Silicon Valley must really hate women. First, Peter Thiel thinks the world went to hell in a handbasket when women were given the vote (they are insufficiently ardent about libertarianism), and now a couple of guys have created a startup to make probiotic supplements that make your vulva smell like peaches. Along the same lines, they want to sell a probiotic for your pets that will make their poop smell like bananas.
Their choice of targets is revealing: women and pets, for the gratification of men. Why not a probiotic for male body odor? Hey, how about a supplement that makes men’s farts smell like Axe Body Spray?
Oh. Never mind. Axe already smells like farts.
But that means it should be easy!
From a comment on the Peter Thiel article:
I don’t even know what that first part means. The second part is just another way of saying Peter Thiel is capable of leaving behind tons of money for his family. My heart goes out to the poor suffering man.
Looks like they’re already on the fart project, by the way:
I don’t know. If somebody walks into the room and they smell nice, I wouldn’t know what to think.
Saad @ #1
Easy. Women vote for democrats. Democrats tax more. Rich man gets less money.
Now, don’t you feel bad for for him?
There’s already a solution for evil-smelling poop. It’s called vegetarianism.
90% farts? Remind me not to take a flight with him.
davidnagle:
The 90% figure is probably for business class.
I’m pretty sure the expansion of “welfare” or general social services in the US that happened post-1920 had waaaaay more to do with predatory capitalism that went unrestrained by government regulation and caused the Great Depression than silly wimmin voting for Government SugarDaddy. Not to mention men and women supporting attempts by the government to check the trend toward feudalism runaway capitalism seems to frequently display by reducing senior poverty and the cost of health care as well as providing better schools to everyone.
Also Peter Theil seems to have missed the Progressive Era under TR, which happened well before women had universal suffrage (on paper) in the US.
I never really noticed a huge diff between Axe and anything else. My opinion of it is largely colored by its awful ad campaign. If I notice it on a friend’s shelf I might wonder how somebody could actually see its commercials and decide “Hey, I really want to line the pockets of sexist fuckers today!” but if somebody using it walked by me, I probably couldn’t distinguish it from any other body spray.
Gah. Men who hate women continue to try to “fix” us so that we make better toys.
The solution to not liking the smell of pussy is a simple one. If you’d rather smell peaches than pussy, go eat a peach. Problem solved. Either that, or go down on a Strawberry Shortcake doll. She stays dry, smells like fruit and won’t ever talk back. She’s perfect for Thiel.
Women voting got the world to hell. Everything was better 100 years ago when in most of the western world women did not have the right to vote. It was November 1914 and most of the western world was involved in the second mot successful attempt of killing each other.
Let me correct that: Most of the western world’s men, those very men who were the only ones who’d voted in the governments that happily conducted an arms race and then desperately needed a war to try them out .
Everything was better in the good old days when rich men could influence poor men enough to vote for wars in which the poor men could die for the benefit of the rich men.
Kind of sounds like the Republican party today…
nich @ #7
True. Although, the dudes who buy and use Axe typically drown themselves in it, making it that much more intolerable.
But it makes sense. More Axe = more scantily clad ladies. That’s just science.
Peter Thiel, neoreactionary and cult funder. He’s the man who bankrolls the “Machine Intelligence Research Institute,” the doomsday cult complete with a secular satan and a variant of Pascal’s Wager to keep cult members in line.
@6 He wants to go back to having an empowered monarchy, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t care. (IMO the Libertarianism is a cover.)
@OP That’s an insult against farts. Farts at least don’t give me a massive headache.
Well, as someone with a cat who developed IBS and decided she will only be pooping on puppy pads instead of in the litterbox for the foreseeable future: sign me up for the banana-scented cat poop ASAP.
In my experience you have to get very close to a vagina to be able to smell it, and when you are in the position to do so why the hell would you want it to smell of peaches??? If you want a whiff of peach surely it’s easier just to open a tin of peaches?
you know, if libertarians were actually about freedom and not just assholes who want their particular desires enshrined in law and isolationist twits, I’d consider being a libertarian.
but this woman isn’t buying that horseshit.
and peaches? my husband hates peaches :)
Giliell @ #8
Oh, hell no. If they actually allowed people to vote on the actual issues things would be horrible. So instead they make sure that you only elect people who make your decisions for you, and then ensure only the right sort of people can be elected. So I guess the right response to “women shouldn’t have the vote, everything was better before then” is “really? there was actual change?”
