One thing made a difference: The actions of Lucie’s father, Tim Blackman, who arrived in Tokyo to join his other daughter, Sophie, in publicizing the search and prodding the police. Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo bureau chief for the Times of London, covered the case as it unfolded, first over the course of several months while Lucie’s whereabouts and abductor remained unknown, and finally for the six years it took to try the man accused of killing her, Joji Obara. The book Parry wrote about the case, “People Who Eat Darkness,” is an exceptionally perceptive and nuanced look at a terrible crime, one that put nations, institutions and family members at odds, and often into bitter and toxic conflict.

Unlike Truman Capote, author of “In Cold Blood,” the most celebrated true crime narrative of all, Parry is in essence a reporter; this is no “nonfiction novel.” But like Capote, he’s less interested in dishing the eerie or lurid details than he is in exploring the penumbra of the crime, the complex factors that fed into it and the unpredictable effects it had on an ever-spreading network of people. The true crime genre has a (mostly well-earned) reputation for trashiness, but it fascinates for legitimate reasons, as well. Transgression, justice and punishment speak to the very heart of what a society is, how it holds its people together and how they decide who lies beyond the pale.

Because Lucie Blackman was a foreigner, and one employed in an industry that the Japanese view as disreputable, the Tokyo police were inclined to dismiss her disappearance. Bar hostesses get paid to talk to and flirt with customers, and they are expected to go on (paid) dinner dates with them outside the clubs where they work, but it’s an arrangement that usually stops short of actual sex. Nevertheless, the Japanese think of most foreign hostesses as irresponsible, drug-loving backpackers who might well run off without telling anyone or get mixed up with dangerous people. Whether or not a Westerner would call what bar hostesses do a part of the sex industry, for the Japanese, these women belong to that category of “bad” girl who can expect little help or concern from authorities should she get into serious trouble.

Crime is not what it was in Capote’s day. In addition to finding and building a case against the perpetrator — jobs for law enforcement authorities — there’s handling the media, a task usually left to the victim and his or her relatives. Lucie’s father proved, initially at least, to be a master at this. Tim could detach himself emotionally from the horror of his situation and strategize. He was able to capitalize on a G-8 summit meeting being held in Japan around the same time Lucie vanished and parlay it into the intervention of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair publicly asked Japan’s prime minister to front-burner the investigation, and met with Tim and his younger daughter Sophie while he was in Tokyo.

The police, who had been dragging their heels on Lucie’s disappearance, found this development (which made perfect sense in the political context of Britain) flabbergasting. Still, it worked: Lucie, who might have been written off as one of those “disposable” women of dubious virtue, was conclusively cast as an innocent girl, “naive perhaps, out of her depth,” but an adventurous daughter rather than a reckless slut. Tim was driving the narrative, as an electoral campaign manager might put it, and he was good at it. He liked talking to the press, even the tabloid press, and they liked him.

But if Tim was good at telling Lucie’s story, he was less successful at telling his own. Some of the most penetrating passages in “People Who Eat Darkness” concern what Parry refers to as the “script” expected from bereaved parents. Years later, Parry covered a press conference given by the father of another murdered girl and recognized in him “everything the world expected of a man in his situation: broken, helpless, turned inside out by loss.”

Tim, however, was composed, which aroused a formless popular suspicion regarding his sincerity. In similar cases, this uneasiness frequently takes the form of outside observers suddenly deciding that the parents might be implicated in their child’s disappearance or death. Tim, halfway around the world when Lucie vanished, was immune to that, but when he quarreled with the rich businessman funding the private search for his daughter, accusations of self-interest and even exploitation surfaced.

Lucie’s mother, Jane, on the other hand, behaved exactly as a grief-stricken mother is supposed to. In some respects, the truth about her parents’ failed marriage is as unknowable as the events of Lucie’s final hours. Unamicably divorced, Tim and Jane avoided even being in the same room together throughout the crisis. Was Jane, who seems to fall for every kind of supernatural hokum that crosses her path, pathologically vindictive, or was Tim as big a shit as she claimed? Just when you think you’ve made up your mind on that question, a new development comes along to knock you into the other camp.

As for the perpetrator himself, he remains something of a cipher to Parry, who was never able to interview him. Obsessively camera shy, Obara deftly avoided being properly photographed even after his arrest. He was clearly demented, as a long, self-justifying self-published book (disguised as the work of concerned supporters) amply demonstrates. Resolutely confident and unrepentant, Obara was also utterly unlike the vast majority of Japanese criminal defendants. (Parry explains that the justice system there depends almost completely on the ability of police investigators to shame suspects into confessing.) They simply didn’t know what to do with him. The Japanese blamed Obara’s recalcitrant behavior on his Korean ethnicity.

The Blackmans and Obara, Western-style players, descended on a criminal justice system unprepared to cope with them. “The inadequacy of its police force is one of the mysterious taboos of Japanese society,” Parry writes, “a subject that the media and politicians strain to avoid confronting, or even acknowledging.” The blunders of the police were many, but they could also be dogged investigators. Their real problem, according to Parry, is that they are good at dealing with “conventional Japanese criminals,” but when faced with the unexpected, they’re “sclerotic, unimaginative, prejudiced and procedure-bound.”

