Mythical Jesus?

Hello, and thanks for tuning in.

Today I'm gonna respond to this article.

My lengthy posting in which I explained why the “mythical Jesus” claim has no traction among scholars (here) drew (predictably) an attempt to refute it from the “Vridar” blogsite. 

I have discussed a bit before why this sort of analysis fails, because it only exists as a second-hand report in every case, and every case draws from the same works that went on to become the bible.  There's no extra-biblical accounts of Jesus as we would expect.

If I wanted to find information on other people alive at the time, I can look in multiple places for it.  I don't have to confine myself to just one book to justify my reasoning. 

For example, if I wanted to find information on Pontius Pilate, I can look at the Pilate Stone.  I can find that he was mentioned by Tacitus and Philo, and I can even find mention of him in other apocryphal works not associated with the bible. 

We don't have anything like this for Jesus.  The only mentions of him we have are in copies of stories alleging to be from earlier.  Considering all of these stories claim he was an incredibly well-known fellow with a trial that had every single person in the crowd calling for his death, we would expect someone other than the authors of the gospels to have written about him at some point doing the things attributed to him.

I don’t think it succeeds, but readers will have to judge for themselves.

I certainly did. Again, there may well have been someone he was based on, who had similar philosophies and what not.  If I told you that Paul Bunyan was a real person just because he's probably based on Fabian Fournier, would you accept that as accurate?  No, I don't think so.

The fellow in the gospels named Jesus is not the same guy as he's based on.  There may indeed have been some fellow he was based on, but that's where the connection ends.

I’ll content myself with underscoring a few things that remain established from my posting.

Well, they would remain established, if you had other historical data to represent it. Currently your assertion is just that the Jesus of the gospels is based on someone who lived then, not that it's actually their life story.

That's like if I said that Fabian Fournier was literally Paul Bunyan and therefore everything attributed to Paul Bunyan actually happened in the real world.

I focused on three claims that Richard Carrier posits as corroborating his hypothesis that “Jesus” was originally a “celestial being” or “archangel,” not a historical figure, and that this archangel got transformed into a fictional human figure across several decades of the first century CE. 

I guess we can agree on that, I don't believe some guy ascended into heaven or and came back to earth or whatever.

I showed that the three claims are all false, which means that his hypothesis has no corroboration.

1. There is no evidence of “a Jewish archangel Jesus”.  All known figures bearing the name are portrayed as human and historical figures.  Furthermore, contra Carrier, Paul never treats Jesus as an archangel, but instead emphasizes his mortal death and resurrection, and mentions his birth, Davidic descent, and Jewishness, cites teachings of Jesus, and refers to his personal acquaintance with Jesus’ siblings.

Again, I agree with you, but that's because Paul's entire narrative is that Jesus appeared to him after he died in a blaze of light.  I don't think this happened at all.  I don't think some ancient dude even appeared to him.  I think he hallucinated or lied or something, to give his story embellishment, so that he could explain his change of heart or whatever. 

Harry Potter is probably based on someone, but I bet you he never appeared to J K Rowling and used magic in real life for her.  Just because he's based on someone doesn't he was real.

Same with Paul.  Believing he's not some celestial being, but also believing he came back from the dead in a blaze of light and appealed to some old guy to change his ways also is equally unbelievable.

If you don't believe that part of Paul's story, what makes you believe the rest of it?

1. There is no example among “all the savior cults” of the Roman period of a deity being transformed into a mortal being of a given time and place (such as he asserts happened in the case of Jesus).  Carrier claims a pattern, but there is none.

Sorry about the numbering, Blogger isn't preserving it for some reason. I do agree though, a lot of myth at the time involved gods taking human form, and many stories were made up about those gods.  Zeus allegedly became a swan once.  It's almost like people can make stuff up and share stories and things.

