I shot a pheromone into the air,...
I shot a pheromone into the air, and where it fell . . . do I really want to be there?
A young woman whom I consider a friend has saved me a full-page ad from the Herald-Examiner under the astonishing headline:
SCIENTISTS DISCOVER MYSTERY CHEMICAL
THAT SEEMS TO DRIVE WOMEN WILD!
“I thought you’d be interested,” she said cryptically.
Naturally, I am interested in any new scientific discovery, being a full-fledged citizen of this scientific age; but it has always seemed to me that women were wild enough, and that science ought not to be wasting its resources on trying to make them wilder.
I soon found out, though, that the ad was directed at males, and what it offered was a chemical that would arouse women sexually--in fact, make them wild with sheer animal desire for any male who used it.
“It’s no secret,” the ad said, “that some men (actually about 10%) have the power to attract women very easily. This unusual power, the essence of their sex appeal, used to be called animal magnetism or body chemistry. However, scientists now say this natural attraction is due to strong chemo-attractants manufactured by certain male bodies. . . .
“This amazing discovery was made at Warwick University in England after more than 10 years of in-depth research and laboratory experiments which involved powerful chemical attractants found in the hormones and sweat glands of particularly masculine men. These powerful chemo-attractants are clinically known as pheromones, and the big talk in Europe is that they have finally discovered how to exactly duplicate and synthesize one particular pheromone that seems to appeal to a woman’s primitive sexual instincts . . . that has the power to attract women and drive them quietly crazy.”
So that was their game. They had managed to synthesize and bottle a human pheromone, and were now making it available to men in “easy to use metalized spray containers” at just $24.95 for a month’s supply.
I might jump right in and send my $24.95, but I’m a little worried about the possible effects.
I had never heard of pheromones until I read “The Lives of a Cell” by Lewis Thomas, that biologist who writes such elegant essays, not only about his field but about life in our times.
He frankly called his piece on pheromones “A Fear of Pheromones,” and asked bluntly, at the outset, “What are we going to do if it turns out that we have pheromones? What on earth would we be doing with such things? With the richness of speech, and all our new devices for communication, why would we want to release odors into the air to convey information about anything?”
Thomas warned about the terrible power of the pheromone in lower forms of life, noting that it had been calculated that if a single female moth were to release all the bombykol (her kind of pheromone) in her sac in a single spray, all at once, she could theoretically attract a trillion males in an instant. . . .
Imagine, he said, a female moth sending out the ambiguous message, “At home, 4 p.m. today,” with a single burst of bombykol, “a single molecule of which will tremble the hairs of any male within miles and send him driving upwind in a confusion of ardor. . . . “
Thomas doubts that the male moth even has any awareness that he has been deliberately seduced. “On the contrary, he probably finds suddenly that it has become an excellent day, the weather remarkably bracing, the time appropriate for a bit of exercise of the old wings, a brisk turn upwind. En route, traveling the gradient of bombykol, he notes the presence of other males, heading in the same direction, all in a good mood, inclined to race for the sheer sport of it. Then, when he reaches his destination, it may seem to him the most extraordinary of coincidences, the greatest piece of luck: ‘Bless my soul, what have we here!’ ”
I hope Dr. Thomas will forgive me for quoting at such length from his book. It is the only thing I have found that so graphically describes the perils of pheromones. (I also recommend for any thoughtful citizen of our times his later books, “The Medusa and the Snail” and “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.”)
In any case, we can see what chaos might be set off by the reckless use of pheromones by human beings. God knows, women keep the world in turmoil enough with their natural female scent and their expensive perfumes, which, if you ask me, they don’t need.
The thing we have to remember about pheromones is that they’re undetectable. They work below the level of our consciousness. So if a human male were to exude pheromones in female company, the females in his presence would go quietly crazy without knowing why!
I have often made talks to groups of women at luncheons--sometimes 200 or 300 of them. Imagine the consternation if I were to show up at one of these affairs and squeeze off a burst of male pheromone from my handy pocket container. Pandemonium. I’m sure I couldn’t deal with the result.
Nor would any man, I should think, care to excite that kind of mass reaction.
How could we control our pheromone so that it affected only the one we wanted to drive quietly crazy? First, we’d have to isolate her; and once we’ve isolated the object of our base intentions, we should be able to accomplish our goal with the usual subtleties of seduction--proximity, praise, promises, strength, ardor, and whatever ordinary odors a healthy male exudes after a good bath.
And a little champagne and nightmusic, too, of course.
