stinkbombshell

I love perfumes, and more specifically, the act and idea of wearing perfumes. But I have small nostrils. This leads me to often forget to breathe through my nose, leaves me panting like a dog, and gives me a terrible sense of smell. So my perfume has to be a good strong stinky perfume: one that is rough and tough enough to penetrate my tight little smell-holes. This is why even though I want to tell you about the experience of wearing perfume, I can’t tell you about it in the standard lingo of scent fetishists—I couldn’t tell you the difference between a “top note” and a “bottom note.” (There must be a “bottom note”?) The best way I could find of describing my attraction to bottled stink is to invoke one of my favorite art pieces, Mike Kelley’s series, Empathy Displacement: Humanoid Morphology, in which Kelley placed found rag dolls in black boxes and placed over each a human-sized, two-dimensional rendering of the doll:

And here I am replicating Empathy Displacement: Humanoid Morphology with the black box packaging for a perfume I wear, Nasomatto Absinth:

Kelley has said that the combination of the opaque black box and rendering makes the actual doll physically inaccessible—an inaccessibility which then enhances the viewer’s ability to empathize with the inanimate object. I’m very drawn to this play between tangibility and emotionality: specifically, how the lack of body actually enables a strong emotional reaction. When I wear perfume, I imagine that I am a flat drawing of a doll trapped in a black box: the doll longs to live in the human world—to desire, elicit desire—but cannot because it is an object. I am the human medium that allows the inanimate object of the perfume to live its life. I am its fleshly conduit, and the immaterial physicality contained in glass bottles takes possession of my brain and limbs. The perfume doesn’t represent me; I represent the perfume, its indescribable viscerality.

Materially speaking, a smell is a bit of moisture made into air. It’s not just a thing, it’s nothing; it’s not just nothing, it’s nothing made into an object; it’s nothingness. I love it when I’m looking at a fashion magazine editorial, and at the bottom of the intricate price-and-textile description of the outfit that the model is wearing, it says in brazen incongruity: “Fragrance: Yves Saint Laurent Opium.” We can see the dress, okay, but to give credit to a scent in a two-dimensional photograph? What this reveals is that the concept of wearing a scent is really about wearing an idea. The perfume binds concept to the essential quality of scent. And usually, what is worn when one wears a scent is a concept of gender.

Like most things that pertain to bodies, perfume is gendered: man-spray is not called “perfume” but “cologne.” Moreover, in the bottled scent world, certain smells are considered “feminine” and others “masculine.” But the categorization of floral scents as “feminine” and musky scents as “masculine” is not based on any biological facts of sexuality. Perfumes are not imitation of glandular secretions. I mean, how many women do you know whose tampons smell like rose-petals? Or men whose cum rags smell like leather musk? “Floral” and “musk” are cultural biases about gender that are essentialized (literally) into bottles of liquids.

And yet, I love perfumes for this very essentializing quality. A good perfume is the perfect foundation for genderfucking. For in the public sphere, a man wearing stilettos puts himself in danger, but he can dump on as much Chanel No. 5 as he wants and who’s going to lynch him for his feminine stink? Perfume’s rigidly gendered taxonomy is what actually allows a gender fluidity. When I am wearing a perfume rather than a cologne, and when a woman wears Davidoff Cool Water rather than Chanel No. 5, we are simultaneously paying respect and lip-service to the existent gender meaning—or dare I say, essence—of stink. Our bodies are transformed by the narrative of the scent, but the narrative of the scent is also transformed by our wearing. Perfume may come in rigidly gendered packaging and ad copy, but it must by design be liberated into the ether of the world and become completely formless. This is why, aside from ck one, there are so few truly unisex fragrances: because perfumes have always been hermaphroditic.

Perfumes are genetically metaphorical; they can only function by association. The identity of stink must be wedded to a certain bottle shape, a certain designer, a certain model in the advertising campaign, and finally, a certain person who wears it who has an impact on you in your own life. My first fragrance was Issey Miyake L’Eau D’Issey: strong sharp orange. In 1995, my sister bought it in San Francisco during her first semester of undergrad at Berkeley and gave it to me as a Christmas present. After that, in the late 90s, I wore colognes as a link to certain masculinities I wanted: Boss Hugo Boss because that was the cologne of the boy I was in love with; Gucci Envy for Men because I was trying to be an open-shirted gigolo type fag. The sole exception during those years was the ubiquitous Thierry Mugler Angel, which I wore because its unmistakable chocolate smell expanded my olfactory nerves like a mega-dildo.