Obara behaved like a British or American criminal — taking charge of his defense, actively contesting the prosecutors, formulating a counternarrative to account for Lucie’s death. Watching how Japanese institutions responded to him, as well as to the Blackmans’ efforts to influence the investigation, proves fascinating. Since true crime, at its best, serves as a window on what a society cares about — how it constitutes not only what’s right and wrong but what’s sympathetic, reasonable, acceptable and important — the Obara trial was a most illuminating culture clash.

Parry doesn’t, however, forget what lies at the root of this drama: the death of a young woman who, whatever her doubts or flaws, had every reason to hope for a wonderful life. As the investigation would eventually reveal, this tragedy was eminently preventable. The people who tried to tip off the police about Obara were dismissed as not worth listening to. Let’s hope they’re not the only ones to learn from that mistake.

It has no place, however, on a map of the United States.

Let me explain: California is a state. New York is a state. Texas, for the time being at least, is a state. And they deserve to be. They’re big, they’re boisterous — but most crucially, they’re populated. Thirty-seven million people live in California, four million in Los Angeles alone. New York is home to almost 20 million people. If California were a country, it would have the eighth largest economy in the world. If New York City were its own state, it would be the 12th largest — and in my humble New Yorker opinion, the best.

Whereas Nebraska?

There are more Americans in prison than in Nebraska. And not for nothing, but as I drove past endless rows of cornstalks, I couldn’t help but think: What’s the difference? Nebraska, whose official state motto is “Equality Before the Law,” nonetheless feels like a punishment for a crime. And like a criminal, I whiled away the hours (or was it days?) thinking up mottoes that better apply: “Nebraska — a great place to serve some time.” “Nebraska — if you lived here, you’d be bored by now.” “Nebraska — Canada’s Mexico!”

Sure, the argument could be made that Nebraska is in fact an idyllic land full of picturesque cities with enviable small towns steeped in small-town values personified by some of the loveliest Americans to grace the planet — and, I confess, in my wildest dreams I often fantasize about living among them in such a glorious place — but let’s be honest: It’s also a lifeblood-sucking leech on our body politic. Yes, my fellow citizens, despite what the original Constitution of the United States says about the qualifications for statehood and the guarantee of representation in Congress, by every measure that truly matters in America (bigness, crowdedness, awesomeness, Texasness), Nebraska doesn’t deserve its star on the American flag.

Which is to say nothing about Montana (4th largest, 44th most populous).

Or Wyoming (10th largest, 50th most populous).

Or the largest but 47th most populous state we call Alaska.

Add it up, and more than half of all Americans live in eight states. The big ones. The important ones. How many live in the eight least populated states? Less than 3 percent. Three percent — also known as the margin of error. (Which raises a terrifying scenario: It’s possible these states are completely empty.)

Yet what concerned me during my soul-deadening voyage toward Omaha was not whether these states deserve their claim on so much territory (they don’t), or whether, as guaranteed by Article I, they should be represented by two senators as powerful as the senators in states where people actually live (they shouldn’t). Rather, as my car sped past miles and miles of unharvested high-fructose corn syrup, my muscles atrophying and my eyes fluttering in and out of semi-consciousness, my mind was focused on Article IV. Because it is Article IV, the first in the Constitution to turn its full attention to the states rather than the branches of national government, that wants me to believe that Nebraska, this expanse of emptiness which so begs for my disdain, actually deserves my respect.

It reads, in part:

Section 1: Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and Judicial Proceedings of every other State.

Section 2: The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.*

Put plainly, Article IV makes a revolutionary claim: All states are created equal. Laws made in Alaska, which is known for its lawlessness, are as valid as laws made in Pennsylvania, which invented laws. Article IV insists that, as a nation, we should care as much about the Carolinas as we do about California. Montana  matters as much as Massachusetts. And New York is no better than any of its 49 neighbors — not even Nebraska. Which is, put even more plainly, ridiculous.

I should know. I’ve driven through Nebraska. I live in New York.

- – - – - – - – - – - – -

Was I thinking about the merits of giving “Full Faith and Credit” to each state as I drove through Nebraska? Not at all. At the time, I was merely thinking: I am soooooooo not a Nebraskan.

I was, at the time, a Californian. I had lived in the Golden State for four years, and as such, all of the rights and benefits of California residency were mine, all mine! I could serve on California juries, vote in California state elections, and draw California unemployment checks. Had I a major case of glaucoma or a minor case of cancer, in a few years I would even be eligible for my very own California-state-sanctioned, medically warranted marijuana — if I were, you know, into that type of thing. Citizenship has its privileges.

And Article IV is cool with that. It is designed to help me be a Californian even outside California. As written, it would guarantee that if I am granted certain “Privileges and Immunities” in my home state, all other states must also grant me those rights. I can thank Article IV for the fact that when I crossed the border from Colorado into Nebraska, I wasn’t immediately pulled over for not having a valid driver’s license. It is why when I stopped in North Platte to fill up my gas tank, the attendant couldn’t legally charge me $10 a gallon just because I wasn’t “from ’round these parts.” Although the Supreme Court has occasionally retreated to a more “limited interpretation” of Article IV — merely that states may not discriminate against citizens of other states in favor of its own citizens — it has always returned to the basic theme of Article IV: States must play nice with others, and do unto residents from other states as they would do unto their own.