1. From earliest extant Christian texts (Paul) to the NT Gospels, “Jesus” is a genuine human figure.  To be sure, Paul and other early Jesus-followers believed also that Jesus had been raised from death and exalted to heavenly glory.  They also then ascribed to him a back-story or “pre-existence” (e.g., drawing on Jewish apocalyptic and Wisdom traditions).  But for Paul “Jesus” wasn’t simply a “celestial being”.  And for the Gospel writers, he wasn’t simply a bloke.

So which one is it?  You claim the Gospel writers and Paul were both talking about the same guy, even though you admit here they clearly seem to be talking about two different people.

My posting was intended simply to illustrate, especially for “general” readers outside the relevant fields, why the “mythical Jesus” view is regarded as bizarre among scholars in the relevant fields, scholars of all persuasions on religious matters, and over some 250 years of critical study. 

Again, I'm not saying there wasn't some guy it's based on.   Kinda like Uncle Sam, lots of people believed for a long time, and perhaps still do, that he was based on a real person. We are fairly certain he wasn't, even though lots of people alive at the time wrote to the contrary. 

If it's this difficult to determine the origins of some myth that we literally have good documentation for in modern times, what makes you think people two thousand years ago acted much different?

It is a sad and desperate move for “Vridar” to dismiss this fact by impugning this huge body of scholarship as either gullible or prejudiced, when the only “crime” is a refusal to endorse the “mythicist” notion. 

I think the main takeaway is that, at least in my case, I have some agreement.  I think Jesus was a mythical figure because being based on someone doesn't make a character real.  Jesus is a character just like any other.

Just like when Joseph Smith claims the angel Moroni visited him, it doesn't mean he did.  We have exactly the same kind of story for Moroni visiting Joseph Smith as we have for Jesus visiting Paul.

I can use your argument to explain that Moroni is real also, since Joseph Smith claims it, therefore it must be true.  People wrote about Joseph Smith in his own lifetime, after all. There were at least 15 other people we can confirm who also have accounts of interacting directly with and observing Moroni. 

According to you, the simple fact that some texts exist confirming his existence means that he was, in fact, real.  In fact, this means we actually have more 'evidence' for the existence of Moroni than we do for Jesus, and it's exactly the same kind of evidence.

Are you going to tell me that Moroni was based on someone, and completely dismiss the mythicist notion, I wonder?

The scholarship that I point to has been shaped by the critical impulses from the Renaissance and “Enlightenment,” all texts, whether biblical or Christian or whatever, subjected to the same critical tests and procedures.  In what other subject would a solid body of scholarly judgement be treated to such foolish disdain?

Steady state universe, flat earth, geocentrism, anti-vaccination, homeopathy, the historicity of prometheus actually getting fire from the gods, and so on.

So, ignoring the various red-herrings and distortions of the “mythicist” advocates, the claims proffered as “corroborating”  their view have been shown to be erroneous. 

Not really, though.

And this is why the view has no traction among scholars. 

Scholars also claim he was a mythical figure because he is only loosely based on someone who probably lived.  Most people, yourself included, seem to accept that whoever Jesus is based on didn't do miraculous things, or anything even out of the ordinary. The fellow in the works of literature appear to be someone completely different to the person he's based upon.  The fellow he's based upon doesn't appear to have done most of the things attributed to him in the gospels, like cursing a fig tree, or turning water into wine, or raising himself and others from the dead, or healing blindness and disease, or being tranfigured, or feeding the multitude, or walking on water, or causing the oceans to still, or so on.

I mean, people did believe that famous people, gods in human form, demigods, and others could perform these actions, though.  We do have accounts of that also, like people seeing Pythagoras calming the seas, for example.  That doesn't mean he did it, though.  It just means people wrote about him doing it.

There’s no conspiracy.  It’s not because scholars are gullible or lazy.  The view just doesn’t stand up to critical scrutiny.

Yeah, that's why there's no mythicists at all in the academic community...

God works in mysterious ways

Hello, and thanks for tuning in.

Today I'm going to respond to this blog post from the venereal... I mean, venerable Joel Osteen

The Scripture says, "The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord" (Psalm 37:23).

