Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 58

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Popular Culture Review

yet to be written.^^ Within the good half of the spectrum in general,
and for perfumes in particular, significant changes have taken place.
Preference has shifted from the once-favored heavy animal aromas
to lighter floral notes, from a craze for musk to the success of eau de
cologne. Instead of masking bad odors, as in postmedieval centuries,
scents are now preoccupied with pleasure more than anything else.
Sexuality and its aromas—there can be no doubt about it—belong
on the side of attraction, but it is precisely sexuality that has been
exposed to the most drastic socio-cultural pressures over time, and the
smells associated with it, the essential body odors, have vacillated
in their status. Hardly any other aspect of the body has been
colonized as much as its odors. The gap between their low public
standing and their secret personal appreciation as erotically
attractive is significant. Publicly, odors can cross this gap only in
disguise, in the shape of perfume, the ersatz body odor. The natural
smells, the wonderful archaic odors once regulating sexual behavior,
are of course still with us. The only effect the civilizing process has
had on them is a "revaluation of all values,” in calling good the
artificial and bad the natural. Deep down, of course, we all know
better. The direct link of body odor to erotics has never really been
broken. Perfumery has claimed for centuries to conceal what it was in
fact revealing, to reveal what it was pretending to conceal. Perfume
is the last piece of clothing to come off (in fact, it does not come ofO in
the historical process of undressing the human (female) body in
Western culture. Perfume is the smell of pudenda by a different,
respectable name. Perfumery, therefore, is the transferred discourse
on the tabooed odors of sexual attraction.
For a sim