Oklahoma must say to Oregon: Legal physician-assisted suicide? Not the way I would have done it, but I respect your choice. It looks good on you.

Oregonians must say to South Dakotans: Seriously? You’ll only provide abortions to a woman who has been raped if her life is at stake? Seems a bit heartless, but I guess that’s just another reason why we don’t live there.

This makes sense — I, for one, enjoy those regional quirks, and wouldn’t want to live in a country where I couldn’t tell Montana from Maine.

Yet Article IV isn’t all-powerful. As a referee between the states, it has its limits. The most famous check on Article IV, in fact, involved the states of New Jersey and Delaware, a boatload of purloined oysters, and George Washington’s nephew Bushrod. In 1832, Bushrod, then  a federal circuit court judge, ruled on a landmark case, Corfield v. Coryell. The question at hand was whether the state of New Jersey should be allowed to prohibit the plaintiff, Mr. Corfield (and all other non-Jerseyans), from gathering oysters found in the pristine waters off New Jersey (keep in mind, this was back in 1832, when New Jersey waters stood the chance of being pristine) only to return back to their home states to sell them for profit. Bushrod ruled that although the “Privileges and Immunities” protected by Article IV do include “the right of a citizen of one state to pass through any other state … for the purposes of professional pursuits,” stealing oysters isn’t one of them. “We cannot accede to the proposition,” he wrote, “that the citizens of several States are permitted to participate in all the rights which belong exclusively to the citizens of any particular State, merely upon the ground that they are enjoyed by those citizens.”

In other words, go ahead and cruise down our New Jersey turnpike and breathe our fresh New Jersey air, but if you’re not from New Jersey, hands off our New Jersey shellfish.

Article IV doesn’t merely snub oystermen from Delaware. It fails to protect Mormons who might want to marry a dozen sister-wives in Utah and expect Vermont to approve of their polygamous bliss, or gun-toting Kentuckians who want to bring their semiautomatics to church while visiting gun-skittish Maryland. These, too, go too far.

But what if I’m not a Delaware oysterman or a Utahan missionary or an armed Kentuckian? What if I am, say, a gay Iowan? And instead of illegally gathering winkles in Weehawken or wives in Salt Lake City, I have gotten legally married in Iowa — which sanctioned gay marriage way back in 2009. And what if I wanted to celebrate the nuptials with a road trip through Nebraska? (I’m not sure why I’d do that, but just roll with me.) Would Article IV compel Nebraskans to recognize my marriage?

Congress has tried to say no. In 1996, it passed the Defense of Marriage Act, citing the broad power Article IV gives Congress — brace yourself for some gobbledygook — to “prescribe the Manner in which such Acts … shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.” Which, if you ask me, makes about as much sense as in which such Sentences … shall be understood, and the Nonsense thereabouts.

Now, such gibberish would baffle a normal human; to Congress, however, it made perfect sense. It determined, conveniently, that if could limit “the Effect” that gay marriage would have as it traveled the nation, it could also prescribe that it must have no effect at all — which is to say, it could give states the power to ignore gay marriages entirely. The Harvard constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe has called this linguistic tap dance “a play on words, not a legal argument,” which forms in us the bad habit of creating “categorical exceptions” to Article IV, when Congress has no such power.

Neither side is happy with the arrangement. Gay couples, skeptical that the  federal government will ever give them that wedding day owed to them, want to see more states legalize gay marriage; opponents of gay marriage, fearful that gays might spontaneously band together and attack their northern border brandishing Le Creuset spatulas and Rufus Wainwright CDs, want to see nothing less than a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. It’s all very confusing. What’s a gay couple to do — other than plan their honeymoon in San Francisco?

It is this competition, between what one state might want for its citizens and what another state might demand for its own, that Article IV is supposed to referee. Yet it hasn’t. It doesn’t. And what’s more — with all due respect to our nation’s homosexual polygamist mollusk aficionados — its failure to do so has meant repercussions far greater than a marriage license, or a second wife, or cheap, tasty New Jersey seafood: Namely, Article IV, with its schoolyard devotion to fair play and radical equality, has done something far more treacherous.

It started the Civil War.

From the book “Me the People,” by Kevin Bleyer. Copyright © 2012 by Kevin Bleyer. Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc. All rights reserved.

As I was by the two other vintage vibrators that I got to try out — the White Cross Electric Vibrator from 1917, which has a pronged aperture that makes it seem like the ancestor of Jimmyjane’s Form 2, and the Beautysafe Vibrator from the 1940s, which is reminiscent in look, feel and sound to a car waxer.

The U.S. release this week of “Hysteria,” a Maggie Gyllenhaal flick about a Victorian-era doctor who invents an electric massager and uses it to bring about “paroxysms” of relief in female patients with “hysteria,” seemed like a good excuse to get a private tour of the museum, which provided vibes that appear in the film, to learn about the history that’s left out of the movie’s fictionalized story line — and, of course, to try out antique pleasure devices while on the clock.

While the movie is set in the 19th century, doctors’ “manual manipulation” as a treatment for female hysteria goes back as far as the second century. “That took too long,” said Queen. “So doctors started training midwives to do it.” In Rachel P. Maines’ “The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria,’ the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction,” she quotes a 1653 medical book that advises:

When these symptoms indicate, we think it necessary to ask a midwife to assist, so that she can massage the genitalia with one finger inside, using oil of lilies, musk root, crocus, or [something] similar. And in this way the afflicted woman can be aroused to the paroxysm.