The scripture says a lot of things, but I'm glad to know that you think anything done in your god's name is good.

God is strategic.

Well, he's got to be.  It's not like he knows everything and can do anything, right?

Before you were formed in your mother's womb, He laid out a specific plan for you.

I've heard this one before.

Nothing happens randomly—not just the good breaks, the promotion, the times you see favor, but even the closed doors, the disappointments, and the betrayals are a part of God's plan.

So all the good and bad in life is, in fact, at the behest of god?  Most people won't admit that, but Joel will.

It may not make sense; it wasn't fair, but God wouldn't have allowed it if it wasn't going to work for your good.

You just told me that people whose cars blow up and kill them is part of god's plan.  Childhood cancer that kills children before they're old enough to speak. Gout.  Morgellons disease. Cystic fibrosis.

You're telling me these things work for our good?  I bet you're not gonna justify that, are you?

If you don't understand that, you'll be frustrated when things don't go your way, upset because somebody did you wrong, bitter because the door closed.

I'm sorry, little Johnny, but you have to understand.  God gave you this cancer that's gonna kill you soon, but don't be frustrated.  It's for your own good, Johnny.

In reality, these were ordained by God as setups to move you into your destiny.

That's right, little Johnny, god ordained you with the holy cancer, to move you through an incredibly painful existence, because that's your destiny.  Praise god, abuser of children, maker of wretches, deliverer of pestilence and strategic evil monger.

We can't comprehend the wisdom of God.

You hear that, lads?  

We just can't comprehend god's wisdom when he allows this stuff to happen.

If we can't comprehend his wisdom, then why's he gotta be strategically causing children to suffer abuse, or old men to be shot, for their own good, for their own destiny.You are not a pleasant person, Joel.

He can plan out generations and take mistakes, betrayals, and closed doors and somehow weave them all together to work for our good.

How exactly did a bullet to the head work for the old man's good?  How does abuse work for the good of those children?

When God told Abraham that he and Sarah were going to have a baby in their old age, Abraham tried to help God out by sleeping with Sarah's maid and having a son named Ishmael.

God can do anything, and that's why he makes you cheat on your wife I guess.

But God said, "He is not the promised child."

I mean, god could've also just made the servant barren, or made Sarah to be fertile, but I guess that wouldn't work for some reason.

What part of being a slave worked toward the good of the maid, again?

Ishmael was in one sense considered a mistake and caused problems in the home.

Mysterious ways...

Surely that was not in God's plan. And yet amazingly, it was descendants of Ishmael who came along at the right moment and kept Joseph, Abraham's great grandson, from dying in the pit when his brothers betrayed him (see Genesis 37).

What door did god open for Holofernes?

It's a shame god didn't have the power to, you know, close up the pit, or destroy the slavers like he destroyed Sodom and Gomorroah and Jericho and the Midianites and... well, let's stay on topic I guess.

The mistake of Abraham became the setup for the saving of Joseph, who helped save the rest of their family. That's how amazing God is.

God is so amazing that he couldn't just, you know, tell us who his chosen person was before some jerks tried to put him in shackles.

A while back Victoria lost a ring that had been in her family for several generations.

Ain't that a shame?  I hate losing things too.

For months we looked everywhere.

Did you really, though?  Did you look at the bottom of the Marianas trench?  I think you're engaging in hyperbole here, Joel.

Late one night, three years later, we were driving home on a rural freeway.

Dang, Joel is just like us.  He doesn't even have 54 million dollars for another private jet.  He has to drive, like some commoner.Maybe god will do some good in his life and get him another jet soon.

I was going about seventy in a sixty-five speed zone.

Don't worry, I'm sure god will protect you.

Victoria kept telling me, "Joel, slow down or you'll get a ticket," and sure enough, I got pulled over.

Rend unto Caesar!

When Victoria searched the glove compartment, she couldn't find the insurance card, so she ended up pulling everything out.

Dude, you gotta keep that stuff with your owner's manual.  That makes it very easy to find!

