August 31, 2007
Oooh… Mami


cydypotd154.jpg There are five components to a human’s sense of taste: salty, sweet, sour, bitter and umami. Salty and sweet are fairly straightforward-salt and sugar, basically. Sour and bitter are a bit more ambiguous-a lemon is sour, but its seeds are bitter, and often these two sensations are intermingled making it difficult to conceive of sourness and bitterness as distinct. But the most free-floating of the five is the most recent addition to our Western understanding of taste: umami.

Umami is that bass note of soy sauce, parmesan cheese, mushrooms and MSG.

It is also the taste of pussy.

Like any other taste, the taste of pussy is concerto. Not just a mixture of the primary five, it blends as well the hundreds of other chemicals that our noses detect, and the combination of the primary five and the olfactory hundreds makes up the taste of pussy (or lemons, vichyssoise, bouillabaisse, Necco wafers or ear wax).

But pussy might very well be the epitome of umami.

Granted, pussy can have a bodega of other flavors partying on with the mysterious umami. I’ve drunk vast amounts of Diet Coke and tasted like the Real Thing. I’ve been a bit off and tasted a bit lemony and acridic. I’ve tasted other women who had a slight strawberry thing happening. Or, yet weirder, who tasted like nothing at all. Like water. Like air.

After leaving them, I would sniff my fingers and find…nothing. That was odd.

Historically, pussy often gets a bad rap, smell and taste-wise. And certainly, an unpleasantly wafty ‘gina is not a beautiful thing. It happens. It’s not a girl’s proudest moment, but sometimes biology goes awry and we and our genitalia are led away from the garden path of sweet-smellingness. It happens to cocks too. We all of us have bodies and sometimes our bodies, despite soaps and lotions and potions and all of our other best efforts, betray us.

But I think that what may be most failing us in talking about the taste of pussy is language. Wittgenstein asserted that the limits of our language are the limits of our world, and perhaps the taste of pussy has just historically fallen outside of these limits. Somewhere on the linguistic frontiers has lurked the right word for the pussy taste. And as we generally have a hard time articulating this ephemeral crossing of boundaries of sensual experience to linguistic utterance, it is hardly surprising that pussy would take the linguistic fall.

Umami itself is a gentle shape-shifter. It is not so much an exact chemical compound that we can put our finger on and point to and grunt: NaCl=salty. Sucrose and lactose=sugar. It can’t be nailed down in any exact science. MSG, what is most often pointed to as the clearest single indicator of umami, doesn’t so much have a taste itself as much as it makes other things taste better.

Synaesthesia, a neurological disorder I really wish I had, causes one sensory experience to cross with another. Synaesthetes “see” music or “feel” taste. When I think of umami, when I think of tastes that evoke this apparitional taste intensifier, I see shades of brown and earth, like the richness of mushroom barley soup, of gravy, of dark and fragrant mysteriousness.

And the saltysweetsexyfunkysilky taste of pussy.

Oooh, mami.


Comments

4 Responses to “Oooh… Mami”

  1. jp on September 1st, 2007 11:47 am

    aha!…so that’s why i like mushrooms so much - they remind me of pussy!…

  2. Curvaceous Dee on September 1st, 2007 4:22 pm

    Ooooh, mami indeed. I never get tired of the myriad differences in cunt-taste-and-smell, but they all have that base note. Yum!

    xx Dee

  3. luscious on September 2nd, 2007 4:54 pm

    “..Wittgenstein asserted that the limits of our language are the limits of our world, and perhaps the taste of pussy has just historically fallen outside of these limits. Somewhere on the linguistic frontiers has lurked the right word for the pussy taste. And as we generally have a hard time articulating this ephemeral crossing of boundaries of sensual experience to linguistic utterance, it is hardly surprising that pussy would take the linguistic fall…”

    interesting. and highly probable too. after all, we’ve been living in a male-centric world for ages and the penis has been described in all its shapes, colours and smells whereas the vagina had to play second violin all along.

    question: what does MSG stand for? a bit of elaboration on this would’ve been welcome…

  4. chelsea g on September 3rd, 2007 7:21 am

    MSG is monosodium glutimate. It occurs naturally in some foods like mushrooms, seaweed and tomatoes, but most often it’s a chemical creation added to foods. It’s the thing in Chinese food that people say makes them sick, and it’s what many Chinese restaurants claim their food to be free of. It’s sold under the brand name Accent! and comes along for the ride in lots of pre-packaged foods like dehydrated soup mixes, snack foods and frozen foods.

    I hope this answers your question.

    kissykiss,
    chelsea g

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