Today’s newsletter is all about sex!
Specifically, I’m going to talk about odor and sexual arousal.
It’s no secret that men and women have very different sexual agendas.
Romance and sex generally mean different things to men and women.
Looking at it in a Darwinian way, it’s even truer.
From a Darwinian perspective, it’s about the survival of the species and how we’re wired for that purpose.
Women can only get pregnant one baby at a time.
But men can impregnate many women.
The reproductive cost of having a child is born pretty much exclusively by the woman.
The costs of pregnancy for a woman range from bodily changes and morning sickness, through 18 years of child rearing.
This is why women historically are much pickier about who they have sex with, and who they have kids with.
Let’s be clear.
I’m not talking about anything political here.
And I’m sure that this is very gender incorrect and inappropriate.
But the fact is that that’s how the biology works.
On top of these considerations, generally speaking, men are pretty much willing and able to have sex anytime.
But women’s sexual desire is often at the mercy of their menstrual cycles (among other things).
It’s long been known that women get more aroused when they are most fertile.
But we didn’t know if there is a relationship between a woman’s fertility and a man’s attraction to her.
So this study focused on finding out when a man is most attracted to a specific woman.
They found that men are more attracted to women when the woman is in her most fertile phase of her period.
Biologically, this is a perfect alignment making it more likely that the woman would become pregnant.
Since sex is biologically about continuing the human existence, this works well.
They also found out a few things about why a man or woman are attracted to a specific person.
Women are attracted to a man who is symmetrical.
Biologically, she’s not looking for a nice man, or a man would be a good father.
She’s looking for a man who has biologically good features.
A woman is attracted to a man who is physically set up well.
She’s not necessarily attracted to a nice person, and not necessarily a person that would nurture the child.
As for men, they are attracted to women who are biologically unlike them in many ways.
All of us have what’s called MHC, major histocompatibility complex.
MHC has to do with our tissues and what we recognize as self or non-self.
When it comes to biological attraction, it comes down to MHC to determine how we react to a potential partner.
Since genetics determine our tissue makeup, MHC helps to steer people toward genetic variety.
Our tissues are more similar to our brothers and sisters than they are to a stranger.
Some strangers have tissues that are very different from ours, and some are more similar to ours.
In general, men are attracted to women that have tissues that are different from theirs.
This is quite obviously a defense against inbreeding and incest that’s built into the genes.
Much of this process is communicated with the sense of smell and taste.
We all have an olfactory sense that picks up a lot of sexual cues that we are unaware of.
In this study, they used T-shirts that people slept in, and had men or women sniff them.
This is a common methodology in such studies.
By sniffing the T-shirts, the participants reacted to the smell of the person who had worn it.
This allowed the researchers to judge how attracted a person was to the wearer of the shirt, without looks playing into it.
Women’s odor changes as they go through their cycle.
And as they do, men can actually pick up on it.
Men are aware of when a woman is most fertile, even if it’s unconscious.
All of this plays out whether we are aware of it or not.
And it plays out whether we like it or not.
This is one of the big reasons why women sometimes will have trysts with “bad boys,” or cheat on “good men.”
And it’s also why men are attracted to the women that they are attracted to.
Citations
Major histocompatibility complex genes, symmetry, and body scent attractiveness in men and women
http://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/content/14/5/668.full
See this for more on body scents and see more on Vitality and Relationships, and for more information see effects of Eating healthy