How much stuff does Joel keep in his glove box, anyway?

Reaching way to the back, she felt something way down in a crack, and finally pulled it out.

I didn't know this was one of those kinds of sermons.  This might get racy.

It was the long lost ring!

PRAISE JEEBUS

And she ended up finding the insurance card right on top of the pile. It was like God caused her to overlook it.

It's a shame he didn't just make you go the speed limit and, I dunno, not cause your wife to lose the ring in the first place.

Sometimes what we think is a setback is really a setup for God to do something great. God even knows how to turn our mistakes around for our good.

You do realize there's no mistakes if god does everything, right?  You do realize he caused your wife to lose her ring just so you could get a speeding ticket, right?  You've got your causality backward.  He didn't cause you to speed so you'd find the ring. 

More to the point, though, you probably didn't even get a ticket for only going 5mph over.  Was this also god's doing?  Again, if he works to make these things happen, then nothing is an accident, and every thing that happens is because god strategically makes it happen.

Thanks for tuning in!

Perfumes and you, a primer

 Hello, and thanks for tuning in.

I've started working on a schedule for posting that I hope to keep.  This should keep my video and blog content coming to you more regularly now.

Now onto the article.

It’s 2018, and you might be wondering:

Is it alright for men to smell like rosemary and heather growing amongst dry wood in the sunny, Garrigues region of France?

Yes, it is.

What about a blend of freshly cut iris, pink peppercorn, and a stone heating in the sun?

Totally fine.

OK, how about a bright orange blossom that just weathered a hard rain and cedar felled from the shores of Corsica?

In fact, yes — but why not add a touch of bergamot?

If recent growth in the men’s fragrance industry is any indication, it is increasingly the norm for men to smell pleasant.

 I agree, it's fine for men to smell how they like, but the point is, people don't smell like those things.  They're all things that are, in fact, not men.  Personally, perfumes tend to be too strong for me, and I really don't care for them, and that's why I wear unscented deodorant and buy soaps with little to no scent if possible. 

Still, if our natural scent were sub-par, then we wouldn't have stayed alive as a species this long.  We smell funky because it works for natural selection.  I agree that it's not a particularly pleasant smell generally, but it works, and that's kinda the point.

Expected to reach $18.7 billion by 2020, this industry is climbing from $14.8 billion in 2015, according to a study by London-based industry researcher Euromonitor. This reflects the broader rise of the men’s grooming industry, which includes shaving products, fragrances, and toiletries. Men are now more invested in personal upkeep than ever, which is good news for all, but especially for the fragrance business. 

That's a lot of money.  I like how the implication is that men smelling better benefits everyone, because we all know that men's stench kills thousands every single day. We have to feed the narrative that people smell bad and things smell good so that we can make that number even higher, obviously.

Again, I don't really care for perfumes because they typically annoy my lungs and sinuses, but I can appreciate why some people enjoy them.  I just don't think it's nearly such a dramatic problem.  Know what's even better news for all?  Ending world hunger.

The week before Christmas each year sees a dramatic spike in Google searches for “men’s cologne,” but it’s quickly becoming a year-round fascination year-over-year.

News, folks.  This is it.  People searching for gifts around the holiday is now news.

The growth of the men’s fragrance industry is partially indicative of changing gender norms, where men are granted more aesthetic freedom and fluidity. 

I bet you didn't see that coming, did you?  Generally speaking, men and women want to mate with one another, and generally speaking people will be attracted or repulsed by whichever smells they like or don't like, respectively.  You can change gender norms all you like, but at the end of the day, men are typically going to be attracted to sweeter smells, and women are generally going to be attracted to muskier smells.  There's a reason that the males of the species are the ones that secrete musk, after all.  Pheromones are complicated.

“Men are more comfortable expressing themselves these days,” fragrance historian and master perfumer Roja Dove tells Inverse. “The way we smell is an extension of our sense of style, so as men have become more self-aware of how they present themselves, fragrance is another thing that has become more commonplace as a result.”

