The other week I had the privileged opportunity to become cultured: I witnessed my first symphony. Set in the beautiful Rebecca Cohn Auditorium, I nestled down to experience my initiation into the upper echelons of culture. As the lights went down, an invisible emcee politely reminded us to turn our cellphones off and notified us we were in a “scent-free” zone. I shan’t say this announcement spoiled my ascendence up the ladder of class, but it did bring to mind a long held suspicion of scent-free spaces.
As a resident stinker, I have been troubled by the recent popularity of scent-free initiatives, that now range from music halls to public libraries, and now the university campus. While I understand the unfortunate sensitivities some folks have to noxious artificial scents (I’m not an overt fan of Axe body spray myself), I think the uptick in prohibitive legislation has been made without considering the past cultural approach to the smell of the human body. The social atmosphere is such that if someone were to show up to work or school or some other public venue reeking of body odour, sex or whatever other cocktail of odours our organisms produce, they are seen as an antisocial pariah and an inconvenience. I know this to be true because I have done so and been received as such. I’m a sweaty boy with a distinctive musk that even I find troubling at times.
The history of my stench
I’ve been told I reek. Mostly by my mother but on the odd occasion by peers, fellow students and colleagues. To my credit I have a cultural disconnect I have trouble surpassing. I grew up in a dry cabin without running water or electricity, bathing in an oversized rubbermaid tub filled with melted snow water, at regular intervals of once or twice a month. Call me filthy, call me a barbarian, but this is the background I bring to the debate surrounding scent-free spaces. When puberty first hit me in this hillbilly horror story, my parents made quite a display of my developing body odour, inviting relatives, family friends and neighbours to take a whiff of my budding manhood. It was humiliating to be paraded around the living room before a crowd of familiar faces with nothing but my jeans on, arms raised above my head, just to prove to the community I was developing accordingly and on track.
After that humiliating ritual I became incredibly self conscious of my odour. Taking initiative to spare my own embarrassment, I tried frequent showers at the local laundromat. While some youth turn to compulsive masturbation after the fruits of puberty begin to bloom, I had recourse to scrubbing my body with the intensity of a jackhammer. I tried everything; loofahs, volcanic bath rocks, sponges, washcloths and for a short period steel wool. I tried Dr. Bronner’s scented and unscented soap. I tried hand soap, bar and liquid. I tried vinegar, and when that failed, diluted bleach. Nothing worked. I took to experimenting with different scent products; stick deodorant, body spray, cologne, perfume, Febreze and carried a fresh urinal cake around in my back pocket for a short time. No matter what I did I couldn’t shake the undercurrent of sour pot smoke and stale sweat that seemed to ooze non-stop from my pores. My hygienic trials and experiments have proven one thing: for some folks if not all, it is quite impossible to banish all smell from the body. It seems I am cursed to be an offensive affront on either the nostrils of the everyday city goer, or on the medical conditions and allergies of the scent-sensitive. I am doomed to be a walking harassment to the very idea of scent-free zones.
Scent free zones are contradictory and nonsensical
It seems the logical sum of these cultural stances result in the attempted neutralization of the human scent. Despite how thoroughly you scrub yourself with scent-free soap or how often you use that salt stick on your underarms, the human body will still produce some whiff of dermatological ecosystems. The possibility of establishing a truly scent-free zone is about as likely as establishing a dust-free one. The human body smells, there’s no way around it. If smelling of Old Spice is considered antisocial, and smelling like yourself is antisocial as well, the conclusion is that the only way to be considerate of everyone’s experience is to not smell at all. And that demand is practically impossible.
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