Your sense of smell is a very powerful emotional trigger. Think
of how, upon entering, the smells of your childhood home can immediately affect
you and send you back to the emotional state you were in as a child–for better
or worse. This is because scent is tied very closely to memory, and
specifically tied to the limbic system, which determines your emotional and
behavioral responses to stimuli.
The fact that smell
is tied to memory makes it all but certain that those memories could (and the
behaviors they trigger) can be sexual in nature. Since scent is a sense that is
very evocative of your first-person memories, a feeling conjured by a smell (of
a sexual partner, say) is directly tied to an experience that you have
previously had. Very basically, what with smell’s affect on memory, it stands
to reason that the scent of a sexual partner will trigger one’s sexual desires.
Historically, sex and smell have been linked
in various ways. A very loose connection would be references
equating nose size to penis size in the legendary play Cyrano de Bergerac, but
more specifically, perfumes gifted to prospective partners in ancient Sumeria
and those given in marriage rituals in many cultures reinforces this link. Even
the psychological thought of Jung held strong connections between scent and
sex.
Whether you’re aware
of it or not–and you are most definitely aware–the smells of sex play a large
role in indicating our arousal, which will reinforce its
connection with our sense memories of sex. However, what if you lose this
valuable innate sense?
Losing the ability
to smell is something that can happen, whether gradually due to diminishing
senses that can come with age, or all at once because of an infection or
sickness. Anosmia is the term specific to losing one’s sense of smell due to
nasal blockage brought on by a cold, a flu, or even COVID-19. Many people who
have been infected with Covid have reported a temporary (or even permanent!)
period of time without their senses of smell as well as taste.
When
one loses their sense of smell, it greatly impacts their experience with and
enjoyment of food. The same goes for how they experience sex. While there
hasn’t been much scientific study of anosmia and its impact on intimacy,
accounts from people with smell disorders claim that their affliction has a
detrimental affect on their sex lives, with some worried about how to navigate
intimacy without this additional sense of perceiving sex.
For people currently
affected by smell disorders or diminished capacity to smell, there are support
organizations to turn to, such as AbScent in the UK. It is a hope of many that
the COVID-19 pandemic and the increase in the number of people experiencing
anosmia will raise even greater awareness. To illustrate how much larger the
anosmia community may have gotten since the start of COVID-19, consider that of
all of the people who experienced loss of smell during infection, some
smell scientists estimate that about ten percent of them now have
long-term loss of smell. And with seemingly no end in sight for transmissions
and mutations of the virus, that number may continue to grow.
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