Recently, my house has begun to experience an adolescent boy “issue” that—even though I’ve read about plenty, and heard about from my fellow mothers even more—I had yet to experience for myself. Hard to believe, I’m sure, but true: since I didn’t grow up with any brothers, or even male cousins for that matter, living with my son, Clyde, has really been my first experience living with an (almost) adolescent boy. So, in other words, yeah, this really has been my first experience dealing with a subject which—despite its delicate and awkward nature, or perhaps because of it—still manages to be one of the main topics of conversation whenever mothers of teenage boys get together.
You see where I am going with this, right? You see that I am about to discuss one of the vilest of teenage boy conditions, one that is both an affront and an embarrassment to all decent people everywhere. That’s right: I am about to discuss the Stinkfoot.
Since this really is my introduction to this issue, my first question is this: how is it even possible for one person’s feet to smell so bad? I mean, if you think about it, from a purely evolutionary point of view it makes no sense whatsoever. For one thing, it has to completely rule out the option of hunting for your dinner; with feet like that, how could you ever hope to get close enough to an animal to see it, let alone kill it? It’s not an issue of “upwind” or “downwind”—ordinary wind could not possibly shift the miasma that clings to the air around these feet. The only hope would be to hunt some kind of game animal that feeds on overripe wheels of Parmesan—the Pastalope, for example. In that case the Stinkfoot would be at a definite advantage.
But forget about hunting: what about reproduction? Beyond mere survival, evolutionary biology would seem to demand that any trait that positively drove potential mates away would eventually, through the process of natural selection, be winnowed out of the species. And yet, somehow, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Who knows: maybe the same part of the puberty puzzle that turns the stink dial on adolescent male feet up to 11 also turns the smell dial on adolescent female noses down to 0. That would certainly explain why migrating groups of teenage girls are so often enveloped in clouds of competing perfumes so strong they make birds fall from the skies in their presence. (An alternate answer, perhaps, to the age old question, “Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?”)
Whatever the reason for teenage girls’ apparent immunity to the smell, it is an unfortunate fact that this immunity wears off completely by the time those same girls become the mothers of teenage boys themselves. Mores the pity. Because it is not the teenage girls who have to live with the little malodorous malcontents—we do.
Maybe it is the malcontent part of the equation that makes the Stinkfoot so hard to bear; maybe it is the combination of really stinky feet and a genuine desire to displease that makes for such a deadly combination. After all, few of us past the age of puberty are blessed with feet that smell like roses, and yet the rest of us have the common decency to be ashamed when we notice it—ashamed enough to actually do something about it. The adolescent boy, on the other hand (or foot) is proud of his reek.
That part, at least, makes some kind of sense—evolutionarily speaking. After all, young, unpartnered males of every species have always tended to form packs, for both protection and socialization. And how do most animals find each other?
Of course: they follow their noses.