Le Mâle Jean Paul Gaultier 1995 Eau de Toilette

Congratulations! Le Mâle and I are celebrating a round anniversary this year: 25 years of mutual disdain.
I don't know what it is, but Le Mâle is one of the few fragrances that I have a heartfelt and deeply felt aversion to.
Shortly after its release, many people went crazy, and suddenly Le Mâle was the "hot shit" of the moment. No matter where you met on the weekend, the majority of the guys smelled like the sailor.
I guess about 90% of my male friends owned Le Mâle. I was not one of them.
I had the chance back then to sniff my buddy's freshly acquired bottle of Le Mâle and discreetly treat myself to a spray on my wrist. The scent annoyed me right from the start; even 5 minutes later, it didn't get any better, and certainly not 2 hours later. I couldn't understand all the fuss and hype around the striped man. The minty scent and the overly swirling nuances were just not my world. The fragrance naturally became more pronounced and deeper. But still, Le Mâle was simply a meaningless disappointment for me. Azzaro was more my thing, and that scent was also quite popular among many others.
While I found Azzaro to be a truly masculine fragrance at the time, Le Mâle just seemed like a pretender fragrance to me. It wanted to be more masculine than it actually was. It was more of a skinny lightweight sailor than a real sea dog!
It wanted to shine with variety but ended up just being overloaded with various scent directions.
I also believe that I didn't like Le Mâle because the advertising with the sailor didn't appeal to me at all and was rather annoying. Additionally, my antipathy towards the perfume probably also stemmed from Jean Paul Gaultier himself, whom I found - for some reason - totally unsympathetic and pretentious. His attitude always struck me as a bit too flamboyant. (And I must emphasize for safety's sake: I have nothing against gay people!)
Maybe I'm being a bit too harsh on Le Mâle. Perhaps I'm just the one who is wrong and who simply cannot or does not want to understand the French sea friend.
Nevertheless: Even after 25 years, my leniency with age is limited. I had the chance to sniff Le Mâle again about a year ago, and I still think: Vive la déception!