“Love Your Fragrance. What is It?”

“Schtupp” just didn’t test well: The new Teutonic scent

The Germans: They went there. They totally went there. (Respect due to BoingBoingTV for the tip.)

Because it’s the question overloading your neurons right this moment, yes, this package, above, is totally real. The scent is called VULVA—a rather pretty word, it occurs to me—Original.

Because, naturally, it’s the second question you’re going to ask, yes, from what I’ve seen and read, reportedly, it smells like…well, let’s just say that the carpet matches the drapes.

According to the web site of VivaEros Special Products, its makers, VULVA Original is “the erotic, intimate scent of an irresistible woman,” though they leave you completely clueless as to which one.

VULVA Original is not a perfume. It is a beguiling vaginal scent which is purely a substance for your own smelling pleasure.

You use it, as follows:

The precious, vaginal odour [is] filled into a small glass phial. The phial is shaken gently, only a tiny amount of the precious, organic substance is applied onto the back of the hand…and the irresistible smell that exudes from a sensuous vagina immediately intensifies your erotic fantasies and starts the film rolling in your head.

Breathe in and enjoy, anytime, anywhere, the odour of a beautiful woman.

Walk, don’t run, to their easy-to-remember SmellMeAnd.com web site (say it out loud without the “dot.”) A “phial” is €19.90, plus €6.90 s/h (about US$42.20, total.)

On SmellMe…, you can ogle utterly NSFW wallpapers, QuickTimes, Shockwaves, and stills of models posing mindlessly in naught but platform heels, nipple rings, and the chic, VULVA Original gift box. (These women should have been paid at least eight times their day rate, if only for not bursting out in laughter during each ridiculous image, though, here, it looks like one came pretty close.)

Trip-hop-lite fans who dig the site’s Muzak-ish background beats can download a bubbly mp3 here. Meanwhile, in the SmellMe videos, a disembodied voice says the words vagina and vaginal so often I thought I was being workshopped by Eve Ensler. Giselle Bündchen aside, German is just not a very sexy-sounding language, unless you already understand it, or are way into bondage.

Still, like all countries, Germany is interesting for its own unique reasons. It’s a place that, particularly due to its seminal role in the Jewish Holocaust, frowns on almost any overt displays of violence, even in entertainment. Companies which make video games, for example, typically face some of their toughest certification in the German market.

On the other hand, when it comes to sex and nudity, the Rhineland’s apparent openness embarrasses Americans, whose nation’s tolerance for violence borders on the unnatural, but whose interest in sex is, despite all, fundamentally closeted.

Indeed, one could argue that U.S. sex mores come closer to those of pre-unification East Germany. There, just last month, for example, it was disclosed that, over a number of years, Stasi, their secret police division—featured in the recent Oscar-winning film, The Lives of Others,” above—ran a 160-man film unit which had a secret amateur circle of 12 porn enthusiasts.”

Set up in 1982, the group made a dozen sex films, with titles like Private Werner’s Big Surprise, before communism collapsed seven years later. As reported in The Independent, and made plain in a new documentary, Pornography Made in the German Democratic Republic, the raunchy scenes from these government films were “in marked contrast to the atmosphere of public prudery that prevailed in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

Coming out of the United States, a story like that, with its stifled, Puritanical overtones, would probably strike most Americans as a bit shocking, but not surprising, given the level of sexual repression here. I mean, consider the sex scandals that have become commonplace, lately, even as erotica, simultaneously, has become more easily and widely available.

On the other side of Germany, however, things seem a bit different. Consider, for example, the fascinating story of Beate Uhse-Rotermund (1919-2001), right, a German female stunt pilot in the 1930s, who founded an eponymous sex information company in the ’40s.

After the Second World War, returning German soldiers did exactly what U.S. soldiers did: Dropped trou and screwed anything that moved. Germany had a baby boom, also. But unlike the United States’s, Germany’s post-war economy was a trash heap. Under these dire conditions, says Beate Uhse’s web site,

Women not only had to worry about food and accommodation, but also about the problems of unwanted pregnancies. Contraceptives were non-existent, and Beate Uhse saw this gap in the market and advised women about natural methods of contraception. In 1946, she put together a pamphlet describing the Knaus-Ogino rhythm method. This pamphlet was called “Schrift X”, and was the foundation stone of the Beate Uhse company.

In 1962, Uhse opened “The Institute for Marital Hygiene,” Germany’s first sex shop. (This, in a country where pornography would not even be legal until 1976, nearly fifteen years later.) In 1989 she was awarded the Verdienstorden der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1996, she opened a sex museum. The company when public in 1999, offering these stock certificates, above. When she died at age 81, her name was known by a reported 98% of Germans. Today, the Beate Uhse AG chain numbers 300 stores in 14 countries, with revenues over €284.8 million (US$448.4 million) annually.

Now think: Could you imagine any U.S. female octogenarian running a publicly traded sex shop chain, and being awarded by our government for her entrepreneurship? (Could you imagine a U.S. sex shop chain?) Like—best analogy—what are the odds that Hugh Hefner, right, will get the Presidential Medal of Freedom in his, or your, lifetime? Hefner’s name doesn’t have 98%, uh, penetration in this country, even though everybody’s heard of Playboy.

I’m not arguing for a Germanic standard in the U.S., of course, or even for more sexual openness here. However, I think we could do with less repression of sexuality for a whole host of reasons, the most of which would be health-related, and the least of which would be better U.S. distribution for VULVA Original.

Though the way things are going, who knows? Hannah Montana‘s virtuous Miley Cyrus is giving us little peeks at her money-green bra. High schoolers flirt by messaging nude pics through cell phones, researchers say more than half have engaged in oral sex, and the Midwest Teen Sex Show, above, offers handy tips for doing anal. At this rate, by fall, they’ll be spritzing VULVA Original from the floor of Macy’s.