The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [69]
The simpler mammals could not get along without pheromones. Most of them are inarticulate and cannot write or speak distinctly. And most of them are nocturnal and need their sense of smell to navigate in the darkness. Humans are the only mammals perpetually ready for sex; the others are willing and fertile so infrequently that they need all the help they can get to be in the right place at the right time. The entire sex life of the male golden hamster is micromanaged by chemical messages; pheromones lead him to the female, announce her reproductive status, reduce his potential for unromantic aggression, rapidly raise the level of his testosterone, and finally bring on his copulatory behavior. Male hamsters who have lost their sense of smell do not even get to first base. There appear to be no pheromones that compel the male hamster to engage in intimate conversation after copulation or send flowers the next day.
But I am not a hamster, nor was meant to be, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot. A human being is articulate; possesses consciousness, free will, lots of brainpower, and a keen pair of eyes and ears; and is nearly always capable of sex. Why do we need the help of chemical messages? Our behavior is rarely governed by the mechanical simplicity of stimulus and response; we interpret and manipulate the messages of our senses.
Or do we? Apart from the current work of the Erox Corporation, the strongest evidence we have for human pheromones comes from women’s dormitories. Women living together in close quarters have long noticed that their menstrual periods soon begin to coincide. Dr. Martha K. McClintock, then at Harvard, carefully followed the cycles of 135 female undergraduates living in one large dormitory and found that menstrual synchrony occurred among roommates and close friends, though not among all 135 women. McClintock was able to eliminate most of the possible causes that might occur to you and me—similar patterns of stress, of exposure to light and darkness, of diet—and was left with only one: the more time any two women spent together, the more likely their menstrual cycles were to have harmonized. She also found that the more time a woman spent with men (measured in time, not sexual encounters), the shorter and more regular her cycle was likely to be.
At least in this regard, the human female college student is indistinguishable from the common female house mouse. A female mouse surrounded by other females will have a longer cycle; the presence of a male mouse shortens it. And the timing of a female’s puberty depends on whether she spends time with male mice (puberty now) or with females (puberty later). Scientists have discovered that these phenomena are provoked by chemical signals—pheromones—in the little creatures’ urine and are sensed by a special receptor, the vomeronasal organ, in their noses.
Are pheromones responsible for menstrual synchrony in humans? The answer is probably yes. And the usual suspect is the chemical androstenol, found both in the underarm sweat of humans and in a boar’s saliva, where it triggers the much-sought-after lordosis in the sow. But studies of whether androstenol acts as a pheromone in humans are inconclusive—which is not surprising, because pheromones from one species are not meant to affect another. Nonetheless, androstenol is the key ingredient in two perfumes sold by the Jovan company with the claim that they have been “scientifically created to attract.”
Such was the state of my knowledge about pheromones as I flew over the Rockies and descended into Salt Lake City in search of lordosis. To be entirely truthful, I already knew that the Erox Corporation, while it claimed to have discovered a dozen human pheromones, discouraged the belief that it had