 

There was a time when we humans used perfumes almost all the time, especially in high-society, because we didn't have things like showers and soap to wash the excessive dirty smells off.  Generally, though, this isn't an issue today, and a bit of deodorant solves it.  Naturally, scent has been a part of fashion since it was first derived thousands of years ago.

The main difference today is that, for the past several decades, we've had artificial perfumes and smells that have made it very affordable for the average person to use them, so naturally they are more common place.  There's a reason everyone jokes about every high school boy wearing Axe deodorant, after all.  It's because they all wear it.

It’s not only that the men’s fragrance industry is growing, but the range of scents that are considered “masculine” or within the realm of men’s fragrance are also expanding. Men, by today’s standards, need not have a cloud of Axe trailing them at all hours, or feign disinterest in fragrance.

Called it.

The point remains, however, that the scents traditionally considered masculine actually came from male animals, as well as plants that had the same smells or pheromones, or close enough analogues.  You can't exactly go complain to the musk deer that their females should start secreting these scents, after all.

We can decide that it's okay for men to wear whatever scents we want, but that doesn't change which chemicals are going to attract the partner you're looking for more than others. 

“As men have become more comfortable with the concept of scent, it has allowed the male perfume market to evolve into something more diverse. Perfumers are more open to delivering compositions that are more unique, such as a bigger embrace of the use of flowers in masculine compositions,” Dove tells Inverse.

Men are just as comfortable with scents as they've ever been.  Have you ever gone to church, or a retirement home, or even the grocery store when there's older people there?  Men's colognes can be stronger than the women's perfumes.

I mean, sure, there's arguably better marketing today, but the bottle of Old Spice on my shelf came from an older male relative.  Again, I don't often wear the stuff, so it just kinda sits there, but you get the point.

Just a couple decades ago, men were not allowed to stray too far from smelling like the ocean, lest they pose a peril to their masculinity.

Depending on the man, though, and which decade or generation you're talking about, that smell wasn't that common.  Again, old spice and other similar perfumes or colognes smell like something different.  Then again, the average working man probably doesn't care about his scent too much, because he's going to go work in the factory, construction yard, or whatever, and the smell isn't going to last anyway.

Dirt, dust, and all the other stuff in industrial environments easily trumps all the other smells you're gonna put on in the morning.  For a lot of men, it has nothing to do with imperiling their masculinity, it is instead just another that takes time and effort which they could put into something else.  Like making coffee, or going to work, or sleeping, or chopping down trees, or hitting things with hammers.

Men have predominantly worked around other men, and women around other women, for a fair part of history.  It isn't like we need to smell good for our machines, or other men.  We're gonna smell like oil, or burning stuff, or dust, or dirt, or whatever.  It's only more recently we've come to see scent as a thing everyone should have rather than a thing that should be used when you go out for a fun weekend to the bar, movies, or whatever.


Listen to the tone of those words.  Men were oppressed and we are taking their oppression away...

Wait a minute, Inverse is closer to SJW than MRA I thought.  Then again, they're focusing on this issue that they claim is better for everyone, rather than an issue like men's custody or something, which only benefits men, so maybe it is still an SJW issue?  Men's odor is so oppressive that fixing it helps alleviate the oppression of women via scent warfare, I see.  This is fascinating.  That's subtle, like a good perfume.

As Dove discusses in his article, “Why All Men Smell The Same, According to Master Perfumer Roja Dove,” beginning in the ‘90s, men’s fragrance tended to be dominated by an oceanic smell that is “actually calone — an aqueous-smelling material with a pronounced watermelon aspect. It’s a man-made, synthetic molecule that gives the olfactory impression of the fresh seashore through its marine/ozone nuances.”

 Spray the watermelon waters of the deep blue on your face!

“As men have become more comfortable with the concept of scent, it has allowed the male perfume market to evolve into something more diverse. Perfumers are more open to delivering compositions that are more unique, such as a bigger embrace of the use of flowers in masculine compositions,” Dove tells Inverse.

