The headline:
Stop the waterworks, ladies. Crying chicks aren't sexy
Now what on earth could that be about? It's about an Israeli study:
The popularizer's conclusion?
In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, the Weizmann Institute of Science researchers collected emotional tears from female volunteers by showing them sad movies. Then they had male test subjects sniff the actual tears and fake tears comprised of saline.
A whiff of the real deal caused testosterone levels in the men to drop significantly. They found pictures of women less sexually attractive. When the men were sent into brain scanners, and shown a sad film, the men who were exposed to the fake tears didn't show much lower activity in a region associated with sexual desire, but the activity in the same region was greatly reduced in men who breathed real tears.
The brain scans, the big yawn over alluring pictures and the drop in the he-man hormone led the scientists to conclude that "women's emotional tears contain a chemosignal that reduces sexual arousal in men."
Bottom line, ladies? If you're looking for arousal, don't turn on the waterworks
Hmm. Here's my alternative interpretation:
It's good to know that when you first hear your father has died the men in the room won't try to hump you, right?In fact, we should test the effect of children's tears on male arousal, too. Everybody's tears on everybody's arousal, really, because to me it seems like a very useful and common-sense conclusion that another person's tears will reduce your sexual arousal. Something tear-worthy is happening and perhaps it's an important survival cue to pay attention to.
This stoopit popularization is what us chicks and ladies get all the time, though. That's why I keep writing about it.
But I also wonder what on earth the purpose of the initial study might have been. Were they looking for the opposite finding? And just imagine how that one would have been popularized! This finding, after all, makes sense, and us chicks and ladies still got whupped.