Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Salon Columnists
Follow these links for the most recent column by:
Susie Bright
Robert Burton, M.D.
Joe Conason
Sean Elder
David Horowitz
Garrison Keillor
Anne Lamott
Greil Marcus
Joyce Millman
Camille Paglia
Amy Reiter
Mary Roach
Scott Rosenberg
Ruth Shalit
Michael Sragow
Virginia Vitzthum
Sarah Vowell
Cintra Wilson
Burt Wolf

+ Columnists' schedule

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Health & Body

Hepatitis highway
Why is there hepatitis hysteria and a syphilis scare along I-95 in North Carolina?
By Geoff Edgers
[08/26/99]

Urge
Lesbian blind date
Nancy calls upon a mismatched couple and can't decide which lie is the truth.
By Tracy Quan
[08/26/99]

To have and to kill
Sexual serial killers aren't acting out random bursts of depression or anger; they are trying to fill an emptiness in their souls.
By Stephen G. Michaud
[08/25/99]

Column
Reach out and touch yourself
A phone-sex virgin creates her own private marathon.
By Virginia Vitzthum
[08/24/99]

Debunking depression
Many people who claim they are clinically depressed may only be disgruntled
By Robert Burton, M.D.
[08/23/99]

Complete archives for Health & Body

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Eventually, at one of those cocktail parties, someone is bound to say, "You know, you'd be a millionaire if you bottled that stuff and sold it for a hundred bucks a pop."

This is pretty much what happened to Winnifred B. Cutler. Cutler has a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She did post-doctoral work at Stanford and worked for years with pheromone experts at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. These days, she's a millionaire with ads in the back of Esquire that say, "INCREASE your SEX APPEAL," "unscented cologne aftershave additive FOR MEN," "Please send me ____ vials of 10X for men @ 99.50." Cutler also makes a pheromone perfume additive for women, a bottle of which is sitting on my desk. But before we get to that, a little background.

Mary Roach Mary Roach's column appears in Salon Health & Body every other Friday. + Biography + Archives

Human pheromones do exist and, in fact, Cutler was involved in their discovery. In 1986, she and Monell researcher George Preti published a paper showing that extract from male underarms has a regulating effect on women's menstrual cycles. The suspect was androstenone, a substance that happens to function as a sex pheromone in wild pigs, as the active ingredient. In boars, a whiff of androstenone causes the female to, as they say, assume the position. Male boars are apparently chock-a-block with sex pheromone. "Rubbing either the male's urine or the male's seminal fluid on the female's snout was similarly effective," wrote Cutler in a recent review paper. Extrapolating to humans presents a puzzling scenario, however, as seminal fluid on a snout suggests the conclusion of a sexual activity, rather than the beginning. In other words, you would be eliciting the mating stance at a time when it can be of no use other than to get the female up and perhaps out of bed to fetch a snack.

Regardless, researchers over the years have been unable to resist testing androstenone on unwitting women and men. In one study, androstenone smeared on the door of a restroom stall caused men to avoid that stall (the "male repulsion effect"), suggesting that the pheromone might function as a territory marker. Around the same time, researchers in England doused a dental office waiting room chair with an aerosolized androstenone product called Boar Mate to see if women would be attracted to that seat. Significantly more women used the seat when it was treated. I asked Cutler's Monell co-author, George Preti, what it all means -- if I look like a dental waiting-room chair, I'll be more attractive to women?

Next page | Women with female armpit secretions on their lips had increased sexual activity