I personally kinda like lavender and jasmine, but I don't really wear them.  This sounds like some marketer looking for a new niche to fill. 

"Oh, that old stuff you're wearing is so out of date and overdone.  Come here, we've got your solution, so you're not like the regular plebs.  Come be our pleb, give us your money."

I'm not really against commercialism, I just think it should be more transparent and honest.

While decoupling fragrance and gender may seem like a modern idea, art historian Jessica Murphy points out that it is really an old idea.

For the majority of it history, fragrance has known no gender. She sees the industrial revolution and resulting commercialization of fragrance as the period when it came to be partitioned into two genders. Before this time, fragrance was lawless — the scent of a rose or a strong musk was open to all.

I mean, that's fair.  Scents were basically just whatever you wanted to wear. Then we created two market segments and now they're trying to create a third with this gender-less stuff.  The best way to make a new market is to complain about the old one and try to replace it with your own, after all.

Even cologne, as it was originally conceived, was intended for and worn by all genders. As the story goes, in 1708, when Giovanni Maria Farina concocted the refreshing, quickly evaporating scent, he wrote to his brother: “I have found a fragrance that reminds me of an Italian spring morning, of mountain daffodils and orange blossoms after the rain.” He named the fragrance Eau de Cologne, after the German city where he was working.

So he found the a smell that he enjoyed.  Excellent!

It was only later that what began as mountain daffodils and orange blossoms lost its more floral origins and came to signify masculinity. Murphy notes that the fragrance was then widely copied and for a long time Eau de Cologne meant a citrus herbal splash with a lighter concentration of oils. For reasons that she does not believe have been well-established, it then evolved to stand in for men’s fragrance.

I mean fair enough, a man was the first one to wear it, and he shared it with his brother, and presumably women liked it so men wore it more often, and more women were attracted by it, and so on.  Something as simple as that can explain the trend.

You know, the reason a lot of guys act macho and a lot of girls act exactly the opposite is because those kinds of people are attracted to one another.  Now, if their peers see that they are using specific fragrances to attract the other, why on earth would they want to use stuff that doesn't seem to be as effective to this end?  Again, scent is tied pretty directly into our brain and wired for our attraction or repulsion.  It's one of the major ways we determine pheromones and stuff, too, even though you can't smell some of them.

Now the western fragrance industry is in many ways returning to an earlier time in history. This shift is largely owed to niche perfumers, outside of the mainstream industry, who have been on the frontline of shaping this move away from strictly gendered fragrances. “[Niche perfumers] were not creating for men or women, but just creating beautiful fragrances,” Sandy Blandin, founder of the fragrance studio Nose Who Knows, tells Inverse

I mean fair enough, there's gonna be a market for it.

I wonder though, if we put together a list of who buys which perfumes, do you reckon we're going to see a major rejection of the currently established trend?  This is the kind of information we need.  It's all well and good that the person making them doesn't care about the gender stuff, but if you're going to have a paradigm shift, you need to see if you're actually selling it as such.

If you happen to be making your scents unisex but one sex overwhelmingly buys one and the other a different one, that might tell you that your filling a ghost niche, one that only exists in your marketing literature.

I'm not saying don't do it.  I'm just saying, perhaps check your sales demographics before you start making such assertions.  Even if you don't gender your fragrances, there's a good chance that your consumers will.

The niche perfume industry has heralded the growth of a new, shamelessly rose and heather-scented man. “The men who are wearing fragrances today I think they are different from the men who were wearing fragrances years ago. […] They want to stand out. They’re a bit more assertive, in terms of what they like and what they don’t like,” says Blandin.

 That's true.  It's also true that teenage boys and girls also make up a large portion of this market, and they're just going to buy whatever is cheap.  It's also true that the working class individuals are a significant portion of this market, and like myself, don't really care what the smell is, so they're gonna buy the one that says it's for their gender.  I am a simple man, you see, and I like fewer choices.  I go to the store and buy the cheapest unscented deodorant I can find, or the least scented one if there's not one.  I don't particularly care if it smells like roses, or a campfire in Mordor.