Of course, this paroxysm was orgasm, but it was rarely acknowledged as such. Instead, it was said to be the exorcism of hysteria, a vague, catch-all diagnosis for female ailments thought to arise from a displaced uterus or, charmingly, a “wandering womb.” “Some of these women probably had PTSD, some of them were overworked, some of them had extreme stress in their lives, some of them almost certainly had sexual issues going on,” Queen explains. As Maines points out, “many of its classic symptoms are those of chronic arousal: Anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability, nervousness, erotic fantasy, sensations of heaviness in the abdomen, lower pelvic edema, and vaginal lubrication.” Married women were often given the prescription of sex with their husbands.

Eventually, doctors turned to technology to speed up the laborious treatment. “It started with hydraulic devices, water jets, but that really only worked well at spas,” said Queen. In 1869, an American physician patented the Manipulator, a padded table with a steam-powered vibrating mound that rested between the legs. A decade later, British physician Joseph Mortimer Granville – who’s at the center of “Hysteria,” albeit heavily fictionalized — patented a battery-operated vibrator for treatment of muscle pain. Interestingly, he was vehemently against the device being used for hysteria. He wrote, “I have avoided, and shall continue to avoid the treatment of women by percussion, simply because I do not wish to be hoodwinked, and help to mislead others, by the vagaries of the hysterical state.”

Ads selling vibrators as home appliances began to appear in women’s magazines, often showing “women in attractive nightclothes, using it on their chest,” Queen said. “You see facial massage shown from time to time.” These spots referred to them as “aids that every woman appreciates” and promised “all the pleasures of youth … will throb within you.” But when vibrators started showing up in stag films in the 1920s, the ads started to disappear, Queen says.

“Within the next 10 years or so, the doctors close up shop,” she said, perhaps in part because it became impossible to deny the sexual nature of these therapies. “In 1952, hysteria is taken out of medical books,” Queen explained. “The medical associations voted to say, ‘Nothing to see here, there’s really not a disease – no, no, no, we haven’t been treating this with clitoral and vulva massage.’”

Vibrators were still sold direct to consumers, but manufacturers made no mention of hysteria and instead “talked about body massage and vague promises of health, vigor and beauty.” The ’60s did away with the subtlety and euphemisms: Maines explains in her book, “When the vibrator reemerged during the 1960s, it was no longer a medical instrument; it had been democratized to consumers to such an extent that by the ’70s it was openly marketed as a sex aid.”

Asked whether doctors or patients saw the treatment as sexual, Queen said, “One of the schools of thought is, ‘How could they not?’ They’re touching the genitals, she starts to sweat and flail around and vocalize and her breathing changes and she gets a flush.” But others argue that “the definition of sex and sexual functioning for a woman was so associated with intercourse,” it was so male-centric, that this treatment, which was most often external, wasn’t seen as sexual. As Maines puts it, “Since no penetration was involved, believers in the hypothesis that only penetration was sexually gratifying to women could argue that nothing sexual could be occurring when their patients experienced the hysterical paroxysm during treatment.”

Paradoxically, Queen explains that hysteria was overtly linked to sex “in that they said women without husbands who were spinsters or widows or whose husbands had become incapacitated were more likely to suffer from it,” she said. “So there was a subtext of, ‘What this lady needs is a good fuck and, sadly, she can’t have one — but this is the next best thing.’” Maines attributes the demand for the treatment to two sources: “The proscription on female masturbation as unchaste and possibly unhealthful, and the failure of androcentrically defined sexuality to produce orgasm regularly in most women.”

We haven’t exactly escaped the expectation that women should be able to climax from penetration alone, but we’re slowly improving on that front — and the mainstreaming of vibrators has played a big part. That point was only driven home as I left the museum, which is located in the back of a Good Vibrations store, and walked past scores of sleek and sexy toys in every color of the rainbow, all unabashedly advertised as what they are: Tools for sexual pleasure.

Here’s how it works: Participants imprint their odor on cotton T-shirts and then bring them to the party. Upon registering and shelling out $30, they place their shirts in plastic bags with numbered Post-its – pink for women, blue for men. The bags are placed on a table in the party area in the courtyard out back, where guests can leisurely (or voraciously, as was sometimes the case) sniff shirts in between trips to the bar for an absinthe cocktail. When you find a shirt you like, you stand in line to get your picture taken with the prized numbered shirt. The photographs are projected on a slideshow throughout the night at the bar and on the big screen inside the movie theater.

When you spot the man or woman of your dreams holding up your  T-shirt and smiling for the camera, you can find them in the crowd and strike up a conversation.

Judith Prays, the 25-year-old filmmaker and rapper who launched the first pheromone party in New York City, conceived of the event as a new twist on speed dating, with pop science thrown in. The idea is that if a T-shirt’s odor arouses you, you’ll be sexually (and maybe emotionally?) compatible with its wearer. But they have to find you attractive based on looks — and come find you. And maybe when you meet them, you’ll find you were horribly mistaken; their shirt smelled heavenly, but in person they remind you of Strong Bad’s alter ego. It’s been described as half underwear fetish party, half “It’s Just Lunch!” I’d say it’s a little more like “The Lion King” meets “Elimidate.”

