Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 59

Peddling Eros

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the border area toward the bad-female, that the history of the
olfactory has left its deepest marks in its unfolding as sexual and
aesthetic politics of the body. Tendentially, the natural has become
the bad and war has been waged on it by whole batteries of artificial
cleansers and deodorants, scents and fragrances, perfumes and aromas.
In this struggle feelings of fear and shame are both created and
exploited. In our cultural discourse "b. o." is either an insult or reason
for embarrassment or both. This is where deodorants and perfumes
come into play.
These are the cultural-anthrop>ological parameters the perfume
industry both exploits and adapts itself to. The basic perceptual
constellation of male smellers of female objects has shaped structures
of fantasy, projection, and desire and put an emphasis on aura, the
crucial sales argument in perfume advertising. The olfactory turns out
to be an ideal medium for this approach. While it does provide an
explanatory model—the model of artificial-good versus natural-bad
—it remains vague enough, in fact provides a smoke screen, for the
preservation of the mystery of attraction itself. Given the taxonomic,
perceptual, and linguistic situation outlined so far, a major problem
for perfumers and their advertisers could be the precise nature of
those smells of supreme attraction they are peddling. In this respect
even the best run up against the limits of the olfactory vocabulary.
They have therefore largely abandoned their attempts at verbal
descriptions. Instead, perfume ads barely use language at all and
build connections sublinninally, associatively, and most frequently
visually. Often the name of the product itself is the main, if not the
only, linguistic component of a perfume ad, it too designed to tie the
viewer into the vague, auratic-erotic halo the ad attempts to create:
White Linen for purity; Poison, conjuring up cabals and drama; Joy,
the pure pleasure. Obsession, with its intertwined bodies; in later
versions the naked couple on a swing, created quite a stir in the
consumer world. Byzance and Isatis, with their vague exotic appeal;
Ralph Lauren's series of Safari ads recalling 1930's travels; and
recently Egoiste for men, walking, as the text has it, "on the positive
side of that fine line separating arrogance from an awareness of selfworth." Paco Rabanne, also for men, with its open-ended phone
conversation between a man (pictured) and a woman (absent) is
downright verbose among recent p>erfume ads, but it too contains an
open space for imagination, in fact it explicitly says so: "What is