Another reason why ya gotta love men.

The wife has been getting interested in women’s magazine’s lately. I can’t say I quite get why. She’s always seemed like such the intellectual type (she is, after all, a Ph.D). But then I guess I’ve always wondered why, when on the rare occasions I stay out late into the evening, I come home to find her watching trash TV shows like Wifeswap and Temptation Island. Something in there just loves that cheap sensationalism…or maybe it’s a just a release from having to be so intellectually serious all day. Who knows?

Anyway, the other day she picked up an issue of O, The Oprah Magazine to see if she might want to get a subscription to it. Maybe it’s because a rag like that is such a novelty in our house (or that I secretly harbor my own desire for cheesy popular smut), I began to leaf through it this morning while Josephine was watching cartoons. It contained all the stuff you’d expect…articles on how to revamp your underwear drawer, scrub your scalp and develop a spiritually enlightened colon. Yet there was one little side item that caught my eye.

It was a study by a doctor by the name of Alan Hirsch from some place called the Smell & Taste Treatment & Research Foundation. Apparently, using a device called a plethysmograph, he set out to measure the degree to which certain scents stimulated blood flow to a man’s, er…nether region (this is Oprah, remember). Just who would voluteer for such a study I can scarcely imagine (unless maybe he paid the poor schmucks in beer). Anyway, Hirsch performed tests on a wide variety of substances typically found in women’s perfumes: rose petals, fruit fragrances etc. Yet for all that the odor that produced the most profound response — far oustripping the aromas of even the most exotic love elixirs — cheese pizza. The close second: roasted meat.

This might open up an entire new market in women’s frangrances. L’eau D’Issey de Matucci’s or L’Air du Mack’s Beef & Bottle. Department store perfume counters could be utterly transformed! God, I love being a man.