To my disappointment, only three men posed with my shirt. This, even in a party whose gender balance tipped copiously, wonderfully, toward male. The law of numbers says I should have had better luck with all those dudes milling around. But it was certainly validating to look at the slide show and see those guys holding up my T-shirt in a bag and smiling. For a moment, I thought, “Yes! It’s official! I have been deemed attractive to the opposite sex! Science has proven it.”

But I was not nearly as popular as No. 134.

“I want to find out who she is! I’ve seen at least six guys pose with her shirt!” I said to a few of the ladies around me as we took turns stuffing our noses into the Ziploc bags.

“She has got to be ovulating!” a black-haired woman declared.

When I asked the women what they found attractive about their desired shirts, they seemed frustrated that all of them just smelled like laundry. The black-haired woman noted, “But you can tell which guys cook. We nicknamed one of the bags Dirty Pasta. And this one smells like Splash Mountain!”

While most people waited in the increasingly long line for photos, clutching their favorite shirts to their chests, one man posed empty-handed and flashed a cocky smile to the camera.

“This doesn’t work for women towards men!” he fumed theatrically. “It’s men who are attracted to the pheromones of an ovulating female. Women are attracted to visuals, so I’m just posing by myself so all the girls can see how hot I am.”

“You are pretty hot,” I interjected. My flirt mechanism only has one setting: Forward.

“Don’t encourage me! Don’t call me hot if I’m bragging about it. What’s the matter with you?”

I went into this party wondering what kind of guys I’d be attracted to just on the basis of pheromone smell. Could I clear away all the flotsam in my heart – the fetishes for big noses and curly hair that I’ve had since high school, or my habit of falling for cocky artists and writers? What if I could reset and recalibrate my attraction patterns and strip them down to pure physical science? It would be like a blind taste test for coffee. Without being preconditioned for brand recognition, I’d be able to go only on what my senses were telling me. Maybe I’d find that my animal instincts really wanted a broomstick-thin MGMT fan with a pedo mustache. Maybe all this time my heart’s been searching for a  Norwegian, a massive wall of a man, instead of the compact, kind-eyed Jewish boys I always (always!) fall in love with.

But as I jostled through the pack of absinthe-soaked singles and made my way, time and again, to the shirt-sniffing table, it became hard to disentangle the physical from the mental and emotional. I didn’t know what I was looking for, err, smelling for, as I opened random bags taped with blue numbered Post-it notes. Some bags smelled clean and almost floral. Others smelled like plastic. Others, like cotton. The aromas ranged from pungent to sweet, sweaty to metallic to chemical, spicy to yeasty. But none of my judgments on which bags smelled pleasant were based on smell alone. Did I like this shirt because its delicate pheromones were sending signals to my adrenal system? Or was it the sweet scent of Downy April Fresh that reminded me of the lazy Saturday mornings of my childhood? Was my norepinephrine working the magic here, or was it just my limbic-based memory? Cartesian duality, don’t fail me now! And then there was the bag whose scent gave me a twinge of nostalgia for an old flame. Should I pick it up because I’d been attracted to him? Or should I put it down because it didn’t work out? And was I actually getting excited about specific pheromones here, or only the generic and intoxicating odor of organic cotton mingling with male sweat, which I’d been physically primed and socially conditioned to feel thrilled by ever since girlhood?

I spotted a cute guy who had posed with my shirt and tapped him on the shoulder. He was skinny and wore a flannel shirt. “Hi,” I said. “I saw you holding my shirt. I’m Lauren. I’m No. 630.”

“Oh wow, you’re No. 630? You were a hit with my whole group of friends. Yeah, everyone at our table liked you. Hey, John!” he said, calling his friend over. “This is No. 630.”

“Hi, I’m Lauren,” I said, offering my hand.

“You’re No. 630?! Oh cool!”

I felt like a celebrity. I asked the guys what it was exactly that had made my shirt a such a hit. Out of writer’s curiosity of course.

“It smelled like girl,” they chorused.

“Well,” elaborated my flannel suitor, “It smelled like waking up in the morning, you know, comfortable, but excited too … and roses.”

“So … what does it mean that you liked my shirt? Like, when you sniff these shirts, what are you looking for? And what do you conclude when you find one that you like?”

“Well, it means, on some level, I want to have sex with you.”

Best pickup line ever? Or bestest pickup line ever?

“So here’s a question for you,” he continued. “Why did you come over to me when you saw me holding your shirt?”

“Oh. Well, I thought you were cute.”

The guy explained that he was a scientist who studied primates, so he knew what was behind this whole pheromone business.

“It’s all about health and immunity,” he explained. “Your pheromones are attracted to mine because we have compatible immunities. For instance, maybe my ancestors were immune to the black plague. And yours were immune to malaria.”

“So our children will be super-immune!” Yes. Let’s reproduce right now and travel to India and medieval Europe all we want!

“I’m going to do an experiment with you,” he said. He then picked out three shirts from the table, one of which was his, and invited me to smell all three and tell him which one I liked the best. If I really did find him attractive, I would easily pick his shirt out of the lineup. I sat on a bench beneath the twinkly lights and sniffed each bag. One smelled like nothing. One smelled a little medicinal. “Ugh, this one is rank,” I said, sniffing the third bag. Bad move. It was his. I failed the shell game. I was Goldilocks in reverse. The third shirt was just ripe.

