If Stinking is a Good Thing, Why Does it Sound like Such a Rotten Word?

I’m single.  Yep, it’s true.  Last week I was taking a yoga class.  We were doing what’s known as asanas, or standing poses, and the particular pose I was in involved standing spread eagle and then bending over from the waist and placing your head and hands on the floor.  As you’re bent over, you’re still spread eagle.  Remember this.

 

The teacher, a handsome, dark-haired Russian lad named Vladimir, who was subbing for our regular yogi, had throughout his stint been ready with a smile and a greeting every time we passed in the hallway.  He had even used me to demonstrate a pose for one class.  This evening, as I had my tale over tête, he headed straight for me to do what’s known as an adjustment or a minute correction of body alignment.  (By the way, it’s quite funny watching a guy heading straight for you when you’re upside down).  Apparently my hands were out of position.  But instead of coming around in front of me and bending down to make the adjustment where my hands actually lay, he bobbed his head up under my cooter area and reached through.  Excuse me?

 

Since I had on a pair of very short shorts, my first thought was OMG I’m so glad I took a shower before class.   It did make me wonder.  Seriously, his head could not have been farther away than an inch from the delta opening.  And then I remembered Joe, a guy I went out with for a short time before we parted and became “friends” (that stage is totally overrated, but we’ll get there another post). 

 

Joe had a fetish in that he preferred sex with women who were ripe—and I don’t mean of a certain age but of a certain aroma.  The stinkier the better.  I, being of the freshly showered type, had never heard of this.  This dude wasn’t Russian, he was an American.  Okay, Jewish could have explained it but I wasn’t sure.  So I played along.  We made a date for me to come over right after yoga (aha!) one evening.  I sweat inordinately, and all through class I couldn’t believe that at the end of corpse pose I was going to get laid by a smell creep. 

 

After it was over, Joe sympathetically placed a hand on one of my armpits and said, “this part was pretty good, but this area” (he pointed to the cooter), “was only so so.”  And he did that hand gesture.  “You weren’t quite smelly enough.”  In any country in the world, except possibly in Eastern Europe, that statement is a compliment.  My pussy not smelling like hot goat cheese was a bad thing?   Honestly, I thought I’d heard every piece of crap that could be uttered by a guy, but obviously I hadn’t. 

 

And now I return to Vlad the Russian yoga instructor.  What if Vlad had the same fetish as Joe?  What if he had been innocently-on-purpose copping a smell for his sexual gratification?  What if copping a smell was, in fact, his entire raison d’etre for becoming a yoga instructor?   

 

When I think about the reference to guys who come “sniffing” around, I guess it’s more apt than I ever realized.  Perhaps scent amplifies sex pheromones, those invisible chemicals of attraction that enter through the nose and leave through the seminal fluid.   Whatever.  If smelling bad is another way that women can attract and manipulate men, then I say lose the soap.