In the Van

For twenty-six years, I coached the women's tennis team at Skidmore College, a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. During fall and springs seasons, we routinely traveled all over the northeast, from Portland, Maine, to Philadelphia, from Buffalo to Boston. During the unpredictable month of March, we enjoyed spring breaks in such balmy locales as Florida, California, and Hawaii. Sunshine replaced snow; warm ocean breezes replaced biting Alberta clippers. And because we were a successful program, we routinely qualified for the NCAA Division III National Championships, which took us to numerous locations across the country. While we flew out of region for our more exotic commitments, we spent most of our time traveling in a fifteen-seat van. Never wishing to be an obstacle to my players’ sense of comfort and freedom, I always told them, “Whatever happens in the van stays in the van.” As a result, I disappeared, I became wallpaper, van driver as omniscient observer, my gender was irrelevant. I posed no threat to my players’ freedom of expression and behavior. We ate, slept, laughed, and sang together. We told jokes and stories, argued and bantered, and we reveled in the latest campus gossip. We also smelled together. Confronting, managing, and dealing with smell, in fact, became an important part of our life together, a personal and cultural operation. Smell as olfactory identity.Historical context is important here. I started coaching in 1978, only six years after the passage of Title IX and five years after the famous Battle of the Sexes tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. Despite significant gains for women in sport, progress on equality was stalled in 1984 when the Supreme Court, ruling 6–3 in the case of Grove City College v. Bell, knocked the legs from under Title IX. The quest for equal opportunity in athletics only regained legal clout in 1988 with the passage of the Civil Rights Restoration Act. “With Grove City, we reached the end of the track,” claimed Marilyn Baker, the women's athletic director at the University of Minnesota at the time. “Now it's time for some new track.”2 In other words, I coached women's tennis during an era of both progress and regress. In some ways, I helped build new track during an era when women remained conspicuously nervous and insecure about their place and role in the sports world. Managing gender was crucial. Managing smell was an important part of the gender agenda.While smell may well be par excellence the sense of reminiscence—as the French philosopher and theorist Michel Serres writes, “It shifts from knowing to remembering, from space to time and no doubt from things to being”—smell is more than a stimulus to memory.3 For my tennis players, it was as a significant element in the construction and presentation of gender.4 My players intentionally used deodorants, perfumes, and scents as a way to express and reaffirm their feminine identity in an arena, sport, which was still generally regarded as a site of male power and privilege. Pit stops at drug stores to purchase underarm deodorants and body powders became a routine part of our road trips. I have powerful olfactory recollections of the smell of flowers and baby powder, stereotypical smells associated with femininity, a subtle blending of artfulness and artifice—Powder Fresh, Relaxing Lavender, Spring Fragrance. Or Tabu, “The Forbidden Fragrance”; Chanel No. 5, “The Spell of Chanel”; Maja, “Maja is Woman. Genteel, earthy, provocative, poignant.” The men were using spice and musk: Swagger, Mountain Peak, Wilderness Night Panther, and Old Spice, “the man your man could smell like.” The journalist Denyse Beaulieu notes: “Men are allowed aromatic herbs, combustible spices and solid woods: clean, substantial, salubrious stuff. Women get the yielding, tender flesh of fruit and flowers: frail, moist, perishable materials.”5 The smell of male athletes was associated with strength, toughness and virility, characteristics not historically deemed appropriate for women athletes. My players were, in effect, “doing” gender at a time in the history of women's sport when “doing” gender, “doing” femininity was a necessary cultural practice.6 As athletes, they still needed (or felt they needed) to maintain their femininity. Smelling good was a kind of apologetic. They were paying allegiance to a long-standing tradition whereby women were expected to play like men and look and smell like “ladies.”What they were also doing, of course, was unwittingly surrendering to the traditional power structure of sport. The use of personal care products to present and reinforce established notions about gender justified the traditional hierarchical gender relations associated with sport. As historian Constance Classen, anthropologist David Howes, and sociologist Anthony Synnott argue, “Olfaction does indeed enter into the construction of relations of power in our society, on both popular and institutional levels.”7 The Suya men of the Brazilian Amazon referred to women as “our rotten-smelling property.”8 Odor classes symbolized degrees of culture and socialization, a mild smell signifying the highest degree of culture and a strong smell, the lowest degree; it was an olfactory classification system that established men as the best models of social order and women as the worst. If, as historian Mark M. Smith argues in How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses,9 dominant white racial groups used codes of smell to judge, repress, and distinguish themselves from the dominated Black race, we can also find instances where beliefs about gender and sexual norms function in similar ways—in the case of my women's tennis team, the use of smell to instantiate and affirm the gender apartheid of sport. My players were obeying well-established gender laws, abiding by codes of behavior in a way that allowed for performances of masculinity and femininity to become inscribed through the bodily production and artificial enhancement of odor. Performances of proper masculinity and femininity consisted of displaying not just the right behavior or performing in the right athletic attire but also exuding the right smell.