To be fair, the guy hadn’t followed the rules at all. Having just learned about the party an hour before it started, he’d flipped a U-turn on Fairfax, whipped off his undershirt, and stuffed it in a bag upon arriving at the Silent Movie Theatre. It didn’t smell like three nights of faint, showered, body odor. It smelled like a locker room.

He tried to think of an explanation for why I would find his face attractive but not his sweaty T-shirt. “Maybe you’re out of sync with your pheromones,” he offered.

I wasn’t banking on finding true love at the pheromone party, even though people reportedly hooked up in droves and began long-term relationships at the inaugural pheromone party in New York City. But I was intrigued by the idea that we can reduce our desires to their basest level. Many of us have heard of the experiment where women are asked to smell a lineup of white cotton shirts, and then it turns out that the shirts they found the most pleasing belonged to the men they found the most handsome, with the most symmetrical faces. Maybe women are attracted to strong jawlines and symmetrical faces because we’re still susceptible to all the evolutionary cues that tell us, “I will father strong, resilient babies with you, and then I will help you take care of them.” Maybe men are attracted to the scent of a woman with robust ovaries who will produce dozens of offspring that carry their genetic code. Maybe on some level, we women are just acting in an updated play that our cavewomen ancestors performed. We might think we want a funny, sensitive guy who likes Lisa Cholodenko movies, cooks Thai food and reads the Rumpus, but what we really want is nothing more than a muscular display of an excellent Y chromosome.

This scenario could certainly make the dating slog easier – just marry whoever smells the best! But it leaves entire swaths of humanity out of the equation. It erases all sorts of sexual orientations, fetishes, non-normalized gender identities, disabilities, races, and histories both personal and cultural. Aside from the fact that most of what we’ve been taught about “how we were in caveman times” is based on racialized and gendered mythology, the fact is, we are not just cellphone-toting incarnations of our ape ancestors. We aren’t born with preloaded instincts to hunt, gather and sleep together exactly as we did in the Stone Age. We are born with brains primed to learn and adapt to social patterns with lightning speed. Which means that what we find attractive, and how we categorize our objects of desire, are not based on a template unaltered from our paleolithic past, but on what we absorb, engage with, and construct, and what is constructed for us. This is not to say that our drives are purely cultural – we have hormones too. But culture is not like clothing. You can’t strip it off to reveal the “true” drives underneath.

Of course, heteronormative evolutionary psych propaganda is not exactly what the pheromone party people have in mind. Participants are, after all, encouraged to sniff pink bags and blue bags – “It’s OK to experiment!” said the chalkboard above the T-shirt table. It certainly would have been edgier and made for a more transgressive evening if the bags weren’t gender-coded at all. Of course, no rule said you could flirt only with those who posed with your shirt-sniffed armpits, before running off into the biological determinist sunset to raise strapping caveman babies and hunt mastodon.

And at the end of the day, it was a courtyard full of single people. The air was buzzing with puckish promise, setup or no setup. Of course, introducing yourself as the mystery girl from Bag No. 630 makes for a great icebreaker. But I also managed to have some engaging conversations with a fellow East Coast transplant while waiting at the bar. We traded teenage nostalgia stories about the hippie crystal thrift stores in Newark, Del. I also met writers, filmmakers and the guy wearing a fez. I’d chalk this up to my ineffable charm and gregariousness, but when I spotted a gentleman I found particularly handsome (the arrogant theatrical one from earlier), my smooth introduction was, “Hi!” as he rushed by me with a clear look of disinterest. Sigh. Maybe I should have worn perfume.

The mouthful of a name contains the basics of the system. It is based in Europe, will be rolled out in phases, and, compared to the Bush-era system it replaced, was sold as an adaptive approach to some of the political and technological realities of European missile defense. It is the first missile defense project to be embraced by NATO allies, who historically have been left cold by the American faith that high-speed warheads can reliably be struck by other missiles hundreds of miles above the earth. Officially, consensus-run NATO has gotten religion. In Chicago, all 28 Alliance members will stand behind the outrageous lie that the first of the system’s four phases has achieved “interim operational capability.” NATO brass will declare with a straight face that a foundation has been laid for the next three phases scheduled between now and 2020. The U.S. is so excited it couldn’t wait for Chicago, and last week Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery said that Phase 1 — a triad of Aegis ships equipped with interceptor batteries, a command-and-control base in Ramstein, Germany, and a radar in Turkey — now “provides an initial capability to provide some level of defense of Europe against a threat emanating from the Middle East.”

Montgomery’s claim is one of the most expensive cons ever to grace the wires of the Armed Forces Press Service. Last month the Government Accountability Office issued a devastating reality-based report on Phase 1 of the NATO system, itemizing a litany of “performance shortfalls, unexpected cost increases, schedule delays and test problems.” The GAO report echoed a more detailed analysis released in September by the Defense Science Board, an in-house Pentagon advisory team of preeminent basic and applied scientists. The DSB report concludes that the U.S. and NATO missile defense systems share the same heel of Achilles: Rudimentary decoys and debris render them useless. This is a point the Pentagon scientists make with some force, going so far as to use a rare government-report exclamatory. “If the defense should find itself in a situation where it is shooting at missile junk or decoys,” they write, “the impact on the regional interceptor inventory would be dramatic and devastating!”

