Men do not look good naked – at least not to women. We don’t mind a nice looking guy in a pair of shorts – except if they are short-shorts, which look almost as bad as a naked man. A guy in a speedo is the worst. This may be an acquired taste for some women, but the rest of us would rather look at a puddle of vomit full of maggots than a man in a speedo.

Unlike a woman, who will incite a veritable stampede of men if she simply takes off her shirt, a man must have other qualities besides a nice body in order to attract a women. He is forced to demonstrate his manly prowess by opening stubborn jar lids.

In the animal kingdom, males have to work very, very hard to attract a mate. They’ve got to butt antlers with other males with the force of a sledge hammer, or make their feathers stand up like they’ve stuck their beak into an electrical outlet.

The human male species, most of which lack either feathers or antlers, have to resort to other rituals to attract women. They will offer to carry things for you to show how strong they are. They will buy you dinner to show how much money they have. They’ll put on some manly smell-um.

You wanna know what’s really funny, though? I use Word for Mac to write, and Word is constantly underlining words because I am not the most accurate typist in the world. Hence as I write it looks like some nasty English teacher has just graded it.

At the moment, this blog is full of those red underlined words. I will run spell check and it will find correct most of them, but there will still be some intractable words remaining that I’ll have to Google to verify their spelling or change them to something else that I know I can spell.

Amongst the typos and the normal words that look like they’re spelled correctly but Word, the hussy, underlines them anyway, Word has let me get away with the word smell-um. It just did it again. Is smell-um seriously a real word?

I’m going to have to take this matter to Google and see if smell-um is, in fact, a bona fide word in the English language because frankly I don’t mind telling you that I would be shocked – SHOCKED – if it in fact is a real word. Be right back.

OMG, the Urban Dictionary says it IS a real word, although they don’t hyphenate it. Here’s what they said:

smellum

 

 
Smell-um (smael-um) -a fragrance, often used in personal care products that are applied to one’s person.1. Ulysses Everett McGill from O Brother, Where Art Though: “I like the smell of my hair treatment; … as soon as we get ourselves cleaned up and we get a little smellum – Dapper Dan Hair Tonic – in our hair…”

2. Calvin Klein’s Obsession is a nice little smellum.

 

 

So I tried to imitate the spelling by taking out the hyphen, but Word isn’t having any part of that. It likes smell-um but not smellum. Go figure.

Speaking of figures, I like a man in some low-slung jeans and barefoot without a shirt if he doesn’t sling them too low like those ridiculous Abercrombie and Fitch guys. I do NOT want to see the top of a man’s hairless pubic area. Someone must have waxed the hair away – those pants are so low – which seems sissy. I look away when I walk past their store in the mall. It’s the antithesis of attracting a mate, in my mind. Worse than a naked man, and it’s hard to get much worse than that.