As for the original subject, words fail me. And at the risk of being gauche, wouldn’t it actually make more sense for them to mess with seminal fluid? At least people seem to have studied the male reproductive system enough to have the first clue, whereas it rather seems the female system is more or less anyone’s guess.
Back in the ’70s, when TV ad’s for feminine hygiene products were still a new thing, somebody came out with a men’s equivalent to FDS (Female Deodorant Spray). It was called “Umpire” – for foul balls.
#2: Women vote for democrats. Democrats tax more. Rich man gets less money.
Ah, women. What’s not to like?
I look forward to him being sued for kids dying from eating banana poop.
But bananas smell much worse than poop.
Ha!
I rather like Deborah Lee Gould’s alleged suggestion of “Cocksure” for a male equivalent brand…
I yield to no one in my disdain for Thiel but his stupid suffrage quote is five years out of date and he seems to have backed off. The stupid dudes who want to fix lady parts and pet poop, however, are real and current, and one of them is involved in the “glowing plants” effort that could be the first unregulated, unmonitored release of synthetically modified organisms.
LOL.
“body spray”
*eyeroll*
madtom1999 @ #18
Ha. First thing I thought was, if humans find certain smells revolting, isn’t for a good reason? Nothing objectively smells “bad”. The scent of shit just triggers our brain to go, “Yuk, no thank you.” Turns out, eating and touching shit isn’t good humans. Well, except for Peter Thiel. He should definitely eat shit.
Oddly enough, humans have an aversive response to the smell of most amines and sulfur-containing compounds.
I for one am rather ashamed of just how popular libertarianism is in the tech industry. Considering what good information technology does in the world and the humble start most of the pioneers had, one would expect something a bit more egalitarian. Indeed, going to those very pioneers, such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, I tend to see a more generous attitude. Going even farther back, to Charles Babbage and Lady Ada Lovelace (the joint pioneers of the entire concept of computers and computer programming), one finds they tended to be a bit more egalitarian too. (Ada Lovelace apparently hated her father Lord Byron Lovelace, and not without good cause considering his typical chauvinism, plus frankly her pioneering in computer programming did far more for the world than his poetry ever did, such as providing a tool to let you look up his poetry.)
Certainly not everyone in the tech industry has these attitudes, but enough do for it to be a problem. I flirted a bit with libertarianism when I ditched Christianity a few years back, but over time and in spite of libertarian web sites saying “this is literally the ONLY world view, the ONLY conclusion any reasonable person could ever reach about how to behave”, within weeks I’d abandoned any interest in it as I concluded the philosophy was both too cruel AND had lots of logical issues. (For example, the entire notion of how to treat children is never addressed. Libertarian philosophy would suggest that one should be free to simply abandon children for the same reasons they’re free to abandon random people on the street. Any defense of this, suggesting that having a child is like forming a contract, starts to look like “social contract” thinking, which is good but it isn’t libertarianism. Also, I can find no logical justification for favoring my own prosperity over that of another’s. What makes me so special, exactly? I may BE me, but that’s just a relative position, not one to base a moral decision on in any logical framework.)
Let me get this straight… If there is a cat, or a penguin, or a cootie carrier, or so on, you know whom you consider to “stink”, then, somehow, you are supposed to convince them or their responsible guardian to buy this goop to be applied, ah, what, daily or something.
Yeah, sure, that’s gonna work.
If the smell is a problem to you, cut off yer nose. Problem solved.
Web enterpreneurs imagine themselves lifted by their own bootstraps. The irony, I believe, is self-evident.
@25, It’s not just in the tech industry they’re all over STEM nowadays. Not just libertarians but the “rationalists” of the cult of less wrong/MIRI. Any disagreement with them is because you’re not “thinking rationally.” Not only that but their members try to recruit other students. It’s odd that this is the case at UC Berkeley considering how in the public mind berkeley is very far left, but STEM majors tend to be far right on anything other than (relatively) mundane social issues.
