by Unknown
Nick Neave, a psychologist at the University of Northumbria, UK, said the results were interesting, but future studies should control for whether participants experienced orgasm, which is associated with reduced stress and an increase in hormones associated with partner-bonding and affection.
But we are a little old-fashioned and, given the choice between a flogging and a wooing, we’d opt for the latter. In 2006, New Scientist took a look at the best ways to woo.
Six ways to woo your lover
Let your body do the talking
We all hunt for the perfect chat-up line, but in reality, our bodies give away a great deal before we open our mouths. It is estimated that when you meet a stranger, their impression of you is based 55 per cent on your appearance and body language, 38 per cent on your style of speaking and a mere 7 per cent on what you actually say. So what can we learn from the experts? There are a number of actions that signal ‘I like you’ to another person. Adopting an open posture (no folded arms) and mirroring another’s posture help create a feeling of affinity. Most people are not conscious of being mirrored, but evaluate those who do it more favourably. And it is worth adopting stances that enhance your masculinity or femininity, such as placing hands in pockets with elbows out to enlarge the chest. You could also indulge in a ‘gestural dance’, synchronising your gestures and body movements with those of the object of your desire, such as taking a sip of your drinks at the same time.
Experience fear together
A dramatic setting can kick-start your love life. Meeting a stranger when physiologically aroused increases the chance of having romantic feelings towards them…It’s all because of a strong connection between anxiety, arousal and attraction. In the ‘shaky bridge study’ carried out by psychologists Arthur Aron and Don Dutton in the 1970s, men who met a woman on a high, rickety bridge found the encounter sexier and more romantic than those who met her on a low, stable one. A visit to the funfair works wonders too. Photos of members of the opposite sex were more attractive to people who had just got off a roller-coaster compared with those who were waiting to get on. And couples were more loved-up after watching a suspense-filled thriller than a calmer film. Why? No one is sure, but the adrenaline rush from the danger might be misattributed to the thrill of attraction. But beware: while someone attractive becomes more so in a tense setting, the unattractive appear even less appealing.
Share a joke
An experience that makes you laugh creates feelings of closeness between strangers. A classic example comes from experiments carried out by psychologists Arthur Aron and Barbara Fraley, in which strangers cooperated on playful activities such as learning dance steps, but with one partner wearing a blindfold and the other holding a drinking straw in their mouth to distort speech. Sounds stupid, but love and laughter really did go together. We suggest that the blindfold/drinking straw approach is best confined to the laboratory.
Get the soundtrack right
Psychologists at North Adams State College in Massachusetts have proved what Shakespeare suggested—that music is the food of love. Well, rock music, at least. Women evaluating photos of men rated them more attractive while listening to soft-rock music, compared with avant-garde jazz or no music at all.
Gaze into their eyes
Any flirt knows that making eye contact is an emotionally loaded act. Now psychologists have shown just how powerful it can be. When pairs of strangers were asked to gaze into each other’s eyes, it was perhaps not surprising that their feelings of closeness and attraction rocketed compared with, say, gazing at each other’s hands. More surprising was that a couple in one such experiment ended up getting married. Neuroscientists have shed some light on what’s going on: meeting another person’s gaze lights up brain regions associated with rewards. The bottom line is that eye contact can work wonders, but make sure you get your technique right: if your gaze isn’t reciprocated, you risk coming across as a stalker.
Use love potions?
Can you short-cut all the hard work of relationship-building by artificial means? People have been trying to crack this one for thousands of years. A nasal spray containing the hormone oxytocin can make people trust you—an important part of any relationship—though there’s no evidence yet to suggest it can make someone fall in love. And while we wouldn’t suggest you try this at home, studies on prairie voles show that injecting the hormone vasopressin into the brain makes males bond strongly to females. Illegal drugs such as cocaine or amphetamines can simulate the euphoria of falling in love by raising levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine, but dopamine levels can also be increased legally by exercising. Another neurotransmitter, phenylethylamine (PEA), is tagged the ‘love molecule’ because it induces feelings of excitement and apprehension. PEA is found in chocolate and it, too, is linked to the feel-good effects of exercise. Overall, a swift jog could be more conducive to love than anything you might find in a bottle.
Love potions or not, it seems that drugs can carry both pros and cons when it comes to copulation.
Please, bore me
In 1995, the internet was abuzz with news of a startling side effect of the antidepressant clomipramine. The effect was first described in a paper in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry which stated that four patients taking the drug had spontaneous orgasms every time they yawned.
One of the patients, a woman, had been depressed for three months. The drug cured her problem, but she asked if she could be allowed to continue using it since she enjoyed the side effect so much. She had even found she could experience an orgasm by deliberate yawning. Another patient, a male, was also highly satisfied both with the drug’s clinical effectiveness and its side effect. He asked to continue taking the drug, solving the ‘awkward and embarrassing’ problem of repeated spontaneous climaxes by wearing a condom all day.
Apparently some 5 per cent of users of clomipramine reported the side effect, which had also been observed in users of Prozac, although for the majority the ability to orgasm was inhibited by these drugs.
