How To Describe The Scent Of A Woman?
Dark romance author A.A. Powers posted on TikTok asking for suggestions on how to positively describe the scent of a woman’s vagina without resorting to the sweetness cliches like honey or fruit, or the tired male misogynies (my characterization, not hers) of fish or seafood. Her commenters did not disappoint:
SKEKMAL: The scent was orchid, but not the kind from bottles. It was warm, flesh-born, laced with salt and skin. A pulse of musk beneath soft floral breath. Sharp enough to stir the gut, and intimate enough to haunt the mouth.
Trish Freyre: Her scent was intimate and alive — warm like sun-touched skin, with a whisper of salt and something softly tangy, like crushed petals steeped in summer heat. It carried the quiet wildness of a hidden grove, rich with earth and something faintly sweet — not perfumed, not artificial, but primal, clean, and deeply human.
Jenn: She was wild and earthy, tangy and bittersweet like my favorite dark chocolate melting on my tongue…
If any ErosBlog commenters want to share their favorite suggestions, the comments are open, both here and on TikTok. But if you go over there, be at least as nice as you would be here!
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Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=34082
The senses of taste and smell are intimately linked.
People who loose their sense of smell frequently find that their sense of taste suffers.
I would bring meaty to my description of both taste and smell. Like dark meat rotisserie chicken.
Can only be pleasant sensations given the pussy associations of the circumstances. Add in pleasure derived from giving pleasure someone you care about.
To me, the whole fruity/sweet description seems almost more misogynistic than the “fishy” trope. No healthy man or woman on earth produces a fruity/sweet body odor as far as I’m aware of. So ascribing that kind of scent tells women that their natural scent is not good or normal…
I have to acknowledge, though, that describing the flavor or scent is quite hard and I can’t come up with a description that would help someone who has never tasted it: “The scent was becoming more complex the more I thought about it – on the surface, it was salty like a fresh seaweed salad, with a hint of sourness like a great Pinot Noir. Yet the scent directly touched that very primal part of my brain with an urgency that I could now quite explain. No descriptions was necessary. It smelled of Her.”
Endymion, I’m going to argue with you only to the limited extent that I have never heard anybody use fruit or sweet descriptors to belittle women’s genitalia or to make them feel bad about themselves. But I’ve been hearing “tuna fish” and “fishy” jokes all my life, in what I can only describe as a patriarchal pattern that’s structured to, and does, make women reluctant to allow, much less demand, reciprocity when it comes to oral sex. Nobody ever makes peach or watermelon jokes about lady parts that are designed to make her cringe and make her feel bad about herself.
Bacchus, you’re right.
I personally have not heard the “fishy” jokes in real, offline life, but that was probably a very skewed sample. So I’d like to retract the “almost more misogynistic” and say “misogynistic in an entirely different way”. Maybe this example of replacing one misogynistic trope with another slightly less misogynistic trope poses a reminder of how ingrained misogyny often is in our culture(s).
Interesting, endymion. In the USA at least, I suspect the “fishy” comments of being tied to age and social class or status; I haven’t heard them spoken out loud in many years, or by anybody younger than my father’s generation. And when I did hear them, it was very blue-collar construction-site locker-room sort of talk. However, I’ve seen it a lot in male-stratified online male spaces ever since the internet came along (especially gaming and porn spaces). I don’t hang out in sports spaces but I’ll bet it’s still there as well.
The fruity stuff comes in from a completely different angle. I don’t know if men use those metaphors at all. They come up a lot in smut for women; the author I linked to was expressly asking for something else. My theory is that in truth women actually often do taste like (fake) fruit because so many body products are fruit flavored or scented; these are designed to prey on women’s insecurities about their own scents and flavors and marketed using those insecurities for leverage. So in that sense, at least, you’re absolutely correct that the fruit metaphor is misogynistic, but the chain of causation is wildly different.