[richlevy]

Y'know, a few years ago I was talking to a friend of mine who had moved into a new suburban community a while back. It turns out that one of her neighbors, a divorced mom living with her boyfriend, was hosting orgies and running a porn site from her house.

My friend mentioned that the woman was selling panties from her web site. Maybe it was because I was naive, or maybe because my mother's family was in the lingerie business, but it took me a short while to understand that the neighbor was selling used panties. I can sort of understand that women, by themselves, can smell nice. I even understand that, for example, Napolean was supposed to be attracted to an unwashed Josephine. Still, I don't personally get it. To me the whole idea smells fishy.

However, according to this article, women would be more logical buyers for used underwear than men.

Napoleon is known to have been susceptible to the smell of the unwashed Josephine. But he was an unusual male. Recent research has indicated that, while male rats are not appreciably affected by the smell of different female rats, female rats showed a preference for the smell of certain male rats. An experiment along the same lines was done with the clothes of human volunteers. It produced similar results to the ones found in rats. Smell was more important for partner selection in females than males. Interestingly, the clothes of women who were deemed most attractive by men were those that had been worn by women described as “shy and retiring”. The clothes worn by women known to the research workers as being “dominant and aggressive” were considered less desirable.