I’ve been rereading Crash by J.G. Ballard. In this book, the narrator is constantly talking about the smell of semen. Those of you who have seen the film may remember one such line:
“[Vaughan] must have fucked a lot of women in that huge car of his. It’s like a bed on wheels. It must smell of semen.”
“It does.”
Maybe I could understand a car smelling of semen if it had been gradually stained with semen over a long period of time. But the novel talks about it being smelled immediately after ejaculation:
“The fresh scent of his well-showered body was overlaid, first, by the smell of hash and then by the tang of Vaughan’s semen moistening the crotch of his trousers as we passed the first of the automobile crashes.”
This is but one of the many references in the novel to someone smelling semen as soon as it has been expelled from the body. (I apologize for being so graphic but I’m trying to be as specific as possible.)
I’ve never noticed fresh semen to have a smell, nor has any sexual partner of mine remarked on it. Does semen indeed have a smell? Does it vary from person to person?
Without wishing to reveal too much of a personal nature, yes, it does. It’s not an unpleasant or a very strong smell, but it does have a distinct and very characteristic smell that’s very hard to qualify. I don’t quite agree with this website, which says “Often, semen has an odor that resembles chlorine” but I suppose there could be variations.
From my sample size of one, I would say that it does have an odor but not a very powerful one – not enough to cut through hashish, that’s for sure, nor do I think it would be perceptable in a car.
Yes indeed, a very distinctive one, but not usually overwhelming. Certain species of mushrooms can be identified in part by their “spermatic odor” ( I can think of a Peziza and the false chanterelle, Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca, just off the top of my head ). Or as a young female friend of my acquaintance once said, after picking a random mushroom in a field and sniffing it - “huh, this smells like cum.”
There’s also a tree around here (SoCal) that smells nearly exactly like semen. I’ve always thought this, and then I learned I wasn’t crazy when a friend randomly noted once that “the semen trees are in full bloom today”.
In my limited experience, it has a faint smell that is similar to, oddly enough, Liquid Plumr. When it dries on the skin it starts to reek of rotten fish.
There’s one in the vacinity of my parent’s house in a San jose suburb. There’s a SD collumn on it, but it doesn’t conclusively ID the offending species.
In my experience, semen has an odor even when fresh and gets worse as it gets older (much like urine).
Is it this kind of shrubby tree with batches of tiny white flowers? My college had them all over the place and we just called them “the spunk tree.”
Ah, looking at Cecil’s column and finding pictures of the specimens in question, I’m referring to the California Privet. So find one in bloom, and then you’ll know what spunk smells like, har.
Agreed. The first time I ever spanked it many moons ago, I remember being puzzled as to how something that (drum roll) came out of my body could smell like that…
In graduate school while setting up crystal trays I used additives such as spermine and spermidine to try to improve crystal growth. They are found in semen and protect DNA. I am certain that spermine is the major “smell” of semen as I have smelled these chemicals many times while working with them in the lab.
I’ve been in places where there was a great deal of semen (Those of you who do not know my sexual history, don’t ask). It does have a somewhat bleachy aroma; in my mind’s memory I also associate it with the smell of poppers (amyl nitrite), used in the same environments.
The smell and flavor of semen differs not only between individuals, but also depending on diet, medications and especially, length of time since the previous orgasm.
I was coming into this thread to say that my semen smells like cleaning chemicals. I didn’t have the word “chlorine” in mind, but now that I think of it, it’s a pretty perfect description.
In his novel Portnoy’s Complaint (which is about masturbation, among other things), Philip Roth describes the smell of semen as “buttermilk and Clorox”. I’m not sure that’s 100% accurate, but my experience is that there’s a definite and usually powerful odor, and that it’s not principally chlorine-like.
In my experience, semen does have a distinctive, but difficult to describe, smell. I never smelled any that (to me) smelled of bleach. Different men’s semen tends to smell fairly similar, although there was one whose jizz smelled outright horrible–I wondered if something was wrong with him, or if it was just that he was a heavy smoker.
