The Sweet Smell of Civet, or, Why We Wear Animal Perfumes

Tap into a woman’s inner animal with the right fragrance…Found in high concentrations in most towns and cities, the wildcat stays out late to indiscriminately sink her claws into those who take her fancy. A fragrance containing musk is a must – its high molecular weight means it releases slowly, and will still be giving off signals long after the chip van has packed up. Try Boss Bottled Night (£36.00 for 100ml, boots.com). Don’t say you weren’t warned. (Men’s Health 2011).

There are four main animal ingredients in perfumery: musk, civet, ambergris and castoreum. Musk originates from the musk deer, Moschus moschiferus, civet from the civet cat, Civettictus Civetta, ambergris from the sperm whale and castorem from the beaver. In the fragrance world the ingredients taken from these species are known as The Big Four, and they translate into Big Bucks. Lately, most of the off-the-shelf perfumes that we wear contain, not real animal ingredients, but synthetic imitations, designed to replicate the fragrance (and presumably the effect) of the real deal. This does not show a touching concern for the species, as much as a concern for the economic bottom-line. The musk deer, for example, is endangered, and does not thrive in a farmed environment. Supply, therefore, is unstable at best. The most stable supply, and so still used in many perfumes, is civet. Unfortunately for the civet cat, it has shown itself to be able to survive even in tiny cages, and is farmed extensively in Ethiopia, where civet keepers routinely torture and enrage the beasts, because the volume of excretions goes up the more agitated the animal gets.  

It seems strange to think that humans could be so attracted to the idea of wearing another animal’s glandular excretions on our skin, particularly in light of the normal associations that we make with the ‘animal’ or ‘animalic’ . In The Odour of the Other (1992) Constance Classen speaks of olfactory codes ‘pervading classificatory thought’, i.e. that odours can be as totemic as the visual. Yet throughout most of our human history any association with the animal has been contextualised in derogatory terms, i.e. dirty, unsophisticated, lowly, bestial. So why the seemingly contrary urge to associate ourselves with the smell of a beast?

Well, despite the fact that the animal ingredients (or in our age, predominantly synthetics) are used in both male and female fragrances, traditionally it is the male fragrances that have tended to be based around these smells. Strong, musky, sweaty, heady odours are the realm of the male eau de cologne. In contrast, female fragrances have tended to use the musks or civets as a subtle background to the more obvious fruity or floral notes. So do men want to see themselves as beasts, and do women want to see themselves as flowers? Absolutely not.

I think my point can be best illustrated by examining current day fragrance advertising. The male is depicted, not as an animal, but as an explorer. He is on a horse. He is captain of a ship. He is sailing a boat. The female, on the other hand, is depicted as an animal. A pussy cat or a tigress, an exotic bird, even a unicorn. The man, depicted as adventurer, or indeed coloniser, is very much a human. If he is shown with any animals, he is in a position of dominance over them. Eventually, it becomes clear that the man is willing to associate himself with the animal because this is the way to attract the exotic, the animal female. By wearing animalic fragrances the human male attempts to send ‘come hither’ signals to the female. It is the female that the male is associating with animal-ness, not himself. While the female, the animal, is sometimes predator and sometimes prey, the male is always, and simply, conqueror.

Does One Globe Equal One Animal Ethic?

This week I’ve been reading Peter Singer’s 2002 book One World: the Ethics of Globalisation. Although Singer is most famous/infamous for his work on animals and ethics, he focuses on the increasingly globalised ‘community’ of humans in One World, with animals cropping up mainly in the abstract, in the form of references to ‘our environment’. However, the ideas, I would say, can be as easily applied to ‘foreign’ animals as they can to foreign human beings, and so I’ve compiled a cheat sheet of the pertinent questions raised by Singer.

1. To what extent should we be concerned for ‘our own’, and to what extent should we be concerned for the ‘other’, who lives ‘elsewhere’?
2. If we should be more concerned for ‘our own’, why is this?
3. Is the person who kills somebody indirectly, for example through driving a gas guzzling Chelsea tractor, as culpable as the person who kills somebody directly, for example through the medium of stabbing with a sharp knife?
4. If another country’s leaders are accused of genocide/pollution/miscellaneous atrocities, does trading with that country imply an ethical judgement, or is trading with that country value-neutral?
5. Is knowing about atrocities in another country and not doing anything about them, as bad as knowing about atrocities in our own back yard and not doing anything about them?
6. Is imposing our own culture onto other, foreign cultures, a force for good or evil?