I mean obviously there are exceptions to this. My close friends in my major (math) are all liberal, one could argue radically so. (and PZ is very antilibertarian/liberal, but he’s part of the older generation of people in STEM so I’m not sure if he should count in this for that reason. That’s more of the reason why I don’t think Bill Gates and Steve Jobs count as a valid counter example.)
On STEM / “tech” industry and libturds: I suspect, based on my experiences here in Europe, this is a USAlienstani phenomenon. Again, based solely on personal observation, I cannot recall ever running in a libturd outside USAlienstani (excepting LOUD obvious tourists in bars (all of whom seemd to be USAliens, albeit “profession” unknown)). I did run into a few in USAlienstani multiple decades ago when I still lived and worked there, but nothing like as frequently as the impression the comments above are giving (obviously, things may have changed, and I cannot meaningfully comment on recent-ish trends).
Now, at the risk of undermining my own point (such as it is, being based only on personal experience), today is Beaujolais nouveau day, so there far more “important” things to do…
Is it only me? Personally I find the smell of clean female genitalia attractive so why is there any need for a method to scent the secretions?
I listened to a segment on Science Friday a few weeks ago about this, and was pretty astounded by how naive Ira Flatow was being. The glowing plants thing was included among a variety of dopey projects that sounded like they were straight out of an undergrad biology lab. Glowing plants were pretty cool when they were first made 30 years ago, but today not so much, and if there were a market for them you’d think Monsanto would have figured it out by the ’90s. Fact is, putting aside the technical problems, it’s conceptually flawed. Plants have terrible photosynthetic efficiency (<1%) and use up most of the energy they receive for growth and homeostasis. If you want solar powered lighting, it already exists with light collection at about 20% efficiency and storage at about 90%.
Basically, these guys are obvious grifters who are selling "edgy" ideas to the ignorant and using crowd-sourcing because no intelligent investor would touch them with a 10-foot solar-powered light pole.
I am genuinely surprised that they didn’t also include a project to make smegma smell like pineapples.
I’m sure someone is marketing a make your semen taste better product. Given the kind of stuff “natural medicine” types market someforeignplantia pills for men, guaranteed to make you taste better, must exist.
well tim I could not resist looking that up I have not read any of them yet though.
https://www.google.com/search?q=ake+your+semen+taste+better+&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=sb
uncle frogy
Area Man @31: Oh, yes. I’m pretty sure Heinz is driven by dreams of the whole synbio as home-brew computers fantasy — becoming as rich as Gates and as influential as Jobs (or, heck, vice versa at least). Meanwhile the glowing plants grift, which he is connected with (and which George Church endorsed), is also a way of setting a precedent for avoiding oversight by FDA or USDA.
@31 Area Man
But at least one of the two startups is IMO quite amusing. Here’s a video “explaining” how Cambrian Genomic’s super-magical dna laser printingTM technology “works”:
3d laser printing living things dna
Maybe they should print less stupid and less sexist versions of the themselves with their 3d-future-laser-science-life-machines.
How about something to make dog poo in bright colors? Finding and avoiding these stinky land mines would be of great social benefit, thinks I.
I suspect, for the most part, the people (surprisingly, not at all exclusively men) who advocate this kind of thing start with an intense disgust for women in general and female sexuality and sexual anatomy in particular, and that completely swamps either natural sexual-characteristic-recognition instincts or “ooh, this thing this person I like’s body does is neat :D” responses.
(The fact that female-bodied humans tend to receive less-than-stellar information about appropriate and healthy hygiene practices, growing up, probably doesn’t help matters, but I don’t think it’s generally the root cause.)
Amusing alright. They took a DNA synthesizer and slapped the label “3D printer” on it, which makes no sense other than to co-opt the current 3D printing craze onto something that has nothing to do with it.
It should go without saying that obtaining the proper DNA sequences is not the barrier to making glowing plants or microbes that make your coochie smell like jasmine, nor would it have been 20 years ago. Even today, synthesis is not the preferred method for obtaining your genes when you can clone them far more cheaply. And if for some reason you need de novo sequences, there are numerous companies that will do it for you at low cost.
My most charitable interpretation is that this is all a marketing ploy to sell their synthesizer, which I’m guessing would not be necessary if the biotech industry had shown any interest in it.
