welcome to camp telophase

It is a mistake to think that the overwhelming reason for women to wear perfume is to attract the opposite sex. But as Luca once explained to me regarding the peculiar, temperature-independent scanty dress of many young women at night, what a woman on the prowl requires is something that men will register after six beers. Thus the use of simplified sexual cues, such as short skirts and big hair, and perhaps also a loud, sweet, pervasive perfume that will cut through a fog of spilled liquor, end-of-day body odor, the occasional vomit on the bar floor, and the perfumes of the nearest five girls, dressed identically. Of course, if your mating strategy casts this wide a net, you may drag in more old boots than big tunas. But that is probably fodder for another book.

Perhaps this attention-getting olfactive strategy can also, in a way, explain the second mistake, milder than the first but still quite wrong, that women tend to make when choosing a fragrance, which is to assume that the reason to wear perfume is to impersonate a flower bed. This is a very fine strategy if your aim is to attract bees.