It is quite interesting to compare instinctive reactions to these questions when thinking about humans, with the instinctive reactions when thinking about animals. No answers, though, just food for thought…

Moral Responsibility in a Technological Era

We live in an age of moral irresponsibility. By that, I do not just mean that humans perpetrate immoral, or amoral, acts and fully expect to get away with them (although they do). I mean that the blame for these things always seems to be split and dispersed, with too many culprits for anyone to actually be culpable.

Take orangutans. Indonesia is the country with the fastest rate of deforestation in the world. Who is responsible for razing the home of the old man of the forest? The palm oil traders, like Cargill and ADM? Ok, who within the corporation will take responsibility? The Chief Exec? His advisors? His stock holders? The men on the ground, doing the dirty work (The judge, the jury, the executioner…)? Of course, individuals in the Indonesian government are at fault here, and biodiesel manufacturers are not exactly helping. Greenpeace seem to lay much of the blame at the feet of the RSPO (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil), who were set up in 2001 in order to establish ethical standards for the production of palm oil, and who are accused of taking no steps to avoid the worst practices, and of actually justifying the expansion of the palm oil industry. Or maybe it’s my fault, for buying all those ginger biscuits from Sainsburys.

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So everybody plays their little part, but who is the real protagonist? In Wickedness, in agreement with Hannah Arendt, Mary Midgley tells us that,

‘the administrative complexity of the modern world makes such cases [Arendt was talking about the bureaucracy of the minor politicians in Nazi Germany] increasingly common. Bureaucracy tends to look like ‘the rule of nobody’, and this obscuring of individual responsibility is one thing which makes the concept of wickedness so hard to apply.’

Having seen the gut-wrenching documentary Green, about the last hours of a displaced orangutan’s life, I would not hesitate to call the annihilation of the rainforest evil.  Now… where is my villain? In the technological, globalised era, the harder we look for somebody to blame, the more the picture dissipates. It’s like staring into the sun. And the division of responsibility has the effect of making us believe, rather than that everybody is to blame, that in fact, nobody is to blame…and certainly not little old me, just another cog in the machine.

In the slaughterhouse, the person who stuns the pig has not really killed it, they’ve just knocked it out. The person who slits its throat has not really killed it, because it arrived looking pretty much dead anyway. The person who begins to dismember the carcass it not really the killer, despite the fact that the stunner and the throat slitter sometimes make a hash of it and the animal is still alive as the dismemberment begins. Clearly, the owner of the slaughterhouse is not responsible; he has no blood on his hands. And when my husband eats his bacon sandwich, he is not responsible; he consumes it because it is dead already.

In Eating Animals Safran Foer describes the woman who first invented the battery cage. She had a lot of chickens so she piled the cages on top of each other. I think she was a housewife. She didn’t sound evil, but then the person who took the idea to the next level probably wasn’t evil either, and neither was the person who thought about taking it to the next, next level, and so on. Technology happens in incremental stages, with one piece being built upon the foundations of the last, and so on, and so forth, until things are finally taken to their logical conclusion and we have farms in Japan piling the tiny little cages 20 crates high and 2 miles long…

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In a lecture on the Philosophy of Technology Andrew Feenberg traces our obsession with technological advancement back to the Greeks, who were fascinated by techne; that which had to be created by somebody (i.e. the opposite of nature, which creates itself). They also believed that everything, natural or techne, contained an essence, and they were equally interested in what the essence, or spirit, of a thing was. What it meant. In modern society we continue to be obsessed with technology, but we are no longer interested in essence. We create machines that perform acts of war and violence on our behalf, but we do not concern ourselves with the essence of the thing, only how efficiently it does its job.

‘In the modern context technology does not realize objective essences inscribed in the nature of the universe, as does techne. It now appears as purely instrumental, as value free…Technology in this scheme of things encounters nature as raw materials, not as a world that emerges out of itself, a physis, but rather as stuff awaiting transformation into whatever we desire. The world is understood mechanistically, not teleologically. It is there to be controlled and used without any inner purpose.’

In other words, nature, once the polar opposite of techne, has become technology too. Non-human animals, and even humans, are included in this attitude, and like machines, biological bodies are now viewed as the sum of their parts; their value measured in terms of their usefulness alone. This brings us back to Midgley’s Wickedness, in which she argues that although machines [technology] are thought of as a means to an end, in reality we often treat them as ends in themselves. Here she cites Eric Fromm, who in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, shows how literature has celebrated machines, gradually leading in particular towards the glorification of death.

The glorification of death? Yes, I would suppose that when you have been trained to kill by playing video games (see Jonathan Taylor’s The Emerging Geographies of Virtual Worlds), and hooyaa marine, you simply have to press a button, and multiple strangers have the life blown out of their bodies like dust, then, without having to look into their eyes, or see the gore, and the messiness of it, killing becomes bombastic, colourful, electrifying. We are amazed, and horrified, but mostly enthralled with what technology can do, and the gods that it makes out of us mere mortals. We must use it because we can. It demands of us that we do, and with the technicolour hyper-world that it creates, it distracts us from another option.