Area Man @31: Indeed. Glowing plants is a simpleton answer to a problem that already has a much better solution. Anyone who is excited about this is really just excited about glowing plants, not about solving a problem. These plants would be toys, not appliances, ever. This would only change if someone somehow designs a photosynthesis mechanism that is much more efficient and a bioenergy storage system that is less leaky than biology has already managed to achieve. And I mean many orders of magnitude better. Switch grass and sugar cane is just not going to cut it. Its about as realistic as using humans as a energy source, not withstanding how awesome the movie “The Matrix” is.
A lot of the “buzz” around bio-startups and bioenergetics is just hot air. What these people don’t understand is biology is good at two things only: replication and creative solutions to niche problems. Energetics is not a niche problem. Biology solved it good enough (forgive my teleological language here) but to ‘solve it’ with decent efficiency requires going back to the drawing board. If Mars had more water I wonder if some interesting solutions to light harvesting would have manifested there or maybe it would turn out only chemical energy is viable. Either way, biological photosystems are piss compared to photovoltaic cells.
Intaglio @30: Indeed, clean genitalia (cock or pussy) should’t need perfuming and I suspect the desire to synthetically change the reality of sex and sexual encounters in this way stems in part from an overexposure to unrealistic pornography. I imagine the thought process is something like this… “I’m down here and all I’m getting out of this is a funky smell and tired tongue/jaw. Whats in this for me?”. The fact they are (suppose to be) pleasuring their partner may very well be far from their mind while ideally pleasuring their partner should be a turn-on for them too.
Besides, if you want ‘it’ to taste like peaches, rub peaches on it. It might be fun for both.
I think poop that smells like food is a reeeeaaaallllyyyyy baaaaaad idea. I expect something that looks like poop to smell like poop (so much so that when I once saw well-made fake plastic joke turd, I kept almost believing I could smell it). I think seeing poop and smelling banana would trigger a much worse disgust reaction than seeing and smelling normal poop, because it would make the primitive parts of my brain try to associate eating with excrement, which is a huge no-no. And it would very likely put me off bananas for a while.
Women’s body odor as a problem is something that has mystified me outside of really specific things like dogs that can smell cancer (maybe one can smell ovarian cancer). But the smell of a vagina in general? I can’t even…
Azkyroth at 38 makes the most sense. I don’t think I want to understand on a personal level.
I am sure they are working on one that smells like money and shattered dreams too, you know, for the twits like Peter Theil.
Oh yeah. Related to my 38 there are people with ovaries who would be considered physically male so even there precision is an issue. This stuff is annoying but has more serious elements.
Public service announcement; applying sugar-containing substances, like fruit juice, to the vulvovaginal region is fairly likely to cause yeast or other infections.
@26. you obviously never heard the traditional english joke:
First man: “my dog’s got no nose”
Second man: “how does he smell?”
First man: “awful”
and while I’m on a roll, three men discussing life:
first man: “when I fart, it makes a loud noise but doesn’t stink”
second man: “when I fart, it makes a terrible stink but is completely silent”
third man: “when I fart, it neither makes a noise nor stinks”
the first two men look at him and say: “then why the hell do you bother to fart?”
ah, the old ones are the best.
When I said “related to my 38” in 45, I meant my 43.
@46 – Good point. I would suggest a good wash, post coitus, if anyone wanted to seriously try that out.
Teehee, I’ve always wanted to put the word ‘coitus’ into a real sentence.
photoreceptor@47. I am aware of that bit of animal cruelty and it was, in part, the motivation behind my suggesting the stoooopid feckers who “thought” this nonsense up missed the obvious and less disgusting alternative — removal of their own olfactory sense.
There are some veeeeery stinky people on the planet, must admit. But your usual strong-smelling person is most often a man. So, this makes no sense.
Also, the peachy-vulva entrepreneurs must be circumcised and straight otherwise they’d know that uncut penises and vulvas smell pretty much the same.
@40:
And if you could do that, why waste time with glowing plants? You could boost crop yields ten-fold virtually overnight. Scientists have been working on improving photosynthetic efficiency for a long time for exactly this reason, but it’s a tough nut to crack.
Which is why I’m quite sure that these glowing plants aren’t going to work by making Arabidopsis better at assimilating light. If they work at all, you’ll see a very faint light for a few minutes if you surround yourself with total darkness and give your eyes time to adjust.