For most of the new millennium, I’ve been scentless. Instead of a scent I had a husband. I guess the proxy smell of natural man-stink was enough for me. But since 2006, post-divorce, I’ve been faithful to Tom Ford Black Orchid. And this is the first time that I’d really been attracted to the stink itself, rather than an external association. Black Orchid is sweet, but it is also musky and dank. And it is strong. To me, it is undoubtedly feminine, but it doesn’t at all smell “light,” the way most women’s perfumes smell. I rotate Black Orchid with two other perfumes that are her gangbanger sisters: Nana DeBary Bronze and Nasomatto Absinth, both perfumes that smell sweet but stinkingly so.

My friend Marisa says she feels naked without perfume; I am the same way. If I rush out of the house in the morning without three spritzes of perfume I feel pantless for the rest of the day. Recently, while I was replenishing my Black Orchid at Bloomingdale’s, the well-intending salesgirl suggested I try the new Prada, which was light and perfect for “day,” since my Black Orchid, with its smelly heft, was more of an “evening” scent. I refused to try the Prada with politeness, but what I really wanted to say was, “I will never wear a ‘light’ scent. I will always wear a scent matched for nights because I’m a gal who loves to dress in homeless gear as if it were an evening gown, and having my 30-year old threadbare t-shirts stink like dark evening perfume is like accessorizing with a major jewel or fur. Such a stink is invisible, but makes me feel indelibly feminine.”

girls who wear glasses

In one particularly beautiful episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mary Richards (MTM) and Sue Ann Nivens (Betty White) attend a broadcasting conference together in Chicago, where they fall victim to a gang of rowdy morticians who want to party down with them. When Mary says she hasn’t any glasses (for drinks) in her room, the slimiest of the morticians tipsily jingles, “It’s fun to make passes at girls who wear glasses!” This is a thesis I’m going to test out this summer and beyond. So far, considering the three disastrous “dates” I’ve been on, I would have to answer that girls who wear glasses may not have so much fun. (I put “dates” in quotes because these encounters with the male kind were really questionable in terms of a proper mating ritual, but they all did spectacularly and depressingly confirm the emotional meaning of “disaster.”) Still, I have to say that I’ve been feeling pretty sexy walking around in my new glasses.

Conventional wisdom about feminine sexiness would have it that blindness is not terribly sexy. Usually, girls who wear glasses have to lose the glasses in order to bloom. There was one spectacular example of this in my high school class back in Iowa City. DN was a very typical orchestra nerd—mousy shoulder-length brown hair, unobtrusive and unremarkable attire, quiet friends, sweet and friendly demeanor, and glasses. Clear plastic frames that were not too outsized, if I remember correctly. Then, suddenly, I think in the beginning of our freshmen or sophomore year, she showed up to school sans glasses. And instead of clear plastic framed spectacles, there was shiny purple eyeshadow! From then on, DN changed in the ways that you’d expect, but also, not changed in the ways that you’d expect. I had quit orchestra after my freshman year (I was a horrible violin player) so I didn’t see DN all that much, but when I did see her she was both familiar and glossily new. She kept all her quiet, nerdy orchestra girlfriends, still played the violin, was still very sweet and friendly to all. But instead of jeans and sweatshirts that maintained a comfortable and modest pocket of air between flesh and cloth, she wore brassy biker-girl leather jackets, and tight, tight, TIGHT black jeans.

The thing about those jeans was that magically, their back pocket suddenly grew a hairy male hand. Yes, quiet shy DN got a boyfriend. And not just any boyfriend either, but one who was very much a bad boy, Iowa City style: whiteboy, long brown hair (might have been a mullet), muscular, walked with a bow-legged swagger that emulated the lead singer or Poison (or Warrant or Winger or Mr. Big). When DN and her boyfriend would walk down the hallway together, he had his hand shoved deep into HER jeans backpocket. On one such occasion of their sighting, I remember overhearing one uptight girl saying to another, “DN is such a slut now!” I didn’t agree; I mean, isn’t it actually nice that tight black jeans comes with a matching hickey? In fact, I quite admired DN for this transformation, and was probably quite envious—of both jeans and boy.

But this is all very regular; DN’s story is not at all unusual. In fact, having been a physically geeky kid myself, I went through my own DN moment in the summer of 1994, when I tossed out my glasses (round wire frames, VERY The Last Emperor), got fitted for contacts, started wearing tight t-shirts to show off worked-out pecs and just generally started slutting around (hickeys included). That was many summers ago, but the feeling seems to have repossessed me. Well, not the hickey and pec and slutting part, but the general feeling of wanting to feel sexy. So why did I have this sudden urge to re-find the very glasses I had abondoned to be sexy? Why do these glasses make me feel sexy?