In other words, if the nation launching the missile deploys rudimentary decoys, which everyone believes it would, the U.S. and NATO systems will be neutralized, their billion-dollar bullets reduced to raging mechanical bulls charging red flags and clowns in a barrel while the theoretical warhead continues along its arc. Almost as a side note, the DSB report notes that the radars built for the NATO system, the ones touted as “operable,” are too weak to even locate the missiles in the first place.

Nothing in the GAO and DSB reports is that surprising. The Missile Defense Agency is the CitiGroup of the military-industrial complex — a corrupt Too Big To Fail institution that never should have existed in the first place but for some bad legislation from the late Clinton era. The epic levels of waste involved in missile defense is unique even by Pentagon standards. “Missile defense has been exempted from many procurement rules and is subject to much less oversight than your standard defense program,” says George Lewis, of Cornell University’s Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. “Together with the rush to deploy rapidly this has led to buying before flying.” At the moment, three of the four types of interceptors procured for the U.S. system have been forced to suspend or delay production. According to the recent GAO report, the cost of testing interceptors for the U.S. system has shot over the last decade from less than $250 million to more than a billion dollars a shot.

But unlike other Pentagon pet projects infamous for criminal cost overruns, missile defense can never be finished. This is its beauty. It is a perpetual-motion defense sector profit machine, one that never stops chasing a dream over the horizon point in the the MDA’s logo. Missile defense exists on an endless continuum of new development contracts for next-generation radars, sensors, interceptors and lasers. A foolproof system will always be more necessary than ever, and just around the corner, almost within reach, despite what the scientists and the evidence may say. And until then, at least we’re doing our best to provide what Admiral Montgomery calls “some level of defense” against emerging missile threats.

But what does “some level of defense” mean when it comes to nuclear missiles? And how much is that fractional security worth? These questions have dogged missile defense since the early 1980s. Many billions of dollars later, the answers are the same: “not much” and “nothing.” The technology remains as far as ever from providing the mythical airtight “gas mask” that a young Richard Perle dangled before a credulous Reagan, the political godfather of Strategic Defense.

“Missile Defense proponents say an imperfect system increases uncertainty in the enemy’s mind and that’s good enough,” says Pavel Podvig, a Geneva-based nuclear weapons analyst and a columnist for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “But the uncertainty is all in the other direction. The number of warheads you have to deliver for deterrence is likely very low. The number could be one, or less than one. A certain probability that a nuclear bomb will land on your megopolis is a sufficient.”

Since the start of ground-based interceptor tests during the first Bush administration, missile defense “successes” have taken place under tightly controlled circumstances using pre-programmed flight paths and decoy-less targets that bear little relation to their likely real-world counterparts. Although rigged in plain sight, the tests are heralded as proof that the system will one day offer absolute protection from ICBM and medium-range missile attack. Those who have watched missile defense’s zombie-like march are hopeful that the Defense Science Board report may mark a turning point.

“The Defense Science Board report is an absolute killer,” says MIT’s Theodore Postol, a leading missile defense critic and a former scientific advisor to the Navy. “The boosters are ignoring it, but finally the Defense Department has acknowledged this crucial fact of physics that sensors can’t penetrate the surfaces of targets and are stymied by decoys and debris. To believe in missile defense, you have to believe in an adversary sophisticated enough to build ICBMs but not sophisticated enough to release decoy balloons around warheads. Viewed through a scientific lens, missile defense makes no sense and has never made sense. It’s an elaborate fraud.”

Richard Lehner, a spokesperson for the Missile Defense Agency, which manages contracts up and down the missile defense chain, claims that the DSB report has been grossly misrepresented. In fact, he says, the thrust of the report is that the technology is “on the right track.” Regarding the decoy problem, Lehner assured me the Missile Defense Agency’s Countermeasures Program is hard on the case. I asked him how much the Pentagon was spending on developing sensors that can tell the difference between nuclear warheads and balloons. “That’s classified,” he said.

Unclassified is the Russian response to the U.S. and NATO missile defense programs. The history of missile defense is the story of a fantasy complicating reality. Not long after Edward Teller dazzled Ronald Reagan with visions of space lasers, the president’s infatuation with SDI torpedoed a grand abolitionist deal with Gorbachev at Reykjavik. For the last 15 years, missile defense has been a reliable stumbling block in arms control negotiations and a constant irritant in relations with Moscow. It is partly because of NATO’s missile defense system that there will be no meeting of the NATO-Russia Council in Chicago.

This was not quite the plan when Europe signed on to the system. The birth of NATO missile defense was timed to Obama’s “reset” with Moscow and sold to allies as a joint system involving Russian participation. That hasn’t materialized, and despite the show of a united front in Chicago, Europe is by far the less eager partner in the system. On Friday, chairman of the Munich Security Conference Wolfgang Ischinger penned an editorial in the International Herald Tribune urging NATO to put missile defense on hold pending meaningful Russian involvement. “It would be wrong,” wrote Ischinger, “to kick the project of a joint missile defense shield into the long grass and move forward on B.M.D. [ballistic missile defense] without Russia. B.M.D. as a game changer: yes. B.M.D. as a game breaker: no.”