If I smelled banana coming from a turd I’d be put off bananas for life.
There are plenty of feminine hygiene products designed to eliminate odour already on the market, so there must be some demand. I wouldn’t blame the existence of these sorts of products on companies hating women, or having a focus on benefiting men. How are you so sure of their motivations for making this product, just because the founders are men? Their goal is to make money, but it remains to be seen if this product would be effective and if there would be a significant market for this bio-hacky probiotic.
Women with conditions such as bacterial vaginosis would seemingly benefit from this. I’m sure there are women out there who would try it out, though I suspect most would be hesitant to apply a “bio-hack” their vaginas.
So long as there isn’t an associated marketing campaign that is designed to shame women whose vagina’s don’t smell like peaches, I don’t see the problem with creating such a product and taking it to market. I’ll concede that their reference to women being able to “connect you to yourself in a better way” via this product, sounds more than a little tone-deaf.
As for a probiotic to make men’s farts smell better, I’ll take bacon please.
Or that any of the present products are really harmful to women.
*raises eyebrows at idiotlogue, possibly a liberturd*
Jeff @ #55
Uuuuh, noooo, one of the things about having a vagina is that the way it smells can sometimes let you know if something isn’t quite right. A woman with bacterial vaginosis shouldn’t cover up the smell; she should go see a doctor and get it treated.
We sometimes criticize those Jews who make a big deal about the ways women’s bodies can be unclean according to their laws (and it’s unclear whether or not Christians should follow the same laws), but I must say that what we think of as standard American culture generally regards women’s bodies as ritually unclean and requires many magic devices and magic spells to become ritually clean.
Girls from 9-12 learn they are unclean. Growing breasts is simply unacceptable. Breasts must be restrained by the dual mojo charm bag we call a “bra”. Differences and distinctions must be erased. This magic is so essential that we have a one syllable word for it, “bra”.
Leg and armpit hair on a pubescent, adolescent, or adult female makes her ritually unclean. She must spend and shave and pray that she does not become an abomination.
But all this is of no use. I am convinced that a large percentage of men view women as ruitually unclean abominations, and that nothing could make a woman acceptable to them. Why do they even want to fuck these horrors they speak of? Must be an emotional thing because I can’t see how it could be more than minimally physically pleasureable.
Just when I think I know the vast dimensions of tone-deaf, Libertarianism cluelessness, the comments in that Peter Thiel article show me I need a new tape measure.
Good grief.
Quoth Jeff S:
–>Ah, but Jeff m’dear, that is exactly what all of those products already on the market do! In the commercials, they present the concept of “that not-so-fresh feeling” or “unpleasant odor” as if it’s an obviousity, something every woman must already know about.
And thanks to a steady cultural campaign to make sure most girls and young women are horribly misinformed about their bodies, those girls and young women think, “Oh no, what if I smell and I don’t even know it? I better buy this thing so the other girls in the locker room after gym class won’t make fun of me!”
From the moment they’re born, girls are told there’s something wrong with them and they need to fix this, improve that, behave this way not that way. By the time they’re sexually active, most have been brainwashed to accept that their body is fundamentally disgusting.
It’s really horrifying.
as frog said in the last paragraph
I understand it is true but find it very bizarre that women should feel that way . I am not aware of all cultures but I know the western one fairly well and it is very disconnected from itself and the natural world, nothing makes that point so well as the sexualizing of advertizing and pornography.
I like the idea of brightly colored shit so long as it faded in a few days.
uncle frogy
Moggie @3
Nope. Some of the worst gas (and poops) I’ve personally experienced were the result of vegetarian fare. (That stuff just gives me a crummy tummy.)
Anyway, a vagina generally smells exactly like it tastes — a little sweet and slightly salty, a very delicate (and not unpleasant) scent.
…what?
This is nothing new. Our local Indian grocery sells a product called Roohafsa which is a syrup you mix with water or club soda to make a soft drink. The guy at the grocery told us if you consumed enough of it it perfumes the entire body. The stuff is flavored with screw pine essence (cloyingly sweet). I kinda like it but haven’t consumed enough to vouch for its efficacy — it’s loaded with things not good for you like red dyes etc.
Probiotics as a whole are a crock, IMHO.
