Exactly when Dr. Winnifred Cutler’s pheromone ads started appearing in my favourite car magazines, I can’t be sure. But she’s now a fixture in the back pages of Road & Track, selling tiny vials of chemicals that are supposed to make a man irresistible to women (at $98.50 for one sixth of an ounce, you are paying for the Bugatti Veyron of colognes, but I have my doubts).
Cutler’s ads are part of a social and commercial shift that has transformed the world of car magazines. Back in the day, their advertising was dominated by products like suspension parts, torque wrenches and car wax. Now they’re filled with come-ons for Viagra, male enhancement systems and mail-order bride services with supply chains that seem to originate in the former Soviet republics.
The modern car magazine serves two parallel functions: disseminating information about cars, and providing an engineering-style solution for men who need to find (and please) a woman. Unfortunately, this is one for the failure file – the mechanical approach only works with machines.
Perusing the now-sexualized back pages of the car magazines got me thinking about two of my favourite things: publishing and the nature of love. When I was a boy, Road & Track and Car and Driver were my twin bibles (the old and new testaments, you might say). I studied acceleration charts, read up on cam lobe profiles and pored over performance shootouts that pitted car against car.
The shootout is part of a car magazine’s DNA, upholding and proclaiming its values in the same way that open elections do for a western democracy. I might argue with my friends about whether a Porsche was better than a Ferrari, but in the end it came down to numbers, and the winner was the car with the fastest acceleration, the highest top speed and the lowest lap time. (Or so we believed.)
Even as a boy, I knew that finding a woman was far more complicated than selecting a car. For starters, women defied statistical analysis (Hugh Hefner tried his best, but there was definitely more to a woman than measurements). Unlike a car, a woman’s performance couldn’t be quantified, and the Grand Prix of Sexuality was a complex and deeply subjective contest, with no clear champion (although many considered Raquel Welch the most beautiful woman in the world, I preferred Diana Rigg).
Back then, cars and women were sharply delineated subjects. If you wanted to read a road test, you went to Motor Trend. If you needed help landing a woman, you bought Playboy, which was packed with ads for English Leather cologne and stereo systems. (Playboy did mention cars occasionally, but only as male enhancement devices.)
But sex aids never made into the pages of Road & Track. This was the realm of the car guy. It defined our thinking and provided us with a frame of reference – when I described a frustrating girlfriend as “a Dodge with the nervous system of a Maserati,” my car buddies all knew what I meant.
Dealing with cars was a matter of logic. Attracting women was more like wizardry, a process filled with mystery and error. When I was 19, I met a nice woman named Sarah on a ski lift. She seemed perfect, and our first date was great, at least for me. But when I called the phone number Sarah left me, it was out of service.
Had my encounter with Sarah happened today instead of back in the 1970s (when car magazines were only about cars) I might have been pushed to consider some of Cutler’s chemicals – and if the pheromones didn’t work, Road & Track could have directed me to some enhancement services or even a young bride from Kazakhstan.