“This van smells like a women's team,” many of players’ parents commented. One even opined that it smelled more like “a brothel.” Not that I would know what a brothel smelled like. Still, I hadn't noticed, and perhaps by this point I had become nose-blind, but these remarks affirm that gender has often been associated with a distinct odor. “Smell-able” gender is obvious and unremarkable and hence can easily be identified as a taken-for-granted, unquestionable truth. When the young Joe Christmas is carried out of the orphanage under the cover of darkness in William Faulkner's Light in August, Faulkner writes that Joe knew “by the smell that the person who carried him was a man.”10 Similarly, Joe describes the dietician's closet as “womansmelling,” and later “rife, pinkwomansmelling.”11 While beliefs and stereotypes about smell help us make sense of the world—men and women enact and navigate gender norms by interpretative actions of smelling—they also solidify gender hierarchies, and nowhere more so than in the world of sport.But not all my players abided by the accepted olfactory gender script. A few of them over the years intentionally disrupted and subverted these gendered sensory patterns by actively using deodorants made for men. In so doing, they blurred the boundaries between feminine and masculine, thus contributing to gender fluidity during an era when coming out was a courageous act for women. After all, it was only in 1981 that tennis greats Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova admitted to being homosexual. It was especially difficult in a sport like tennis, which embodied femininity during the 1970s and ’80s. Like figure skating and gymnastics, tennis was one of those relatively rare spaces in which women could be powerful and aggressive yet not dismissively labeled a jock. Tennis offered the glamour and aesthetic of feminine athleticism without the ubiquitous overtones of lesbianism. Like race, gender is always omnipresent; it is apparent, assessed, and performed in virtually every encounter. Women must make decisions every day about whether to engage in “unfeminine” or transgressive behaviors that challenge the gendered status quo. How they smell becomes an integral part of their identity, one that openly displays their gender and often their sexual orientation. Ultimately, the conscious use of deodorants made for men is concerned with the question of women's proper relation to issues of power and privilege and the consequences of usurping masculinity in a male-oriented and male-dominated arena such as sport. In the same way that the Amazon-like, warrior woman Aunt Drusilla in Faulkner's “An Odor of Verbena” chose verbena, a flower that does not carry the connotations of ladylike gentility and sheltered femininity, rather than a more obviously scented flower, like a rose or gardenia, with its symbolic connotations of conventional femininity,12 so also some of my players donned a distinctly masculine scent to reflect and advertise their androgynous tendencies.There were also times inside the van when, after a match, especially on a hot day, my players would boldly exclaim that the van smelled like fish or like a fish market. For a few years in the 1990s, they called themselves “ginches,” their humorous code name for “fish.” On several occasions, and for their own amusement, one of them would call a pizza joint and order a “ginch” pizza; “it's like fish,” they would inform the befuddled pizza guy! They once even openly asked for a “ginch” pizza in a restaurant. The waiter was equally befuddled, until he realized he had been pranked. Interestingly, the connection between femininity and the smell of fish has historical precedent. For the African ethnic group the Dassanetch, the odor of fish symbolized the disorderly noncyclical world, the world outside the natural cycle of weather and sexuality which were so crucial to the well-being of cattle and society's stability.13 Likewise, the anthropologist William Davenport describes a Southwest Pacific society where the similarity of vaginal odor and fish served as the basis for an aphrodisiac: “Men use a red ground cherry attached to the leader of a trolling line to attract fish. After having caught a fish in this way, the ground cherry is believed to have power to attract women in the same way that it attracted fish. Their vaginas, like the elusive fish, will be attracted to the possessor of the ground cherry.”14 While Davenport relates the smell of fish to sexual attractiveness, my players were using the smell of fish to self-deprecatingly acknowledge the bodily consequences of hard work. If you work hard as an athlete, you sweat; your clothes stink; you stink. The invocation of fish was a candid, authentic, and even proud recognition of the fact that if you work hard on the tennis court, you will do what all athletes, male as well as female, will do—stink.15The fact that references to fish, and “ginches,” was rarely if ever invoked beyond the confines of the van—and if references were voiced, they were only raised among the players themselves as a sort of secret subcultural argot—suggests that the van served as what symbolic interactionist Erving Goffman called a “back region.”16 That is, a site hidden from the public where the players could not only rehearse their public presentation of self but where they could also perform, relax, and engage in behaviors that would otherwise be deemed inappropriate in the “front region.” The use of odorants and deodorants, perfumes and scents, was a part of the script for “impression management,” what Goffman calls a “personal front.” The management of smell was an item of “expressive equipment,” much like clothing, hairstyle, speech patterns, facial expressions, and body gestures.17 In the drama of everyday life, the players typically presented themselves as traditionally smell-gendered; they wanted to look good and smell good around campus—in the dining hall, classrooms, and countless other micro-interactive settings. In the “backstage,” in the van, my players did not need to engage in impression management, except among themselves. Rather, they could be authentic, express feelings, engage in dialogue, and make jokes away from the scrutiny of others and without fear that they would contradict, if not jeopardize, their cultivated performance of gender. To remark upon odor in public would violate proper decorum, but not in private, not in the van.The public culture of smell provides us with a consensual definition of what gender means and how genders are distinguished and constructed. Or, as the sociologist Karen A. Cerulo puts it, “We make sense of and attribute meanings to smells in ways that both emerge from and recreate the organization of life.”18 If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it is that smell is important to our sense of well-being.19 Deprived of smell, we are deprived of one of those taken-for-granted faculties that allow us to organize, navigate and accommodate to social life. Perhaps the pandemic will force us to recognize the value of the nonvisual and nonauditory senses and rectify the current prejudice against smell.20 My experience with coaching a women's intercollegiate tennis team during the 1970s–1990s certainly suggests that managing odor was a deliberate practice in the presentation of gender and sexuality. I wish I knew more about the way current women's, and indeed men's, tennis teams deal with issues of smell. But during the 1970s and 1980s, in particular, a time when women's sports were just beginning to gain widespread acceptance, publicly affirming femininity through smell management was an important political and social act. Perhaps, in the end, it might also be worth considering what sensory and cultural patterns might surface if we pivot from the traditional approach of thinking about smell as a symbolic noun to a new examination of smell as an active verb. By asking who gets to smell whom and who is interpreted as smelling like what, social patterns and arrangements reveal our beliefs about gender and sexual mores.