The human capacity for inventiveness is a marvel – and not only in our grander creations such as written language, the wheel and space travel. We create in many smaller and wacky ways.
Take smell dating.
At a smell-dating event – as in May in Moscow’s famous Gorky Park – participants wipe off all deodorants and perfumes. They share in high-intensity exercise. They then swipe cotton pads across their armpits and place the smelly blobs in unmarked containers. Next, participants sniff the swabs and rate those whose scents appealed to them. Event organizers determine if there are matches.
Sweaty entanglements, we suppose, may follow.
Call me a fuddy-duddy, but I’d not heard of smell dating until stumbling across an article about the Gorky Park event in the Canadian journal The Walrus. So I searched online – and found loads of information.
One link led deceptively to benaughty.com, which then … oh, I am so not writing that! The other links were to reputable news outlets. Smell dating apparently has acquired the status of “real thing.”
Hmmm. I have just two questions:
WTH? SMELL DATING??!!!!!
