What does your GAYDAR run on? Is it how someone walks? Is it how they talk? Is it just how they interact with others in general? But is it how they smell? Now, I've been in environments where men love smelling and licking the pits of other men, but a new study is wanting us to believe we can smell the gay.
Gay men strongly preferred the body odour of other gay men in the test which investigated the role played by smell in choosing partners.
Other studies had previously looked at how straight men and women choose sexual partners in line with odour, but this was the first study which looked at how sexual orientation and different odours could be linked.
The study was run by Charles Wysocki of the Monell Chemical Senses Centre in Philadelphia.
Wysocki said the findings showed the importance of odour in how people choose sexual partners.
“Our findings support the contention that gender preference has a biological component that is reflected in both the production of different body odours and in the perception of and response to body odours,” Dr Wysocki said.
The study involved 24 people, some straight and some gay, who were subjected to a cleansing period of nine days, where they washed with unscented soap and shampoo and ate plain foods excluding garlic, cumin, and curry.
Then for one day the subjects wore cotton pads under their armpits, which were stored as a source of their body odour.
Then a panel of 82 straight and gay men and women assessed each pad, rating it in terms of pleasantness. – pinknews.co.uk
It may not be a new type of GAYDAR, but there seems to be a link to smell preference.
Homosexual men and lesbian women had patterns of body odor preferences that were different from those of heterosexual men and women. In particular, gay men were strikingly different from heterosexual men and women and from lesbian women, both in terms of which body odors gay men preferred and how their own body odors were regarded by the other groups. Gay men preferred odors from gay men and heterosexual women, whereas odors from gay men were the least preferred by heterosexual men and women and by lesbian women. – monell.org
Do you notice a difference in straight man smell?
Is that how we are supposed to pick out our next gym buddy?
What do you think?
For a pdf of the study results, click here.
I’ve been saying this for
I've been saying this for years. Some people are magnets for people wanting them sexually and I used to observe they must be giving off some kind of scent. Whenever I would notice a guy in the bars who constantly had guys coming up to him, sometimes even in groups, I used to joke I'm going to go over and rub my head in his armpit to see if I can pick up the scent and get lucky! Lol