Women's hedonic ratings of body odor of heterosexual and homosexual men

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Sergeant, M.J.T., Dickins, T.E., Davies, M.N.O. and Griffiths, M.D. ORCID: 0000-0001-8880-6524, 2007. Women's hedonic ratings of body odor of heterosexual and homosexual men. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 36 (3), pp. 395-401.

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10508-006-9126-3

Abstract

Men’s body odor influences women’s mate choice, and individual variation among traits affect hedonic perceptions of this odor (e.g., immune system characteristics; Wedekind & Füri, 1997). Previous research by Sergeant (2002) indicated that one such characteristic is sexual orientation: body odor from homosexual men was perceived by heterosexual women as more hedonically pleasing than that of heterosexual men. The current study re-examined the influence of men’s sexual orientation on women’s perceptions of body odor. Homosexual (n = 10) and heterosexual (n = 9) men produced samples of body odor using T-shirts under equivalent environmental conditions. Heterosexual women (n = 35) rated these samples, and a set of unused T-shirts, using a series of hedonic scales. Women rated the body odor of homosexual men as being comparatively more pleasant, sexier, and more preferable than that of heterosexual men but not significantly different to the unused T-shirts. This finding is consistent with contemporary research demonstrating that an individual’s sexual orientation significant impacts their olfactory function, both in terms of body odor production (Martins et al., 2005) and olfactory perceptions of certain compounds (Savic et al., 2005).

Item Type:

Journal article

Description:

The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com

Publication Title:

Archives of Sexual Behavior

Creators:

Sergeant, M.J.T., Dickins, T.E., Davies, M.N.O. and Griffiths, M.D.

Publisher:

Springer

Date:

2007