(Intimate talk about male bodies, mostly mine, in plain terms, though not so racy as to ban kids — but I will freely use the vernacular noun and verb piss, nouns dick and balls. In any case, some people will find the topic of crotch odor unsavory.)
I’d hoped to be able to post about meat dreams and crotch pong on the same day — just for the sound of the two off-color compounds together, but meat dreams took a lot longer than I’d expected (I somehow ended up in the 16th century), so crotch pong had to wait a day. So it goes.
The name of the problem. You can refer to the affected area as the crotch (NOAD: ‘the part of the human body between the legs where they join the torso’) or the groin, so there are alternative versions for all of the names. I’ll use crotch throughout.
Digression on symbols and names. The appropriate symbol to refer to the crotch would be the inverted / upside-down Y symbol:
A symbol for which an apposite name would be fork
In fact, the noun fork (as in a fork in the road) would be an excellent bodypart alternative to crotch (as in the crotch of a tree). So I could be writing about (alliterative) fork stink rather than (assonant) crotch pong.
Now to move from the name of the bodypart to the name of its offending condition. The most decorous usages are the vague crotch odor and crotch smell; followed by smelly / stinky crotch (smell is neutral and vague, but smelly is used only for offensive smells); and then the most flagrant usages, starting with crotch stink and moving on through the more intense crotch stench and crotch reek, while embracing the North American slang crotch funk and — finally! — the British slang crotch pong.
From NOAD:
noun pong: British informal noun a strong, unpleasant smell: corked wine has a powerful pong. verb pong: [no object] smell strongly and unpleasantly: the place just pongs of dirty clothes.
(I picked up BrE pong from various periods of living in the UK, long ago, and I’m very fond of it. It sings.)
The causes of the problem. Four main contributions.
First, the food you eat, which manifests itself in the smell of all your bodily secretions (including sweat and piss, both relevant to crotch pong). Cruciferous vegetables (like the chopped kale I’m now eating a lot of, for its many virtues) are especially strong contributors to effluvia.
Second, your sweat, which builds up on your crotch (and armpit) hair and then interacts with bacteria on your skin to produce sweat pong. (The fresh sweat of exercise has very little scent.) Male sex sweat in your armpits and crotch is considerably stronger — detectable on its own, even before the bacteria get to amplify the smell.
Third, your piss, some drops of which soak into your underwear after you whizz (unless you take elaborate precautions to catch the drip) and then ripen there. This is a minor contribution for most guys, but a huge one for me, since I piss many times during the night (formerly, once an hour; now down to once every two hours, but that’s still a lot). At the end of the night, my briefs have wet patches of piss — which I spray with Shout, to neutralize the piss and impede the inevitable bleaching of the fabric of my briefs. (After laundering in hot water, my briefs are squeaky clean but somewhat stained. I’m not going to throw away perfectly fresh briefs just because they don’t look pretty any more.)
Fourth, the confinement of your crotch in clothing or other material — like the adult diapers I had to wear for some time, which served pretty much as a hothouse for the development of crotch pong. I mean, really powerful crotch pong, instantly detectable even though my crotch is several feet below my nose. Now, that confining material is serving a real purpose, keeping your sweat and piss (and streaks of shit too) from escaping into the world around you and messing up your outer clothing, your sheets, your furniture, whatever. The downside of this useful service is the fostering of crotch pong.
How I clean up. As part of my upon-wakening bathroom routine (which also includes emptying and rinsing the bedroom urinals; taking a levothyroxin tablet; washing my crusty eyes; applying underarm deodorant; getting out of my old clothes — on dealing with my briefs, see above — and putting them in the appropriate laundry baskets; shaving; and sometimes a wake-up bowel movement).
Now about what I do to clean up my crotch. In the BAD (before adult diapers) days, I used (flushable) wet wipes to clean my pubes, dick, and balls, dried everything with Kleenex (I use a lot of Kleenex), and went on to fresh briefs.
But the adult diapers made for a lot of work. They were, first of all, hard to get out of, and even harder to get into (but I learned how to do it). The old ones went into the bathroom nasty-trash wastebasket. Then to conquer the crotch pong.
This called for a whole new routine, of soaping up my hands (which were themselves fairly gross from handling my pissy dick repeatedly through the night) in warm water, then applying those soapy hands to my pubes, dick, and balls.
Soaping up my crotch with my left hand turned out to be a great sensual pleasure — sensual, not at all sexual. A pleasure so satisfying that I continue to do it even after returning to wearing briefs.
Then rinsing my crotch with a wash cloth specifically for this purpose (not the one I use for my eyes). And drying it with an absorbent towel also devoted to the purpose.
Then I take my pong-free and entirely naked self and the day’s fresh briefs and shirt to the recliner chair, where I can sit while putting on the clothing. (I have learned ways of doing all sorts of things sitting down, so as not to risk falling.) Then I’m ready to get to the desk chair at my work table and face the day’s work; there’s a whole set of further routines for this, including the first blood-pressure reading for the day (this morning’s was perfect, right on my target).
August 9, 2023 at 11:14 am |
Wendy Thrash on Facebook, right after I posted this:
I really should have seen that coming.