@58 Francisco Bacopa
You should have just stuck to the body hair issue. I don’t know if you have any experience growing breasts, but it’s never been unacceptable to grow breasts (there were brief fashion trends in the 20s and 80s that called for flat chests, but that’s not the same thing as not growing breasts). Over the past twenty years the fashion and body image industry has moved almost entirely to padded push-up style bras; girls and women of all ages get the message that breasts are very much in demand. Maturing girls typically start wearing bras when their nipple-areola complex develops to the stage that it’s noticeable through clothes or when there’s sufficient breast mound growth that it becomes uncomfortable to go without a bra for everyday activities and athletics. Yes, there is an expectation that in order to be taken seriously, a woman must keep her tits from bouncing around or drooping under her clothes, must keep her nipples from being visible through her clothing and not expose cleavage, but that’s not because breasts are regarded as ‘unclean’ by the culture the way that female body hair is. For most women, wearing a bra is a question of comfort, much like the choice of underwear that men have to make according to their genital support needs.
Francisco Bacopa @ 58
Uh, no. We have a multisyllable word “brassiere” which dates back to the 18th century that got shortened to “bra” in the 1920s.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=brassiere&allowed_in_frame=0
You know, when the whole point of your product is that vaginas smell bad you cannot have that product without shaming women.
Also, there are already probiotics you can insert into your vagina if the microflora is off. They’ve been created by actual biologist and doctors, tested and FDA/respective authority approved. I much prefer those over whatever shit somebody mixes together in their garage.
@65 Yeah, brassieres as a recognizable and *functional* piece of clothing for women with breasts heavy enough to find relief in the support, have been documented in a variety of ways back to classical Greek times, and earlier if you count sari tops and various methods of breast binding/wraps.
I was just reading a historical costume article excitedly discussing a new find of women’s wear dated to the 1400s, that included concrete examples of ‘breast bags’. They’re very modern looking, insinuating a long trend of design that was not worthy of mention in period writings.
The present psycho-sexual expectations of open-season availability to male advances society places on a juvenile girl that decides she needs to wear a bra, that’s another depressing topic altogether.
Although, you gotta admit, it WOULD be pretty cool if we could make them glow. O.o
Important Update:
Casual misogyny ruins things again.
Dudes are unfazed; are confident that this will hurt them more than they hurt the woman whose work they misrepresented and basically used without regard to her circumstances, her wishes, and without giving her credit, to shore up confidence and spark interest in their own projects.
Film at 11.
I forgot to close my html tag but it looks like the link works right. Hm.
Great. Heinz acknowledges that he just made everything associated with this idea look bad by grossly misrepresenting everything about it. But he’s already sitting on $10 million in seed funding for his project. And he thinks he’s done Hutchinson a favour? By making her work look bad right before she was about to try and crowdfund it? What an arsehole. Fuck up, damage somebody’s prospects, and then instead of apologising you pretend you smell of roses. Unbelievably self-centred and crass
…Gah. :-O
It’s more aggressive and… more ammonia-like.
More specifically, rice and chocolate.
*high-five* :-)
Dying? What exactly do you think poop is? ~:-|
I’ve encountered one libertarian Finn… on the Internet. That’s it. Libertarianism isn’t even known to the general public here, Ayn Rand is unheard of.
@sugarfrosted #28:
In fact, there’s one right here in the comments section! Get out! Get out while you still can!
Are you amenable to evidence? Last year the actual composition of the lesswrong commentariat (at least among those who cared enough to respond to the annual survey) was:
Communist: 11, .7%
Conservative: 64, 3.9%
Liberal: 580, 35.5%
Libertarian: 437, 26.7%
Socialist: 502, 30.7%
Did not answer: 42, 2.6%
Properly cared for and washed daily, and free of infection, genitalia should not stink.
I don’t know how to keep a penis clean (I imagine you just, er, stroke it with a handfull of soap suds…?), but vaginally speaking there’s three major takeaways: 1) don’t put anything foreign up there, especially not alkaline pH things like soap, as it’s naturally acid, 2) clean all around, but don’t douche, and 3) watch your food intake, and keep sugars and leavened foods down.
People do not smell of roses, but this should keep it to, frankly, skin-and-salty-snot-with-a-hint-of-clove levels. I don’t imagine this peachy-keen formulation has been pH-tested, either *rolls eyes*