In last week’s post I referred to industry being the motif of the wicked, the precursor to our downfall. That’s how the fantasy world sees it, anyhow. But the fact is, we cannot go backwards, so we march on forwards. Feenberg believes that there is still the promise of greater freedom in technology, that the problem is not with technology itself, but with our failure to devise a more democratic process of developing and delivering it. He believes that technology is still controllable, but that we cannot afford to forget that it is also value-laden. I would add that we cannot afford to forget about our own personal autonomy, and that of other creatures; we are not just cogs in the machine.

Let's Pixelate the Planet

A cursory glance at the Environment page of the Guardian online this week yields an article on the British government’s plan to downplay the Fukishima disaster in order to protect our nuclear industry, news that poachers in a South African wildlife park have killed its last female rhino for her prized horn, and a commentary on the fact that a proposed plan to cut maritime carbon emissions has sunk like the proverbial sinky-thing, due to economic restraints. In her 2002 book Loving Nature Kay Milton tells us that the market kills whatever it cannot encompass. The news these days concurs.

Meanwhile, esteemed scientist and author of Gaia, James Lovelock, informs us that our natural environment is off-the-charts fubar (not a direct quote), and it’s too late now to stop our forward march towards disaster. Our small efforts at  bottle recycling and energy saving are futile, verging on laughable, and all we can do now is sit back and appreciate life while it still exists.

So, let’s say you decide to keep trashing the world, but you still suffer from an incurable case of Edward O. Wilson’s Biophilia, and you want to escape to an unblemished paradise, where tigers still roam and the waterfalls haven’t dried up. What do you do?

Get online.

There are upwards of nine million people currently subscribed to the MMRPG (massively multiplayer role playing game) World of Warcraft. The basic premise of the game is that you create a character, go on some quests, kill a lot of baddies and accumulate tons of gold. But the best bit is outside of all the action, in the environment. The amount of detail that has been poured into the landscapes, both visually and in audio, is awe-inspiring.

You can soar from rainforest to desert, from snowy mountaintop to jungle, from paradise island to volcano peak. You can hear the snow crunching underfoot as you sprint through it. Night falls in real time. It starts to rain and the drops make plopping sounds on the leaves. It’s sensual. It’s immersive. It’s so realistic that social scientists have written papers on the infamous epidemic of 2005, when an ultra-virulent blood virus spread like wildfire through the land, wiping out characters and their pets in the thousands; an event that took the builders of the game completely by surprise. It seems that even the bacteria are plugged in these days.

Jean Beaudrillard says that virtual reality is as real as whatever we currently call reality. Who am I to argue?

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And best of all, once you have conquered, colonised and plundered the whole wide World, the gods bring out an expansion pack. You pay about fifteen pounds, and get access to new frontiers, be they floating lands in the sky, underwater cities, or even whole territories in a different dimension.

You never run out of land. You never run out of trees or oceans. You never run out of species. Moments after you slay a beast an identical one regenerates in its place. Nothing that you do, no matter how destructive you might intend it, has a lasting impact on the World.

As with all good epic battles of good versus evil, there are two factions to choose from in WoW: the Alliance, and the Horde. Which faction you belong to is the first decision you make in character creation. Members of the Alliance include night elves, dwarves and humans (who get a special passive ability called ‘the human spirit’). Members of the Horde include blood elves, the undead, trollocs and so forth. Different web sites give different statistics on the ratio of people who have Alliance characters versus those who have Horde, but it seems to work out at just slightly more Alliance than Horde members.  In this largely pre-industrial world the motifs of the Horde include all the precursor signs of burgeoning industry: oil drills, black smoke, razed forests...

Yet the villains are so easy to dispense with here. Take out the 12 drillers, set fire to their equipment, collect their badges and present them to the mayor. Collect 3 gold pieces, and retire to Ye Olde Inn to manna-up and quaff dwarf beer. Job done. That’s nine million people accepting the ‘Save the Sparkly Lake’ quest. If Tony Hayward was imported into the game he'd be toast.

They intend…to make us dependable consumers of their artifice, which is to say addicts. They will do this in part by giving us instant and throughgoing fantasy. But the kind of experience they offer, through its allure and technical sophistication, is intended to control not to liberate. The consumer of virtual reality will be kept in a state of infantile self gratification, a kind of technological solipsism. As a result, virtual reality will tend to weaken our loyalty to real people, places, and communities and distract us from the real work that must be done in order to preserve a habitable earth and sustain cultures.

David W. Orr, from Virtual Nature.

What a buzzkill.