I buy the one that says mens because it tends to work best and smell the least.

Niche perfumers were among the first to embrace unisex fragrances, which are now a quickly growing trend as well. Some of these independent perfumers have been creating fragrances that are intentionally deconstructed, a smell removed from any gendered connotations.

I thought you told me that people a century or two ago were the first to do that?

Dang hipsters.

For example, Christopher Brosius, one of the most revered iconoclasts of smell, does not use any gendered language with his fragrances. He instead opts for scents are deeply conceptual, capturing something more psychological than material, like “Where We Are There Is No Here,” “November,” and the E. M. Forster-inspired, “A Room With A View.”

Yeah, but you see, I'm not going to buy something that smells like nowhere because that just sounds like an empty bottle.  What does November smell like, I wonder?  Does it smell like a snow storm and road salt?  I wonder if a room with a view smells like a jail cell that has a small window.

I hate this kind of superfluous marketing bullshit, I guess. 

Dang hipsters.

Zoe Tambling, who is soon to launch her own perfume line, Agnes Fragrances, in Los Angeles, spent five months developing the scent of a Hurricane — of lightning, of rain on concrete. At one point, it hit her that rain on concrete smells like bell peppers, which she then tinctured and added to the fragrance.

I feel like they're just making stuff up now.

Her earlier creation, Stainless Steel, which she colored blue to resemble Windex, is not only outside of gender, but outside of anything remotely human.

Lemme tell you what, when I go out for a night on the town, what I want to smell like is steel wool.  Knives.  Power cables.  Arc welders.

“I wanted to make something that was totally cold and unfeeling,” she tells Inverse.

Well, to be fair, that does sound an awful lot like some corporations.  Maybe you could sell some to congress.

Blandin hopes that in the future, the men’s and women’s fragrance are eclipsed by unisex fragrances, so that nothing has a gender.

Why though?  Why does it matter if smells are gendered?  Are you losing sleep over the fact that some men are wearing perfumes or colognes based on what the market tells them to?  Are you so offended by the smell of Bod that you want to make sure no one ever wears it again?

Also, I just noticed, this article hasn't once recommended that women should be wearing scents that are traditionally mens, as a sign of equality, as a sign that the scents are truly without gender as they claim.

Funny thing, that.

“For me, what I would love to see is that we don’t have any more men and women’s fragrances. Let the people choose what they would like. Let the people whether they want a vanilla, a raspberry, a citrus, and don’t segment the market into men and women.”

Arguably the people are choosing what they like.  Arguably, the people want a segmented market, in general.  That's good for you, too, because it means you can create a third market segment to compete with them.

If everything becomes unisex then your niche goes away, after all.

Also, notice again, how they're talking about a very few scents here, and not ones typically worn by men, even though this shouldn't be a gendered thing I guess.

If current trends keep up, Blandin might just get her wish, and rose and musk will be, once again, in the domain of all genders.

Again, why does she care what other people wear?  How, exactly, will you know it is in the domain of both if people still preferentially choose other things and it just happens to continue being used primarily by women, or people stop using it altogether?

What is the actual resolution here, I wonder?  It sounds like the resolution is to make men wear scents that women typically wear without making women wear the scents that men typically wear.  What if men genuinely don't want to smell like those things and largely don't buy them, even if they're labelled in a unisex fashion.  Will this still be sexist somehow?  I'm sure they'll find a way to say so.  How will we know when this unisex movement succeeds, I guess, is what I'm asking.

I mean, I agree with article, effectively.  Wear whatever you want, and don't worry about stereotypes and stuff.  Still, what if everyone is already kinda doing that, and we've already hit peak unisex?  Do I actually have to go out of my way to buy something typically designed for women just to demonstrate my loyalty to this cause, or can I just say I agree and continue buying my unscented stuff?

The world may never know.