It’s true that most smells we notice are unpleasant, outside of the kitchen, in the same way that most messages from our touch receptors are unpleasant—but all the more valuable for it.
Huh. I wonder if this is at least somewhat down to sex-linked biology.
I’m trans, and my sense of smell changed significantly with hormone therapy. Before, I wouldn’t have necessarily said that “most smells” I noticed were unpleasant, but it was definitely true that if I noticed an aroma at all from anything other than food, it was somewhat likely to be so. A lot of things I’d later learn I could smell, just faded into the background and weren’t noticed as such.
Fast forward to years of living with a different hormone regimen. Everything smells, in the same sense that everything I can see has color. Most things do not smell bad, either—they’re just there, noticeable, conveying information. It’s as stimulating as texture and as distinctive as color, and no more likely to be unpleasant than either of those things. Most smells are if anything pleasant, simply because they’re non-icky sensory information with some emotional effects. I love to smell packages and objects that I’ve ordered from other countries, because the air inside contains some of the scents of the place where they came from—and whenever I’ve travelled to a place I had received a package from, the signature was unmistakable. When my partner is travelling for business, I even sometimes sleep cuddling the shirt she wore just before she left, because it smells like her.
So, yeah. If smell is like a pain sensor at a distance to you, possibly you don’t have a very strong sense of smell.
Huh. I wonder if this is at least somewhat down to sex-linked biology.
I’m trans, and my sense of smell changed significantly with hormone therapy.
Interesting. That’s one way of checking for biological differences between sexes that doesn’t rely on speculation or statistics (which might be confounded by self-fulfilling prophecies about gender roles).
I’d guess it’s of limited utility—there’s very little good information about all of the effects of this sort of HRT (a very common conversation among trans folks is what effects the doctors never mentioned).
A lot of human sex variation is down to your hormones, particularly during puberty—the x-vs-y chromosomes control much less than you think (the phenotypical development of the penis/testes combo is controlled by the SRY gene; sometimes you get phenotypically “male” folks with an XX pair where the SRY gene has translocated, or XY phenotypically “female” folks without the SRY gene, as well as XY and a functioning SRY gene but who develop as phenotypic “females” anyway. Genetic traits that aren’t themselves sex-linked can nonetheless be strongly affected by the difference hormones make—this is why trans women grow breasts and trans men often find theirs shrinking; it’s also probably why my sense of smell shifted, since that can be rather strongly hereditary and my mother has a very strong sense of smell (enough she’d frequently get headaches in the vicinity of perfume).
Well, it isn’t just that, but I was trying to show the utility of having a sense of smell by the comparison. I appreciate my touch/pain receptors immensely, likewise smell.
Most of my touch information is either information (“there is a wall here”), or pleasant (cuddling).
In fairness, I know how to move around blind (and practice 2-3 days a year), and my whole life I’ve seemed to just naturally pay attention to thinks like the texture of my clothes, fiddling with jewelry or small objects, the texture of the ground as I walk (I often go barefoot, but I notice it even in thick boots), etc. so I’m definitely an outlier.
But I’m an outlier in terms of paying attention, not in terms of touch actually being a routinely unpleasant sense, I’d hope.
Assuming you mean you tend to hit stuff a lot, aye, I tend to be very good at avoiding such, and I also don’t find stubbed toes and bumped heads particularly unpleasant (but mostly I don’t have them frequently :))
It’s true that most smells we notice are unpleasant, outside of the kitchen, in the same way that most messages from our touch receptors are unpleasant—but all the more valuable for it.
Smell is like a pain sensor at a distance.
Huh. I wonder if this is at least somewhat down to sex-linked biology.
I’m trans, and my sense of smell changed significantly with hormone therapy. Before, I wouldn’t have necessarily said that “most smells” I noticed were unpleasant, but it was definitely true that if I noticed an aroma at all from anything other than food, it was somewhat likely to be so. A lot of things I’d later learn I could smell, just faded into the background and weren’t noticed as such.
Fast forward to years of living with a different hormone regimen. Everything smells, in the same sense that everything I can see has color. Most things do not smell bad, either—they’re just there, noticeable, conveying information. It’s as stimulating as texture and as distinctive as color, and no more likely to be unpleasant than either of those things. Most smells are if anything pleasant, simply because they’re non-icky sensory information with some emotional effects. I love to smell packages and objects that I’ve ordered from other countries, because the air inside contains some of the scents of the place where they came from—and whenever I’ve travelled to a place I had received a package from, the signature was unmistakable. When my partner is travelling for business, I even sometimes sleep cuddling the shirt she wore just before she left, because it smells like her.
So, yeah. If smell is like a pain sensor at a distance to you, possibly you don’t have a very strong sense of smell.
Interesting. That’s one way of checking for biological differences between sexes that doesn’t rely on speculation or statistics (which might be confounded by self-fulfilling prophecies about gender roles).
I’d guess it’s of limited utility—there’s very little good information about all of the effects of this sort of HRT (a very common conversation among trans folks is what effects the doctors never mentioned).
A lot of human sex variation is down to your hormones, particularly during puberty—the x-vs-y chromosomes control much less than you think (the phenotypical development of the penis/testes combo is controlled by the SRY gene; sometimes you get phenotypically “male” folks with an XX pair where the SRY gene has translocated, or XY phenotypically “female” folks without the SRY gene, as well as XY and a functioning SRY gene but who develop as phenotypic “females” anyway. Genetic traits that aren’t themselves sex-linked can nonetheless be strongly affected by the difference hormones make—this is why trans women grow breasts and trans men often find theirs shrinking; it’s also probably why my sense of smell shifted, since that can be rather strongly hereditary and my mother has a very strong sense of smell (enough she’d frequently get headaches in the vicinity of perfume).
Well, it isn’t just that, but I was trying to show the utility of having a sense of smell by the comparison. I appreciate my touch/pain receptors immensely, likewise smell.
Most of my touch information is either information (“there is a wall here”), or pleasant (cuddling).
In fairness, I know how to move around blind (and practice 2-3 days a year), and my whole life I’ve seemed to just naturally pay attention to thinks like the texture of my clothes, fiddling with jewelry or small objects, the texture of the ground as I walk (I often go barefoot, but I notice it even in thick boots), etc. so I’m definitely an outlier.
But I’m an outlier in terms of paying attention, not in terms of touch actually being a routinely unpleasant sense, I’d hope.
hypothesis: you are shorter than I am. ;)
Assuming you mean you tend to hit stuff a lot, aye, I tend to be very good at avoiding such, and I also don’t find stubbed toes and bumped heads particularly unpleasant (but mostly I don’t have them frequently :))