ArcaMax

When I was in high school, a girl I was going out with said she was first attracted to me by the way my hair curled over my shirt collar in the back. She sat behind me in math class.

I spent the next five years of my life turning my back on girls so they could get a good look at the back of my neck.

It didn't work. They just thought I was walking away.

Guys are always looking to slip an extra ace into the deck.

If a man gets a beautiful woman to go out with him the day after he shaves his head, he tells all his buddies he's got it figured out.

"Shave your head," he says. "They love it."

This kind of reasoning is why nearly every motorcycle gets sold, and most sports cars, and nearly all leather jackets, and cowboy hats, and work boots you don't actually need for your job as a mortgage originator.

Right now, the idiots on the edge of our tattered male culture have come up with something called "pheromone maxxing."

Pheromones, if you're not a scientist, are juices inside the male body. They leak out through your skin, and the smell attracts women the way a "Buy Here, Pay Here" car dealership attracts poor people.

The poor women don't even know the pheromones are what's getting them all worked up. The pheromones come off your body, into the air, and they pass right through the woman's protective layer of hair dye and into her brain, and then they go down to her cervix or her ovaries, or some other girly place, and she doesn't even notice you don't have a job or a car.

Pheromone maxxing has now become an online relationship and dating trend, and I understand why. Study after study tells us that fewer babies are being born, people aren't dating as much and numerous women have given up on trying to find that one perfect baboon of their species.

As we know, desperate times call for stupid measures.

It turns out that when us video-addicted, weed-smokin', part-time-job-workin' males take showers, we scrape the pheromones right off our skin, and so, when women smell us, we smell like an unused paper plate,

Pheromone maxxing tells us not to shower, or use deodorant or soap. A couple weeks of that and the masculinity rolls off you like a cloud of nerve gas. Women turn to warm butter when they get a smeller full of your funk. The next thing you know, your involuntary celibacy is deader than your character in a video game you're playing when you're drunk, lonely and nearly crying.

I tested the theory when I was 20 and working long hours in a motel laundry, where I wallowed involuntarily in the smelly sheets of a thousand guests. The laundry wasn't air-conditioned, and it was summer in Kansas City, and after a solid eight hours, you could smell me before you saw me.

After I got off work, I'd eat, shower, change, grab my fake ID and go out to meet girls.

I didn't do so good in the bars. Maybe it was because I made $3.35 an hour, was driving my dad's car and still lived at home.

Then again, maybe I'd washed off all my pheromones, and I didn't have the ripe monkey smell that makes girls forget every word they ever heard at vacation bible school.

If a man wants to know something about how woman think or feel, or what they like or don't like, first of all, he thinks they all think, feel, like and want the same thing. Secondly, when a man wants to know something about women, he usually asks another man.

I've got a little age on me now. I don't smell that strong anymore, and when I want to know something about women, I usually ask my wife. She can't speak for all women, but she can come closer than I will.

So, I told her about pheromone maxxing and smelling bad to do good with the ladies.

She looked at me. In silence. For a while.

"You can be as manly as you want," she said. "No one cares. Just try not to be a jackass."

I laughed. C'mon. Who's gonna try that?

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www, creators.com. Dion's lates book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.