WHOSE PHEROMONE ARE YOU? - World Medicine July 26 1978

We may attract or repel other people depending on the odours we emit. The way we look, sound, and feel play their part but a lot of researchers now believe we underestimate the effect of attractant or aversive odours. Smells are somehow less definable; more easily overlooked .

Pheromones are substances that one organism produces for purposes of chemo-communication with another of the same species. And, what is more, that definition appeared on the Arts page in the Guardian. "Pheromones," wrote the arts correspondent Robin Denselow, "are smells which are not consciously recognised by the brain but which affect the behaviour of others. "

He named androstenone as one pheromone which occurs in men's urine and sweat. It has also been found to have an attractant effect on women.

      I first demonstrated this effect in a waiting room at Guy’s Hospital. Michael Kirk-Smith repeated the experiment at Birmingham University and showed a statistically significant influence. He also confirmed this pheromone had an aversive effect on men.

      Equivalent female substances arc called "copulins": vaginal pheromones attractive to men,
which Alex Comfort postulates are put out particularly by blondes and redheads. Copulins
are a mixture of vaginal acids and are maximally secreted by women at the time of ovulation.
Richard Michael who discovered the secretion (and patented the combination), described
experiments suggesting this secretion was a male attractant, at least to male rhesus
monkeys. There are other postulated human pheromone systems. One researcher, Martha
McClintock, observed that women who live in close contact with one another menstruate
together. She found that women living in institutions where they had no contact with men -
hostels, convents and the like-all had their periods at the same. Ms McClintock then
performed an interesting experiment in her sample convent. She let in male smells in the
form of urine and smegma-stained pillowcases which were put on the nun’s beds. The result
was that the nun’s periods were disrupted by what researchers now, call "the strange male
effect". 'I'he oestrous synchrony broke up. It happens in rats as well.

      The Royal Shakespeare Company got into this unlikely territory during rehearsals for the
recent Stratford production of Coriolanus. The director Terry Hands encouraged his cast to
ask why Coriolanus was so disliked "Is it something about him? Does he smell?" The answer,
said one member of the cast, Mathew Guinness, was clearly to do with pheromones.

      Back to the Guardian arts correspondent: "The rest of the cast looked at him blankly while he
explained how he had taken an interest in the subject for several years now. It had been
shown that animals could put out these smell substances that attract and repel and may,
arouse sexuality, anger, or content. Could the same be true for humans? If so the implications
for artificial use of pheromones, for military or commercial use to change behaviour patterns,
seem to be staggering."

      Mathew Guinness decided to investigate how far pheromone development had gone and
discovered androstenone, which induces anger in other males but acts as a female
attractant.

     Thus Mathew Guinness came to produce a late night "Pheromone happening", Whose
Pheromone are you? He had wanted to call it Armpit Theatre but had been out-voted. He
constructed a performance within the loose format of a TV chat show, but he also wanted to
involve the audience in some pheromone experiments. Thus the RSC entered the field of
scientific experiment and gave a meaning to the idea of experimental theatre.

     Meanwhile, in another part of the world, Robin Klassnic an artist friend, had been
experimenting with pheromones. We sprayed one of his photographs in a recent art
exhibition and noted an aversive effect from dominant male artists and art reviewers. Most
of the exhibits one would expect to get a mention in the review did get reviewed, except
Robin’s --- and the one next to his. He also sprayed a telephone at the Hackney Space
Studios where he works. Again he used the male smell and the marked telephone was used
so much more often than the others that the GPO had to be called empty the box which was
jammed full. The marked telephone also rang more often. This "telephone effect" has recently
been confirmed in a controlled series of observations on marked booths in a large railway
station.

      Robin had organised and been involved in several happenings and wanted to orginise a
theatrical "pheromone event". He and Mathew Guinness had come up independently with
the same idea and all three of us got together.

     I view experimental theatre with near horror. I find it, like all public events, distinctly anxiety
provoking. In the theatre I’m afraid the actors will forget their lines, that they will have heart
attacks, or turn on the audience. This last is the horrors of horrors and a strategem beloved
of fringe theatre -- audience participation. I prefer to go to the pictures; celluloid rather than
flesh.

     Theatre-goers are a different breed; they are stimulated by the experience. They feed on that
sense of uncertainty. Prompts, accidents, and poor staging are not an embarrassment to
them. The "anxiety of uncertainty" actually enhances the drama. People who prefer live drama
may well do so because of an attractive pheromone effect.

     If we were to do any experiments it seemed appropriate to involve a theatre audience, so
we booked the Gulbenkian Studio Theatre in Newcastle for the happening. We studied the
audience which came into the afternoon and evening shows and got a good idea of the
seating patterns. The Gulbenkian studio, part of the university theatre complex, is used for
informal experimental theatre. Most important, all the seats are unreserved. We decided to
spray certain seats and to have some sort of stage experiment. We also sprayed the
programmes with pheromones.

     We got a full house. The day before, the Guardian had printed the article by Robin Denselow,
who had shown great interest until he had a smell of the androstenone. He described later
how that put him in a bad temper for the rest of the evening.

