Scratch 'n' sniff

An emerging movement among swingers: sniff before you strip.

Another small victory in the eternal struggle to get Gam to stop wearing deodorant: the benefits of BO for your sex life!

A group in Switzerland studied this by asking women to sniff men's dirty T-shirts. The women found some of these sexy, and preferred those worn by men with MHC genes most different from their own.

[...]

As a footnote, the Swiss discovered that the birth control pill seemed to reverse women's preferences: Pill-takers liked the dirty T-shirts from men most similar to themselves. That prompted a few researchers to wonder what happens if you choose your mate on the pill and later go off it. Would you suddenly discover that your husband stank?

[...]

But until recently no one had linked MHC genes to any effect on actual romantic couples, said Garver-Apgar. So in 2006 she and her colleagues rounded up 49 couples who'd been together for periods of between a month and 12 years and tested those three MHC genes that vary the most from person to person.

Since we have two copies of each gene, there were really six places where these couples might or might not have matched. On average, the couples had one matching gene out of six, though some shared two matches and one couple had four.

She and her colleagues then asked the couples about their sexual activities and sexual satisfaction. Only a few of the women admitted to cheating, but these tended to be from the genetically similar couples. The more similar couples also reported less sexual satisfaction.

Garver says she'd like to expand the study and look further into the possibility that birth control pills change a woman's nose for sexually compatible men.

Not so sure about the birth control pill thing though- Implanon hasn't changed my nose for Gam.

It's posts like these that make me glad my family don't read my blog...