Scent Politics: Prejudice, Body Odour, and Cambridge University
How our oldest sense still harbours our most primal aversions.
I spent a couple of formative years living in Kathmandu as a kid. Thanks to that time, the overwhelming miasma of this beautiful city became perhaps my favourite scent on Earth.
Returning to Nepal for five months during my gap year, I chose for mostly financial reasons to eat only local food. I did end up having more Western food occasionally, but at least 90% of my diet consisted of Nepali classics – lots of dal bhat tarkari, roti, and the occasional thukpa or plate of momos. An unexpected effect of this was that my body odour became almost indistinguishable from those around me, a fact that I only truly noticed after returning home. (I assume the air quality also had an effect on my body odour, much like how tobacco affects a smoker’s scent, but that field is far less understood.)
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A person’s odour can trigger a pretty immediate response in your brain – intrigue, happiness, or perhaps most notably, disgust.
Dr Ally Louks, a Cambridge literary scholar whose thesis on scent and literature went viral on Twitter last year, probably knows as well as anyone that knee-jerk reaction at scale can cause significant harm. After she posted a photo online of her thesis, Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose, it quickly went viral for all the wrong reasons. Racking up over 100 million views on Twitter, the post drew widespread outrage over academic merit and perceived anti-intellectualism, as well as misogynistic attacks and threats of violence, one of which prompted a police investigation. Notably, the thesis was still under embargo – as it will remain until November 2025 – meaning the entirety of this backlash was based on initial impressions rather than actual criticism.
Scent can cause this kind of snap judgment as well, prompting feelings of disgust before you even see the source of the smell. This likely emerged in our very early ancestors as a survival instinct, helping them avoid infection from rotting food and death by fire (olfaction is widely believed to be the oldest of the human senses). But paired with social conditioning and an us-versus-them mindset, feelings associated with this primal and largely subconscious sense become very difficult to leave behind.
We’ve taught our eyes and ears to accept people for how they look and sound, but our most primal sense has some catching up to do. More often than not, turning your nose up at someone is less a rejection of their odour than of their culture, diet, and habits. Much like the thesis that sparked millions of reactions from people who hadn’t read a single page of it, our reactions to scent are much more about our own conditioning than they are about aesthetics or survival instincts. It’s not just an olfactory problem but a societal one.
Next time a scent makes you recoil, pause to consider why. You might come to appreciate what once repelled you.