I believe I smell a rat
By Sheryl-Lee Kerr
YOU'VE got to hand it to Austrian researchers. Their current
fascinating but highly useless scientific research is on how ugly people smell to the opposite sex.
Austrian researchers, for reasons known only to themselves (and even that's debatable), conducted a little experiment. In it, men were asked to smell T-shirts that women had worn for three days. Another group of men were then asked to rate the facial attractiveness of the 17 women, New Scientist magazine reported.
It found that attractive women were also judged to smell the most erotic.
I ask you: how unfair
is that to your average woman? Beautiful women still get the hunky guys even
when said hunky guys are BLINDFOLDED?
I sense an upsurge in chocolate consumption and much fervent playing of
Celine Dion from Adelaide women as they digest these sobering facts.
I'd also like to hope, before the chocolate supplies in South Australia run out, that the blokes weren't just nodding happily towards the odiferous shirts because they smelled eerily like their own bedrooms.
But I digress. The researchers from the Institute of Urban Ethology in
Vienna (with a name like that, it has to be real) were surprised to
find the results were reversed for women. The more attractive a
man's face was, the less appealing he actually smelled.
To me, and I am no rocket-lettuce scientist (although launching
orbital vehicles I can help you with), this study poses more
questions than it answers. Like why are Austrian scientists running around
sucking in lungfuls of sweaty shirt? As if watching the sport of
curling and giving surly Sven a lab-coat wedgie isn't fulfilling enough?
And how do they pick the ugly guys? Are we talking scar-faced,
tooth-rotted, bad-breath Xena baddies of the week? Or merely mildly
lopsided lads, whose bulging chest muscles may have slipped to
stomach-height after a few hundred beers too many?
How do they break it to the men in this experiment that they are in fact, officially, well, ugly? It's not like they're not going to work out something's up as the entire cast of Les Miserables slum-dwellers trundles in with them. Up until then they would have been blissfully unaware.
Indeed, I have read that most men - it doesn't matter how gross things are looking in the physical department, how much of their bits are overhanging or what's falling out - still think of themselves as, well, average-looking.
This contrasts with most women who generally think they are pretty darn close contenders to the back end of a bus - with maybe one or two redeeming features, which, they bemoan, are not the bits men notice.
The upshot of all this is that, somewhere in this world, shattered groups of officially ugly men and women are now inconsolable; Adelaide is facing a chocolate crisis; while over in a stark, windowless lab in Austria, bored scientists have finished with their smells and have hunkered down to watch curling once more ...
© Sheryl-Lee Kerr & The Advertiser, 19 MAY 1998