It's not TMI if you use fancy words

The F-word is back, and indeed it wasn't a second too soon, because I'm in oestrus. Have been for a couple of days. For the first time in more than a year I've had nowhere to channel my state of oestrus, so I've been observing it carefully. And I don't just say this because I myself am endlessly fascinating: women are endlessly fascinating creatures.

One of the remarkable things is the staring. The way a pert ass walking by makes the head swivel. The irresistible up-down sweep taking in the goods, that my middle-class manners can barely keep subtle when a nice piece of something passes on the street. It's very mannish, and it backs up my theory that men are just women who live in a perpetual state of simultaneous oestrus and pre-menstrual tension, so we should all try to understand each other a little better than we do.

Another of the remarkable things is the sense of smell, which suddenly goes from a sense to a superpower. I can smell perfectly clean people from ten paces on a windy day, and perfectly clean men from farther. It's the oddest thing when smelling can inform you who's walked in the room, or that the fecking gorgeous blue-eyed Sicilian pizza guy is just around the corner as you walk to the falafel shop. We don't pay enough attention to our sense of smell generally. If you haven't read the massive Swiss blockbuster Perfume yet, get to it - I think it's one of the best novels of our generation.

And finally, there's the way that sex with almost everybody becomes a realistic possibility - not an attractive one, mind you, indeed usually exactly the opposite. But nonetheless a visualizable option that a conscious part of your brain has to reject, instead of a hypothetical one that doesn't even bother swimming up from the subconscious. I have a feeling that's also fairly mannish.

And all of this, as well as a couple of subtle physiological things, within the framework of concealed ovulation, so that outside of the fact that maybe women stare a bit more and know who you are without looking up from her desk, the rest of the world has no idea.

God, human beings are so strange! So beautifully and oddly adapted! For me, this sort of thing is what really separates us from the other animals - not our opposable thumbs, our big brains, or our porcine ability to eat almost any old rubbish - but things like concealed ovulation, the female orgasm, minimal but key sexual dimorphism, and the way willies hang out of gentlemen's bodies on display for the ladies instead of getting tucked up inside them until they're in use. Our sexual organization in general.

It is so gloriously fucked up compared to all the other animals - the most poetic sexuality out there - except maybe for the bonobos', but I don't like them that hairy. So hurrah for sex, ladies and gentlemen: it's more than a replacement for television. In my book, it brings us closer to that Big Bonobo in the Sky.

Nick Cave has an opinion on this too: