriously affected, in the absence of any preliminary excitation, by crude body odors, they are by no means insusceptible to the sexual influence of olfactory impressions.  It is probable, indeed, that they are more affected, and more frequently affected, in this way, than are men.