F*ck Around and Find Out with Anna Lee: Can you really smell your perfect match?

Hello, my sweet angel pies! I'm going to let you in on a little secret: most of the time, I end up writing the intro LAST, because I don't always know where the questions and answers are going to end up going. Yes, I live life on the edge like that. Anyway, now that I've picked the questions and answered them, I'm calling this month's theme, "bonus fun facts and poorly done Photoshop." You'll see what I mean. Let's get to it!

Wait, what? Women can really SMELL genes from men? I need to know more about this immediately. -LW (DM sent to Anna)

OMG, you know what? I had to shorten that whole thing to fit my column last month but it deserved so much better—because the study goes WAY deeper. Let me make it up to you.

It's a 1995 study by a researcher named Claus Wedekind, and the setup is exactly as gross as you're hoping. He had men sleep in the same cotton t-shirt for two nights straight. No deodorant, no cologne, no spicy food, no sex allowed. Then he put each shirt in a box with a little hole in it and had women come sniff and rate them.

And shockingly, the women rated the shirts of men whose immunity genes were the most different from their own as the sexiest smelling. The theory goes that the more different your immunity genes are from your partner’s, the stronger immune system your offspring would have. 

BUT. Here's the part I couldn't fit last time and it's the best part. In that same study, the women on hormonal birth control flipped completely and preferred the men with the most similar immunity genes. Wedekind's guess is that the pill mimics a pregnancy hormone state, and when your body thinks it's already pregnant, it's not shopping for genes anymore. It wants family. It wants the smell of people like you!!! CRAZY RIGHT?!

Which raises the question I have been fretting over: Does going on or off the pill quietly change who you're into?! A 2008 followup tested the same women before and after starting the pill and did see that shift. So, maybe? (Fair warning, this research is famous but not settled. No one's cleanly replicated the whole thing since then.)

BONUS: The silliest study I found around scents. In 2005, a researcher, Dr. Alan R. Hirsch, measured blood flow to people's genitals while they sniffed different scents, and the winning combo for men was pumpkin pie and lavender. For women? Good & Plenty licorice and cucumber. I know. I KNOW. This one's even shakier though, and I say that as someone who desperately wanted it to be real. Tiny sample of 31 people and no peer-reviewed publication. Hirsch also studied how the scent of jasmine affects bowling scores. So…grain of salt. I can tell you though, as a sample size of one, I’ve never envisioned a licorice and cucumber combo making me wet.

I’ve been seeing this new guy for two months now and we were fooling around, and he started sucking on my toes. I was a bit surprised but rolled with it. He told me after we had sex that he is into feet. I’ve never been with anyone with a foot fetish and I don’t know how I feel about it. Do you think this is a deal breaker? -Anonymous

Is your guy Quentin Tarantino? (sorry, that was such a cheap joke!)

Okay, real talk. I can't tell you whether this is a deal breaker. Only you get to decide that, and I'd be a garbage advice columnist if I handed you a verdict on your own relationship. What I CAN tell you is my own experience. I dated a guy with a foot thing once, and honestly? I got fire foot massages and he loved taking me to get pedicures. To me, it was a win-win when his kink was "I want to worship this body part you were going to maintain anyway."

But before you decide anything, I want you to clarify what he means by "into feet." Because those are two pretty different situations: A foot kink means feet are an enhancer. They turn him on, he'd love for them to be part of the mix, but he can absolutely have a great time without them. A foot fetish means feet are mandatory for arousal. No feet, no engine. That's a bigger conversation about how you both structure your sex life together.

Neither is bad! But "he'd love it if I let him suck my toes sometimes," and "this is a required ingredient," are different negotiations and it's worth knowing which one you're working with before you spiral.

BONUS: One of my favorite fun facts in the kink universe is that foot fetishes might be a wiring situation. Your brain has a map of your body laid out across the somatosensory cortex, and on that map, the feet sit right next to the genitals. Neurologist V.S. Ramachandran famously used this to explain why some amputees feel phantom sensations in a missing foot during orgasm. The theory goes that in some brains, those neighboring regions can get their wires crossed a bit. So maybe your guy's brain may have simply drawn its map with a slightly generous border.

 I promise you that there is truly NO question too unhinged for F*ck Around and Find Out with Anna Lee. Have a question you’d like me to answer for the next article? Submit them anonymously here!