     At the afternoon performance we had noticed that the seats on the side balconies were the
last to be occupied. Before the evening performance we sprayed the stairs to one of the
balconies and the chairs on it with androstenone. After the audience had come in, the chairs
were found to be occupied mainly by women. It had worked much better than we dared
hope.

     We sprayed the stairs and chairs on the other side of the balcony with copulins. When the
audience came in, we detected no discernible pattern in the seating, no obvious copulin
effect, until we questioned them later.

     The performance consisted of the panel presenting a resume of recent human pheromone
discoveries. There were observations about the interplay of body language and pheromone
release: how people, for instance, raise their hands and expose their armpits when feeling
exhilarated. The panel discussed the phenomenon of washing and quoted Napoleon. While
away on campaign he wrote to Josephine: "Home in three days. Don't wash."

    The panel also considered the suggestion that male pheromone secretions not only attract
women but repel other males. The more powerful the male, the more pheromones released.
One extreme of aggressive territorial behaviour is the Hitler salute.

     If you observe the crowds at rock concerts you can see pheromones at work. If the air
currents in a concert hall move from the stage to the audience, the excitement is literally
carried from performers to fans. That is why a concert at the Hammersmith Odeon works up
the crowds more than one at the Festival Hall, where extractors move the air the other way.
Most of the big successful closed theatres have air conditioning circulating air from the front
to back and make ideal pop venues. This system was originally designed to keep the
expensive seats free from the smells and cigarette smoke of the lower orders. The new
National Theatre, like the Royal Festival Hall, has all round ducted air conditioning. Actors
there are said to feel a sense of isolation from the audiences -- a sense they never felt at the
Old Vic. The cool unemotional atmosphere of these places is OK for classical music or Ibsen,
but deadens emotion.

      Audiences for the big pop concerts include more girls than boys. These girls, primed by
newspaper and TV and fan clubs to follow their heroes get into menstrual synchrony for the
concert so that the concert halls probably end up full of ovulating teenagers. The evidence for
this speculation is admittedly tenuous, merely the observations that girls in orgasm wet the
concert hall seats with their vaginal secretions and no menstrual soiling has ever been
recorded. Also the lavatories bear little evidence that girls are menstruating. Nobody has
done control observations at, say, a Prom; until they do, the assertion about ovulating
teenagers will remain speculation.

    All the same, theatres do funny things to people. It has been noticed that after pop concerts
girls often show menstrual disruption, and their periods become irregular. Such symptoms
are also common after any major emotional upheaval, particularly after leaving home,
changing jobs, or emigrating, indeed after any major life crisis Involving a change in
surroundings. It also occurs in women with anorexia nervosa. These women have been found
to have a disorder in the hypothalamus and appear to have abnormalities in the secretion of
pituitary gonadotrophins, the system through which menstruation is controlled. This system
is upset by pop concerts, leaving home, or changing jobs and is possibly triggered by the
presence of new, or strange male smells.

    Recent research by Robin Klassnik and myself has shown that the male pheromone effect
can be reversed by deodorants. It is feasible now to spray a football crowd with deodorant
to calm them down (or to spray political gatherings, adds the Guardian).

     When the RSC show finished, one woman was selected from the androstenone end of the
theatre and asked to join in a further experiment. (As I've already said, the chairs at the
entrance balcony had been sprayed with androstenone, and after the audience had come in,
these chairs were found to be mainly occupied by women.) Five identical chairs, one of
which had been sprayed with male pheromone, were placed in a circle on the stage. The
volunteer was blindfolded and asked to find the marked chair and sit on it. This she did
quite easily. When asked if she could smell the substance she said no, and when asked by an
audience member if she had felt a black identification tag, she said no again. Members of the
cast asked each other if they had fixed it and we were accused of "planting" the lady; but it
had really worked. The most rewarding thing about the experiment was that it was the first
time any human pheromone effect had been demonstrated in public.

     The audience reaction was fascinating. A group of psychologists who sat at the copulin end
became very angry because they said the experiment had not been properly controlled. "It
was not even double-blind." They did not think it was science. We agreed. But did they think
it was art, asked Robin Klassnik.

      We had sprayed the programmes but there was such a rush of people -- it was a full house
with some of the audience sitting on the floor -- that there was no chance for anyone to make
a choice. We asked the audience which programmes had been selected but found no
discernible pattern. Mathew noticed the following morning that the programmes that were
left behind were all non-sprayed controls and he also discovered that five of the girls who
work in the theatre had their periods disrupted. One of the girls had started her period that
Saturday afternoon and it stopped on the following day. Normally these five girls had
synchronised periods.

     Can one call it an experiment? Ludwig Wittgenstein tells us we can arrive only at an
approximation of the truth whatever we do, and however we do it. Thus a scientific approach
is limited by its language of controls and doubleblind techniques; double talk indeed. The
theatre however is a place of much greater flexibility of human expression than the
laboratory. In the theatre, miracles can happen, and marvels and magic are everyday means
of expression often performed twice nightly.