The secret of eternal love has been right there all along—under our very armpits!
Dan Brawner
February 13, 2007
Hold the flowers, the chocolates and the sappy Hallmark cards! And hold the Right Guard. What really turns women on is men’s sweat.
That’s right, guys. We’ve been scammed by corporate America all this time. We don’t have to dress up or splash on aftershave or drive fancy cars. No matter what the commercials say, women want men in their raw, primal, gritty, naturally sweaty state. At least that’s what researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have concluded.
According to the Berkeley biologists, when heterosexual undergraduate women sniffed a bottle of androstadienone, a chemical found in male perspiration, it revved up their cortisol hormone.
Whereas it is not surprising that sniffing essence of men got these young women excited, one wonders how truly definitive this study was. I mean, what are the odds that those 48 undergraduate women were already thinking about sex anyway? It might have had the same effect if they had sniffed a Formica countertop or a textbook on macroeconomic theory of the Bolivian industrial revolution. And notice how the Berkeley brainiacs didn’t even bother to have undergraduate men sniff bottles of cortisol—as if men needed any extra help in turning their thoughts to lust.
But a primitive biological impulse isn’t the same thing as love and this Valentine’s Day, we are more clueless about love then ever. The latest census shows that single people are now in the majority in America at 50.3 percent of the population – dramatically up from 35 percent in 1950.
Despite news about the possible demise of the planet, impending world wars and really nasty chicken diseases, stories about love gone wrong continue to dominate the headlines. Isn’t it awful that San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom had an affair with Ruby Rippey Tourk, his best friend’s wife? Wasn’t it a shame about that astronaut, Lisa Nowak, who drove 900 miles in a murderous obsession, wearing a wig, a trench coat and an adult diaper to attack the rival of her lover’s affections? And is Brittany Spears really gay?
We don’t care about melting glaciers, we want to hear about melting hearts. President Bush doesn’t really want to declare war on the entire Muslim world, he just wants us to love him again, like we did after 9/11. Even though Anna Nicole Smith was a gold-digging ex-stripper who married an 89-year-old billionaire, we were all sad when she died. We wanted her to find true love and live happily ever after.
Recently, archeologists in Manitova, Italy unearthed a Stone Age couple, locked in a tender embrace for the past 5,000 years. Unwilling to disturb what is considered to be the longest hug in history, archeologists are scooping up the “Lovers of Valdaro”, named after the suburb of Manitova where they were found-- dirt and all and placing them in a museum as a model of eternal love.
That Neolithic couple apparently understood something about love that 5,000 years of civilization could not improve. Scientific tests on their bones are not complete, but it’s a pretty good bet that neither one of them was wearing deodorant. This could hold the answer to all our problems. But is it worth the risk?
That’s right, guys. We’ve been scammed by corporate America all this time. We don’t have to dress up or splash on aftershave or drive fancy cars. No matter what the commercials say, women want men in their raw, primal, gritty, naturally sweaty state. At least that’s what researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have concluded.
According to the Berkeley biologists, when heterosexual undergraduate women sniffed a bottle of androstadienone, a chemical found in male perspiration, it revved up their cortisol hormone.
Whereas it is not surprising that sniffing essence of men got these young women excited, one wonders how truly definitive this study was. I mean, what are the odds that those 48 undergraduate women were already thinking about sex anyway? It might have had the same effect if they had sniffed a Formica countertop or a textbook on macroeconomic theory of the Bolivian industrial revolution. And notice how the Berkeley brainiacs didn’t even bother to have undergraduate men sniff bottles of cortisol—as if men needed any extra help in turning their thoughts to lust.
But a primitive biological impulse isn’t the same thing as love and this Valentine’s Day, we are more clueless about love then ever. The latest census shows that single people are now in the majority in America at 50.3 percent of the population – dramatically up from 35 percent in 1950.
Despite news about the possible demise of the planet, impending world wars and really nasty chicken diseases, stories about love gone wrong continue to dominate the headlines. Isn’t it awful that San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom had an affair with Ruby Rippey Tourk, his best friend’s wife? Wasn’t it a shame about that astronaut, Lisa Nowak, who drove 900 miles in a murderous obsession, wearing a wig, a trench coat and an adult diaper to attack the rival of her lover’s affections? And is Brittany Spears really gay?
We don’t care about melting glaciers, we want to hear about melting hearts. President Bush doesn’t really want to declare war on the entire Muslim world, he just wants us to love him again, like we did after 9/11. Even though Anna Nicole Smith was a gold-digging ex-stripper who married an 89-year-old billionaire, we were all sad when she died. We wanted her to find true love and live happily ever after.
Recently, archeologists in Manitova, Italy unearthed a Stone Age couple, locked in a tender embrace for the past 5,000 years. Unwilling to disturb what is considered to be the longest hug in history, archeologists are scooping up the “Lovers of Valdaro”, named after the suburb of Manitova where they were found-- dirt and all and placing them in a museum as a model of eternal love.
That Neolithic couple apparently understood something about love that 5,000 years of civilization could not improve. Scientific tests on their bones are not complete, but it’s a pretty good bet that neither one of them was wearing deodorant. This could hold the answer to all our problems. But is it worth the risk?