i can smell the difference between orgasms, and you can too

the scientific exploration of the olfactory distinctions between different kinds of climaxes

this article discusses the act of the orgasm and the different ways they might smell. if that is uniquely bothersome to you i simply recommend clicking away. but you should read, if you dare.

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I have kept this bit of information to myself for several years because I am aware that it may seem strange to say, “I can smell what kind of orgasm you had,” without sounding like I’m clinically insane or like I’m about to come out of the closet as an unlicensed sex coach, but I think that’s exactly what Substack was made for. I have also lost most of my dignity surrounding sex at this point in my life, so you know what, fuck it.

For as much as you might be too shy to talk about it or too proud to admit it out loud, your pussy does all of the talking for you. You simply smell different when you come. More specifically, you smell different depending on how aroused you were and what kind of orgasm you had.

Quick ones that come from clitoral stimulation do not smell like the orgasms that have been building for the last twenty minutes, and those don’t smell like the orgasms you’ve experienced after a particularly long session of penetration. I’m aware that this sounds insane, but I spend a lot of time paying attention to the way a woman’s body responds beneath me, which I don’t think is a bad thing.

I also want to be clear that one does not smell better than another. They just smell different depending on the change in intensity and how the orgasm was pulled from her body. And every woman smells different. I’m not taking random guesses or doing blind scent tests for fun like a Bushwick party trick. Every woman’s body speaks its own language, and you have to have spent enough time with her to learn from it and to hear what it’s telling you.

It seems embarrassing to me how limited our vocabulary is for the way a healthy vagina smells. We have a lot of words for when something is wrong with one — yeasty, fishy, rotten, etc. Medicine and misogyny work together to create a very unsexy understanding of a woman’s scent, but if you ask someone what a healthy, aroused woman smells like, they often use words like ‘musky,’ which is, in my opinion, not a satisfactory description.

When we talk about the aroma of wine, we hear that it has notes of cherry, tobacco, leather, and chocolate. You smack your lips together and swirl your tongue in your mouth, comment on the aftertaste and what is left on the tip of your tongue after sipping it, and pussy simply gets musky. How wildly unfair.

This also often means that women are taught to only notice the scent of their own bodies when they should be afraid that something is wrong. There are entire aisles at pharmacies dedicated to wipes, douches, powders, and generally floral-scented products that were invented for the sole purpose of telling women that a vagina should smell ‘clean’ in the same way soap or sweet things are clean. Ideally, of course, it shouldn’t smell at all. But I can say from my own perspective that I do not want a woman to smell like nothing, or artificial lavender. What would be the point of putting my face there instead of a candle?

Before you can accuse me of inventing all of this from thin air because I enjoy making women nervous (and to be clear, I do!), there is actual science to back me up at least partially.

What we refer to as vaginal wetness is not one thing. It can include fluid passing through the vaginal wall, cervical mucus, vulvar sweat and oil, secretions from both the Bartholin and Skene glands, dead skin cells, and compounds produced by the vaginal microbiome. A 1981 review of vaginal odor describes the several compounds that contribute to the scent of the vagina. And depending on how one decides to interact with a vagina, it changes the makeup of things.

This was established in 1979 by researchers who collected a set of vaginal secretions before and after sexual stimulation, and analyzed them with gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. The findings were fascinating — arousal changed the proportions of what was found in the fluid. Several lipid constituents increased, including increases in glycerol and stearic acid, while the new fluid diluted some compounds that were originally present in the vagina. The study, of course, did not discover some array of magic horny chemicals, though that’s incredibly disappointing because I would enjoy proliferating that information; but it did establish on a scientific level that sexual stimulation changes the mixture of the vaginas secretions.

There is also typically more than one fluid present at any given moment. I think we have all heard people talk in circles about what squirting truly entails and whether or not it is piss or a secret third thing, though I must say, as a lesbian with significant experience in this regard, I think there are probably multiple variations of the ‘female ejaculation’ and piss is probably involved, which is fine and you should get over it, but anyway.

We can deduce from a scientific level that depending on the woman, the length of arousal, and the kind of orgasm that was had, there may be different proportions of vaginal fluid, sweat, secretions, and maybe piss present. I’m not sure why we would ever pretend that that would smell identical.

Scientists have also found that people can detect the scent of a woman’s arousal. In a series of experiments published in 2020, researchers collected sweat from women’s armpits while they watched either erotic or neutral materials and later found that men rated the aroused samples as more attractive, and smelling them increased the men’s own arousal responses. The conclusion was that women release distinctive olfactory signals when they are horny.

I keep getting stuck on the fact that these samples were taken from their armpits, which is a respectable place to bury your face, but the authors of the study suggested that future research may examine scent from the vulva. May. Straight people were faced with the opportunity to study straight from the source and simply lost their nerve. I am proud to say that lesbians have been leading the cause in this regard — no grant funding was needed, just extraordinary commitment to the bit on our end.

I grew up in a community where there is an entire tractate of Talmud devoted to the topic of menstruation and not one sentence about the way a woman smells after a particularly intense orgasm. This is a shocking gap in the mesorah. Orthodox Judaism taught me a lot about how to examine the particular workings of a woman’s vagina. Blood must be thoroughly examined; stains need to be accounted for. But it turns out that the body can also produce significant and interesting evidence when it is having a very good time. Halachically speaking, lesbian sex may be regarded as literally fake, but olfactorily, there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary, my friends. No rav required for this inspection.

I’m sure you’re thinking about the way you smell now. I have, after all, been talking to you this entire time about the different ways in which a pussy can emit a certain aroma. Perhaps you’ve remembered a woman lifting her face from between your legs and looking up at you with a particular expression, when you thought she was admiring her work. Maybe she was. But she also may have been basking in the glory of your scent.

Don’t worry, I can’t smell you through Substack. It has many invasive features now, but that’s not one of them. And even if I could, one sample doesn’t tell you very much. As I said, bodies speak in different languages. You need a baseline, repeated observations, and intimate familiarity with your cycle and the way your body responds to different stimuli. For science, of course, as I’ve so clearly stated thus far.

That is what makes scent erotic to me, by the way. It is entirely private information. You can see a naked woman anywhere — on screen or in your bed, but knowing how she smells when she is barely aroused, very aroused, or coming so hard she blushes after the fact requires you to be very good at what you do, because it requires you to return to her.

Some people are so focused on trying to get a woman to come that they miss the actual act of the orgasm. Many people cannot even clock the specific way the body contracts or how muscles tremble. If you’ve never noticed any of this, I’m not saying that you’re bad at sex — I just think you could do better.

Your pussy may not be able to keep a secret, but fortunately for you, I can.