Well, in truth, it’s not so much about glasses as it is about hair. I personally am not one of those girls who wear rhinestones in their glasses, as you can see. But I think a chic, simple glasses frame can perfectly frame an otherwise hothouse feminine self-presentation. This is all due to Lee Remick in the 1959 film Anatomy of a Murder. In this film, Remick plays the sexy (read by others: “slutty”) wife of an army lieutenant. When she is raped by a sleazy bar-owner, her hot-tempered husband goes and kills the guy, which is when Jimmy Stewart his hired as the eccentric defense attorney. Anatomy of a Murder is an interesting text for archiving the filmic representation of female sexuality. It’s kind of infamous for being the first mainstream American film to use the word “panties.” But more importantly, it argues, way before The Accused (1987), that a woman’s sexy self-presentation is most definitely NOT an invitation to rape, or even, sex.

This argument of course hinges on Lee Remick’s embodiment of feminine sexiness. Remick is utterly wonderful. In her more overtly sexy scenes, she really is all jazz and jiggle in tight capri pants and braless sweaters. But what is even more intriguing is that Remick’s sexy character wears glasses. Of course, following the cultural script about girls who wear glasses, she doesn’t wear them all the time—and she hints that she prefers not wearing them. But as she explains at one point, “I wear them to read, play pinball.” (It’s a disturbing kismet that Jodie Foster’s character in The Accused is raped on a pinball machine, and Lee Remick’s character plays pinball the night she is raped.) But this is what is so beautifully idiosyncratic about Remick’s femininity in the film. The glasses are not a deterrent to but an accoutrement of her sexiness: she has to play pinball to “jiggle” her tight-panted butt, and in order to play pinball, she has to wear glasses. So, the glasses become necessary to her sexy aura.

This is a point that is underscored in the courtroom scene in which the prosecution attempts to prove that Remick’s “sexy” is actually “slutty.” When the trial starts, Jimmy Stewart anticipates this and orders her to look the part of a “good wife”: tweedy suit and hat, glasses firmly in place. The prosecution calls a witness to describe how Remick looked on the night of the murder, to show that she is indeed a slut who was not raped. When he begins to describe what her hair looked like, Stewart simply asks Remick to take off her hat and show the court her hair:

I find this scene glorious. It’s like a shampoo ad as assault rifle: Remick whips off the hat, and tosses her hair about and then sits there, fully proud and unashamed of her femininity. This gesture says to the court: "Yes I am sexy but you will not make me feel shame about my femininity." But I also love that she doesn’t take off her black, heavy-framed glasses. I love the nonchalance of the gesture, and the new kind of femininity that it creates. Remick’s subtle argument is that the geekiness of black glasses is not discordant with a traditional feminine sexiness. The message here is not “You can be a sexy girl in spite of your glasses,” but “You are a sexy girl because of your glasses.”

So I saw the film again a few weeks ago, and totally became obsessed with replicating Remick’s courtroom look. I hunted around for frames, and finally came upon the perfect pinball-playing pair: Tom Ford TF5040, a.k.a. “Cary.” You know you’re making an investment on your femininity when a pair of prescription glasses cost the same as a good cashmere cardigan or a Lanvin bag on markdown at Barneys. I’ve stored away my contact lenses for now, and been wearing these glasses almost every day. I feel pretty sexy in these glasses (and hopefully it's not totally delusional!); I think that the heavy black 1950s-style frames go well with big hair, and makes my face feel smaller. I’ve been feeling not only like Lee Remick, but also my pop-cult namesake, Jenny Schecter (Mia Kirshner) on this past season of “The L Word”: Jenny also wore heavy black frames to great effect when playing at being a film director.

But unexpectedly, I felt like my own self--more specifically, my adolescent self. My very first pair of glasses were black-framed. I picked them out myself, with no cultural referents—just the budding and questionable personal taste of a 14-year old fag.

I don’t know why I’m holding this blue balloon from the First National Bank of Iowa City in this picture; maybe I’m dreaming of being floated away out of the midwest into some beautiful homosexual heaven. Wearing these glasses today, I’m Lee Remick and Mia Kirshner but also my own babyfaggot self—fresh pimples and all. Wearing my new glasses connects me now—with my banged long hair, my lipstick, my shameless femmeness—with that kid with the black glasses. I’m taking an Bic pen to those beginning days of adolescence, and doing some badgirl vandalistic doodling: drawing a web of curlicues, hearts, rainbows, fairies, princesses, potential boyfriends’ initials, around that babyfaggot who felt so physically and psychically so ugly, and making him an antique desk to be velvet roped in the museum of my heart.