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You guys. People always ask me what the weirdest question I’ve ever gotten is, and I’m never really sure what to say because one person’s weird is another person’s totally reasonable. Anything offensive I usually keep to myself. But I did think I should share this one with you, because I would not be at all surprised to learn there is someone out there who has an entire stand-up bit about how ladies’ ethnicities affect their pussy flavors.

So! Just in case anyone is truly confused: though I have not personally done a thorough sampling, I would suggest that probably every individual has a distinct flavor while being similar enough across the board that there is a recognizable “healthy vagina” taste. I don’t think there are strong variations across racial lines, though allegedly what you eat influences the flavor somewhat, so if you were going down on someone whose cultural food norms were quite different, you might notice a subtle difference.

I suppose there is a question of nature vs. nurture in all of our human flavors and smells. Obviously diet, hygiene, and other health factors affect the odor, taste, and mouthfeel (ugh sorry) of our various secretions. But there does seem to be some kind of inborn, unmodifiable smell to every person. I think They decided that pheromones in humans are not really a thing, but I am definitely convinced that we evaluate people—and especially romantic partners—on the almost subconsciously faint human smell they emit.

Like the way different perfumes smell different on different people, or how the used pillow of your beloved, if you stick your face way in it and sniff, retains the scent of his or her hair, shampoo, soap, perfume, sleep smell, and something other and difficult to pinpoint but that’s undeniably singular to them. Or how every bro smelling like ass at the gym has his own particular stank, and yet “B.O. smell” or “rank sweat emanation” are easily categorically identifiable.

I think every person’s various oozings partake of both the Platonic human ooze flavor and their own cocktail of innate and acquired scent. We are animals, after all, first and foremost. We sniff each other for identification and classification. Science says our sense of smell—and, by extension, taste—is the most immediate, the one that hits the brainstem almost precognition. This is where people always, for some reason, mention Proust, even though I haven’t read À la recherche du temps perdu and I doubt they have either.

Which is all to say that vaginal flavor is a complicated subject, and while race is an enormous part of how we interact with each other in this country, and racism is built into the very framework and superstructure of our judicial, educational, legal, and cultural systems, and colonizes us all in profound and terrible ways, and especially harms and disenfranchises the people who experience racism in large and small ways every day of their lives, I’m not sure it really has all that much to do with how our pussies taste.

But don’t take my word for it. Get out there and lick a glorious melting pot full of vaginas and report back. Knowledge is power.