It is safe to say that the Yamate police, in the Japanese prefecture of Kanagawa, was puzzled when the twenty-fourth report about a stolen bicycle seat was filed. They probably thought they were on the right track when the security cameras of a parking pointed them to Joji Kondo, a 35 years old man who was identified as he was removing four more seats. What they really didn’t expect, however, was finding a full collection of exactly 200 stolen bike seats at the man’s house. «I like to enjoy the lingering odor of women» said Kondo – who can now be officially considered the king of misophileseverywhere.

Misophilia, also called ‘ozolagnia’, is the relatively common fetishism for human scents. Sweat, skin and more private smells are all possible targets for misophiles – although different persons can fixate on different scents or odor combinations: ospressiophiles, in example, only go for the most pungent and often unpleasant smells. Others are more refined, and proud of their gentle-sounding definition as ‘renifleurs’, from the French word for ‘sniffer’.
The Japanese case could be a textbook example, for Kondo only stole leather seats from female-style bikes. He explained that leather retains the scent better, even boasting to the officers that he could identify each seat by smell and taste alone. As the cam girls I interviewed for XXX – The dictionary of unusual sex repeatedly told me, misophilia is so frequent that the bulk of their earnings came not from the shows themselves, but from sales of their used (and sealed in airtight Ziploc bags) panties and stockings. One friendly word if you are a client: they also confessed that to satisfy the huge number of requests they often employed their male friends as help, asking them to wear and sweat the items on their behalf…