One writer suggested that the effect, if it became widespread, could have had interesting social consequences. People who experienced it would presumably seek out the most boring person they could find at parties…
Dopey sperm
In the year 2000, Herbert Schuel of the State University of New York at Buffalo claimed that cannabis may slow down sperm. This could explain reports of low fertility among men who smoked a lot of marijuana. Schuel’s team treated sperm in a test tube with a synthetic anandamide—a chemical very similar to the active ingredient of cannabis. Low levels sent sperm swimming into overdrive but higher levels slowed their motion to a lazy crawl. The chemical also inhibited the ability of the sperm to bind to the egg and penetrate it. ‘It really stops them cold,’ Schuel said. Natural anandamides are present in semen, and are also secreted by the oviduct and egg follicles.
Frozen stiff
A frozen penis was the key to discovering the male impotence drug Viagra, according to three patent applications filed by Pfizer of Sandwich in Kent. In June 1990, Andrew Bell, David Brown and Nicholas Terrett described a range of pyrazolo-pyrimidinones that relieved angina and high blood pressure by inhibiting an enzyme called phosphodiesterase.
Three years later, Terrett and Peter Ellis tested the drug on a detached frozen human penis. They found it inhibited a similar enzyme in the corpus cavernosum tissue. When this tissue becomes engorged with blood it produces an erection. In a June 1997 patent, Peter Dunn and Albert Wood discovered a better way of making the drug which was to become Viagra.
Fart molecule could be next Viagra
The stink of flatulence and rotten eggs could provide a surprising lift for men. Hydrogen sulphide (H2S) causes erections in rats and may one day provide an alternative to Viagra for men.
The penis is packed with spongy tissue that produces an erection when it fills with blood. Nitric oxide (NO) helps relax the walls of arteries that supply the penis, allowing extra blood to flow in. Viagra wo
rks by blocking an enzyme that destroys NO. In 2009, H2S had been shown to relax the walls of major blood vessels too. Giuseppe Cirino at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy and his colleagues found enzymes that produce H2S in human penile tissue. Injecting this tissue with H2S dilated the blood vessels, while injecting it into the penises of live rats produced erections.
Of course, it’s not size that matters, or so we are told.
The lengths some men will go to
In 1995, it was discovered that penises were generally smaller than popularly assumed. By injecting 60 men with a drug that produces erections, and then measuring the size of their organs with a tape measure, Jack McAninch and Hunter Wessells of the University of California, San Francisco, concluded that an average erect penis is 12.8 centimetres long. (That’s just over 5 inches for those who can’t think about their anatomy in metric units).
Wessells and McAninch conducted their size survey after several unhappy patients came to them with complications resulting from penile augmentation operations. The researchers hoped that by revealing the ‘norm’ for penis size, they would help doctors to decide if a patient really needed such a procedure.
Only a few surgeons in the US performed penis-lengthening operations, often advertising aggressively in the sports pages of newspapers and charging up to $6000 for their services. But the results were less than perfect, said McAninch. The operation could result in uneven swelling, bleeding, loss of sensation and infections leading to skin loss and deformity. These could lead, in turn, to psychological problems, including the inability to achieve any erection at all. The researchers intended to firm up their data by measuring more penises.
There’s no such thing as the ideal size or shape or body, we suspect. But drinking can help improve most things. Beauty is in the eye—or the beer glass—of the beholder.
‘Beer goggles’ are real—it’s official
The next time you hear someone blaming ‘beer goggles’ for their behaviour, you may have to believe them. People really do appear more attractive when our perceptions are changed by drinking alcohol.
There have been few previous attempts to investigate the idea that people seem to find others more attractive when drunk. In 2003, psychologists at the University of Glasgow, UK, published a study in which they asked heterosexual students in campus bars and cafés whether they had been drinking, and then got them to rate photos of people for attractiveness. While the results supported the beer goggles theory, another explanation is that regular drinkers tend to have personality traits that mean they find people more attractive, whether or not they are under the influence of alcohol at the time.
To resolve the issue, a team of researchers led by Marcus Munafò at the University of Bristol in the UK conducted a controlled experiment. They randomly assigned 84 heterosexual students to consume either a non-alcoholic lime-flavoured drink or an alcoholic beverage with a similar flavour. The exact amount of alcohol varied according to the individual but was designed to have an effect equivalent to someone weighing 70 kilograms drinking 250 millilitres of wine—enough to make some students tipsy. After 15 minutes, the students were shown pictures of people their own age, from both sexes.
Both men and women who had consumed alcohol rated the faces as being more attractive than did the controls, and the effect was not limited to the opposite sex—volunteers who had drunk alcohol also rated people from their own sex as more attractive. This contrasted with the Glaswegian team’s results, where there was only an effect when men were looking at pictures of women, and vice versa. One explanation, said Munafò, is that alcohol-boosted perceptions of attractiveness tend to become focused on potential sexual partners in environments conducive to sexual encounters. He aimed to repeat the experiment after showing students a video of people flirting in a bar, to provide some appropriate social cues.