This is where many people ask why the Russians or anyone else even care about a profoundly flawed technology that is so easy to outsmart and defeat. “The answer is simple,” writes Yousaf Butt of the Federation of American Scientists in the National Interest:

Their military planners are hypercautious — as are the ones in the Pentagon — and must assume a worst-case scenario in which the system is highly effective. Missile defense will therefore strengthen the hands of overcautious, misinformed, opportunistic or hawkish elements within the Iranian and North Korean — as well as Russian and Chinese — political and military establishments. Both unknowable future circumstances and pressures from hawkish internal constituencies will pressure all these regimes to increase deployed nuclear stockpiles and military expenditures.

The Russian nuclear arsenal still sits on a hair-trigger and remains the most dangerous in the world. Not because the Russians are itching to launch an attack, or even because the button is guarded by human beings capable of error. What makes Russian nuclear psychology so important is their relative blindness. Russia has no satellite cover and majorly degraded radar cover. If something shows up on their screens resembling incoming missiles, they have a 15-minute decision window. Recent years have seen an increased threat of accidental nuclear war based on radar misreads and miscalculation. In Moscow bunkers, there have been close calls involving sunlight reflecting off of clouds and Norwegian weather satellite launches. Any policy that decreases trust with Moscow and makes them doubt their deterrent is a net loss for NATO’s stated mission of maintaining European peace and security.

“On the Russian side, there are easy-to-understand concerns,” says Postol. “From a military point of view, they see the U.S. building a vast radar system on its borders, and sometime in the future maybe the U.S. could put nukes on the interceptors. It creates a lot of uncertainty on the planner. On the political side, it’s another broken promise that fuels distrust. Misperceptions are destabilizing on both sides. Missile defense complicates the situation even though it doesn’t work. Politically and technically, it’s the worst of both worlds.”

Which brings us to a second irony in Chicago care of missile defense. An organization founded in response to the Russian military threat is now pursuing one of the only policies guaranteed to accelerate the reemergence of a Russian military threat, one that is no less dangerous for its radically different nature and context.

NATO’s adoption of missile defense may come as a surprise to those who remember the allies’ anger over the non-NATO European system proposed by the Bush administration in 2005. For decades, missile defense was the lonely obsession of a right-wing faction in Washington. Clinton did his best to ignore GOP calls for abrogating the ABM Treaty and committing the country to national missile defense. He was clearly hoping to run out the clock until it was Al Gore’s problem, but a 1998 “Team B” study on the missile threat chaired by Donald Rumsfeld shifted the debate, and during his last year in office Clinton reluctantly signed the Missile Defense Act. With the arrival of George W. Bush in the White House, the Act became an executive priority. September 11 next provided an unlikely opportunity for the most unctuous missile defense boosters to prey on the nation’s sense of vulnerability. I remember Frank Gaffney, director of the defense-industry sponsored American Center for Security Policy, going on television while ground zero was still on fire and making the case that the box-cutter attack proved missile defense was more urgent than ever.

In 2005, Bush proposed the system be extended to Europe to better address the still-theoretical threat from Iran. Most NATO allies wanted nothing to do with what they regarded as a destabilizing boondoggle but the Bush administration found eager partners in the “New Europe” capitals of Prague and Warsaw, which agreed to host a radar and missile battery. The Russians were outraged. In the early ’90s, NATO promised Russia it would not expand toward Russia’s eastern border; then it did and promised it wouldn’t put missile batteries on new members’ territory. Now the U.S. was doing just that. Major NATO allies were also unhappy, both about not being consulted and the growing diplomatic row with Moscow over a plan to protect the continental United States. Soon even the Czechs turned against the plan. Only Warsaw, Washington’s reliable saliva-dripping puppy, was angry when the plan began to fall apart.

Obama arrived in office and quickly scrapped Bush’s system. Republicans on the Hill laughably attacked the decision as a betrayal of Europe, even though the system was designed to protect the U.S. and the decision to kill it was fully backed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The Republicans would have [Obama] pursue every single missile defense program that is theoretically possible, even if the new system is faster and more flexible and has a better test record,” says Daryl Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association in D.C.

Obama replaced the Bush system with the “Adaptive Approach” system being celebrated this weekend in Chicago. Intended to address the technological and geopolitical shortcomings of what came before, it has done neither. Despite the word “European” in the name and the NATO seal of approval, Obama’s system is essentially an extension of U.S. missile defense, paid for by American taxpayers. “The U.S. never really asked NATO permission, but told them what they were doing and said they could contribute if they wanted,” says Pavel Podvig, the Geneva-based analyst. “Europe joined, but for them it’s more about managing relationships among Russia, the U.S., Old and New Europe. Nobody in Europe really cares about missile defense. They just don’t want to make it confrontational or destabilizing.”

It sure is a nice thing to want. But unfortunately for the 900 million people represented by NATO countries, European missile defense without meaningful Russian participation is inherently confrontational and destabilizing. It’s also a very costly antonym for “Smart Defence.” A good number of the allied presidents and ministers arriving today at O’Hare know this. Their willingness to say so during tomorrow’s meetings and working dinners may determine much.