The sexiest man alive, according to science?
By David Futrelle
It’s time once again for another installment in my series MGTOWs Explain Sex. I think this is the second installment. It’s been a while.
Anyway, as longtime readers of this blog no doubt already know, most MGTOWs seem to have convinced themselves that women basically hate sex and only pretend to like it so dudes will give them stuff.
But what about kissing? I mean, ladies (or at least a lot of them) seem to love movies with kissing in them more than they love movies with explosions, right? So there must be something about kissing that these mysterious creatures like?
Not according to MGTOW Redditor goadsaid — and he’s got SCIENCE on his side. Or at least he thinks he does.
In a post last year, goadsaid reported his SCIENTIFIC findings to the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit.
I was just reading some science stuff for leisure and I am no expert but the stuff I stumbled upon (much of it in this article http://www.livescience.com/3328-saliva-secret-ingredient-kisses.html) suggests that men release oxytocin when kissing women but women do not release oxytocin when kissing men. Oxytocin is released in women when they kiss babies which is what is said to bond them to the babies. Oxytocin is the “love” neuron according to what I’ve read.
So basically that feeling of “adoring” women is not reciprocated (or at least not at the same times for sure) and they only feel heart tugging when being intimate with babies but not men.
Well that’s certainly an … interesting conclusion: The hot babes love the hot babies! But it’s not quite the same conclusion that the researchers who actually conducted the study — Neuroscientist Wendy Hill and a student at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania — themselves came to. According to the article that goadsaid himself quotes, the two studied
the hormone levels of college-aged male-female couples who had kissed and those who had just held hands and listened to music for 15 minutes in a room in a student health center.
Ah yes, nothing more romantic than making out in the student health center!
Subjects were measured for their levels of cortisol, a stress-related hormone, and oxytocin, the bonding hormone involved in social recognition, male and female orgasm, and childbirth.
Cortisol (stress) levels decreased in men and women after kissing, but only men’s oxytocin levels increased, while women’s decreased.
Huh. That’s interesting, but can we really draw any definitive conclusions from a small study conducted in possibly the least sexy place to make out in, and in which the makeout sessions were interrupted after a few minutes by someone coming in to measure the kissers’ hormones?
Turns out that Hill herself has asked this question, and answered it with a “no.”
Hill thought that the setting might have been too clinical for the women to get turned on, so she tried in her latest study to up the ambience by locating the couples in a secluded room of an academic building, outfitted with a couch, flowers, jazz music and electric candles.
This time, cortisol levels were found to plummet, post-kissing, in both men and women, Hill found, but the other hormone results are still being analyzed … .
My own half-assed research hasn’t turned up Hill’s followup results, but I did run across something in the Lafayette Psychology Department newsletter in which Hill is quoted:
“Because the oxytocin levels rose only in males, we think that women might need a more romantic atmosphere than Bailey Health Center,” said Hill. “Or that males are less affected by ambiance when kissing.”
Regardless of whether or not the results changed in the more “romantic” setting, you can’t determine whether or not a woman enjoys kissing based entirely on her oxytocin levels, because you can’t reduce a person’s feelings about something to a single hormone. For one thing, in addition to lowering cortisol levels in Hill’s study, kissing also releases feel-good neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin. For another, there’s more to human beings than their biochemistry.
So I’d call that a swing and a miss for MGTOW Science non-expert goadsaid. But his next claim is even weirder.
Another piece I read suggested that women don’t actually enjoy mouth kissing men at all because mouth kissing evolved to only be between mother and child during “pre-mastication” (before the baby can chew its own food) and men began kissing women to “trick” them into bonding by imitating the baby while simultaneously “dosing” them with testosterone from male saliva in order to stimulate their sex drive.
Wat.
Who woulda thought? They don’t really like kissing men or having sex.
Uh, no. Maybe the real lesson here is that women would rather be kissing men with giant fat baby heads who like eating prechewed food from their mouths?
If so, these devious women are doing a pretty good job of hiding this preference from the world’s non-baby-headed men.
In any case, I was unable to find the source of this claim either, though admittedly I gave up my research pretty quickly after running into too many stories about weirdo actress Alicia Silverstone, who infamously decided to kick it very old school indeed by pre-chewing food for her young son and exuding it into his mouth.
Well, that’s enough science for me right now. I conclude from all this that while I like kissing, and all the women I’ve kissed have also liked kissing, I do not want to kiss Alicia Silverstone, at least not during dinner.