Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

In the personals section of Miss Poubelle's local gay paper, there is a special section labelled raunch. As she has noted before, it is remarkable how many of the ads here are from men looking for various kinds of forbidden olfactory stimulations: sweaty armpits, smelly feet, unwashed buttholes, piss-stained underwear, or cheesy foreskins. While gay men are still more likely to rent squeaky-clean shower epics, there is a significant minority that favors such classics as Blue Collar Cheese Factory.

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In many animal species, the proportions are entirely reversed, and the smells of sweat and urine are absolutely essential to mating. These substances contain pheromones, or chemical signals that affect sexual response. What is surprising is that these pheromones are not detected by the ordinary system of smell, but by a special sensory organ called the vomeronasal organ (or VNO) or Jacobson's organ. In felines, canines, cows, and many other animals, the entrance to the VNO is on the roof of the mouth.

Some of these animals (like lions, buffaloes, and giraffes) show a special sort of behavior associated with detecting pheromones, called a flehman. During a flehman, the head is thrown back, the lips are tightened and pulled back, and the teeth are displayed in a gesture that is often compared to a human grimace. Apparently the function of the flehman is to carry odors back to the VNO. As one web site on giraffes explains:

"Like many animals, including cats and horses, male giraffes can tell a female is in heat by testing her urine. The male nudges a female near her tail to stimulate her to urinate and then takes a sample into his mouth. He then pulls his lips back in a characteristic grimace called a flehman and uses his tongue to bring urine droplets to openings in the roof of his mouth."

It has been shown that if you remove the VNO of an animal like a male hamster, it will completely disrupt his sex life and make him uninterested in sex.

For a long time, researchers thought that adult humans didn't have a VNO. But in the last two decades, the evidence for it has become irrefutable. The entrance to the human VNO is inside the nose. Some researchers have argued that our VNO is a vestigial organ which no longer functions in modern humans. And apparently the issue of human sensitivity to pheromones is not definitely resolved. The clearest evidence seems to be the fact that women living together tend to menstruate at the same time, which is probably due to chemical signals being sent and received.

While the jury is out on exactly what the VNO does in humans, Miss Poubelle thinks it very likely that our sexuality is influenced in unconscious ways by the chemical signals we all send out to each other. It doesn't take a wide stretch of the imagination to see the fetishist with a sweaty jockstrap over his face as indulging in the one of the oldest and most widespread aspects of animal sexuality: vomeronasal stimulation.

And what of that scene at the end of Blue Collar Cheese Factory, where the guy is on his knees, covered with sweat and cum? If you look closely at his face, Miss Poubelle believes you'll see something remarkably close to a flehman.