This story contains spoilers for the movie Challengers.
Working up a sweat during exercise is one of life’s simplest pleasures, but, generally speaking, said workout sweat isn’t the kind of thing you flaunt. In fact, according to the deodorant-commercial industrial complex, we’re supposed to be in a constant battle with our sweat glands, never allowing the fact that we excrete liquid from our bodies—ew, gross mammal behavior!—to be known to the world (or, God forbid, announce itself via the age-old scourge of the unsightly sweat stain).
All this Miss Manners–esque politesse, though, has been thrown into turmoil by Challengers, the brand-new Luca Guadagnino film featuring Zendaya as a hyper-determined tennis coach (and, for a time, a star player in her own right) and two little white boys—excuse me, I mean Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor—as her rotating, sometimes overlapping love interests. I’m on the record as loving movies in which sports and romance collide, so obviously Challengers was extremely For Me. Frankly, I thought I’d have to suffer through the sports scenes to get to the parts where they all kiss, but even for this extremely lazy nonathlete, the tennis of it all was one of the best parts of the film—not to mention the sweat. Oh, the sweat!
As mentioned, I’m not particularly sportif, and the most sweat I tend to encounter in my daily life comes either during my weekly Pilates class (to which I bring a little spray bottle of Mario Badescu face mist to douse myself with when I’m really exhausted, because I have to be the most annoying girl on the Reformer for some reason) or when I’m waiting in line at the post office. (Seriously, why is it always so hot in there?) I never played team sports, and I never really had crushes on athletes growing up—except for a circa-1999 Mia Hamm, of course—so I was shocked to find myself, well, all worked up at the sight of O’Connor perspiring in a sauna while playing psychosexual mind games with his so-called platonic male bestie. (Hello, bisexuality, my old friend.)
To my mind, O’Connor is the pinnacle of Challengers’ sweat chic, but Faist also looks incredibly good a little damp (and drips directly onto the camera at one point) and of course there are infinite odes to be written about the sight of Zendaya heating up a court. Wondering if my interest in these actors’ perspiration made me, well…something of a perv, I turned to Google, where I learned that the erotic potential of sweat is actually very well-documented. Sexual arousal based on someone’s natural smell is known as olfactophilia, a word that’s technically defined as carnal interest in and stimulation by body odors. (Androstenol, a pheromone in fresh male sweat, has been shown to improve women’s moods and heighten their focus.)
I would love it if the success of Challengers inspired a no-antiperspirant, au naturel, hippie-influenced summer. But frankly, having lived through one very odoriferous Brooklyn August when I was trying out aluminum-free deodorant (not to mention making my roommates live through it with me), I don’t think I can in good conscience go through that kind of thing again. Maybe if I were a ripped tennis star, I’d have the confidence to just let the sweat fly from my body unfettered. But because I’m not, I’ll just have to content myself with slathering on the Secret and heading out to see Challengers again in an ice-cold, air-conditioned movie theater—all the better to appreciate the heat onscreen!