As well as changing perceptions of attractiveness, alcohol also encourages us to engage in behaviour we would otherwise avoid. In a study by Robert Leeman of Yale University, students reported they were more likely to engage in risky sexual acts after drinking—which could be due to alcohol lowering our inhibitions through a direct effect on the brain or by providing a convenient excuse for such behaviour.
But if you’ve fitted your beer goggles yet no prospective partner heaves into view, don’t switch on the football.
Shagged out
Here is a sobering message for footballers launching themselves into a new soccer season: an overactive sex life could give you a career-threatening injury. A study conducted in 1999 suggested that players were especially prone to arthritic knee injuries triggered by sexually transmitted bacteria.
The study, by Paul Oyudo, analysed the cases of ten sportsmen with persistent knee injuries. Of the ten, six were footballers and five of these played in the English Premier League. John King, a consultant orthopaedic surgeon at the London Independent Hospital and president of the British Sports Doctors Association, who released Oyudo’s study, hoped to make footballers aware of the risk to their careers posed by frequent unprotected sex.
While most footballers’ injuries were sustained on the field of play, the cases studied by Oyudo involved sexually acquired reactive arthritis, or SARA. It is triggered by the same bacteria that cause non-specific urethritis, an inflammation of the urethra. In eight of the ten cases reviewed by Oyudo, the sportsmen clearly had non-specific urethritis. Three had cloudy discharges in their urine and two tested positive for Chlamydia trachomatis, a bacterium implicated as a cause of SARA.
Whether the sportsmen revealed the full extent of their sexual activities to their doctors was unclear, but 5 of them admitted having had more than 11 sexual partners in their lifetime. Only about one in four British men in their mid-twenties reported having had this many partners. ‘The level of promiscuity among these sportsmen calls for concern,’ Oyudo wrote. ‘Footballers appear to be the greatest culprits.’
A spokesman for the Football Association said at the time that young players were routinely given ‘general sex education’, including advice on avoiding sexually transmitted diseases.
Presumably this is not a problem for footballers in Hungary who, thanks to this device, will surely be keen to practise safe sex.
Ode to joy
Hungary made a special contribution to music in 1997 with the Serenading Condom, which used technology very similar to the kind that makes birthday and Christmas cards play a tinny tune when they are opened. A microswitch in the condom connected a small battery to a preprogrammed sound synthesiser and a tiny loudspeaker. When the condom was unfurled it played a tune.
Hungarian lovers could choose between two condoms, each with its own serenade. One played the traditional Hungarian tune You Sweet Little Dumbbell. The other sang the Internationale, also known as Arise Ye Workers.
The little shock that’s too much for a sperm
In 1990, a contraceptive which worked by electrocuting sperm was developed in the US. It had already been successfully tested in baboons. The device, similar to a tiny heart pacemaker, consisted of a lithium/iodide battery—which was half a centimetre long and as thick as a cotton bud—and two electrodes. The plastic cylindrical battery was placed in the cervix and is anchored by two plastic lugs.
The 2.8-volt battery generated a constant electrical current of 50 microamps. This was conducted across the cervix by mucus or seminal fluid, immobilising sperm in three to four minutes, according to researchers at the Women’s Medical Pavilion in New York who developed the device. They believed the current would prevent the sperm passing through the cervix and fertilising the ovum: their in vitro studies showed that 100 per cent of sperm were stopped in their tracks by this level of current, and studies in baboons seemed to back up the findings.
The batteries were a modified form of a pacemaker. However, while a pacemaker lasts for up to ten years, the contraceptive batteries would run out after a year.
Steven Kaali, medical director of the Women’s Medical Pavilion, sai
d human trials lasting years would be necessary before the device could be used. ‘Everyone believes in their own invention—I think this is the best thing ever to happen to women, but the proof will come from the R&D stages,’ said Kaali.
He believed that the device would have few side effects: there had been no reports of problems such as burns or chemical changes in people who wore pacemakers. An electrical current might also kill bacteria and fungi, and he hoped that contraceptives incorporating the battery could cut down the risk of sexually transmitted diseases.
Shock therapy during sex was probably never likely to be a winner. As useless as spraying your genitals with cola, perhaps?
‘Coca-Cola douches’ scoop Ig Nobel prize
Tests of whether drinks such as Coke and Pepsi could be used as spermicides were among the many offbeat ideas celebrated at the 2008 Ig Nobel awards. The tongue-in-cheek awards, presented at Harvard University, are organised by the humorous scientific journal the Annals of Improbable Research and awarded for research achievements ‘that make people laugh—then think’.
Deborah Anderson of Harvard Medical School’s birth-control laboratory took her first step towards the Ig Nobel chemistry prize in the 1980s when she asked medical student Sharee Umpierre what type of contraception had been used at the all-girl Catholic boarding school she had attended in Puerto Rico. ‘Coca-Cola douches,’ Umpierre replied.
