6 Sex Myths as Explained by Science

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It's hard to find out the truth about sex, because when we talk about it, we're usually lying.

So every dude has a nine-inch dong, and pouring a Red Bull on your ass before sex will totally prevent pregnancy.

Luckily scientists are working tirelessly to sort through all the "facts" about sex you learned from porn and your pals in the locker room.

6. Beer Goggles

The Conventional Wisdom

You're out with some buddies at the bar, and it's getting late and, let's face it, you're shitfaced. Suddenly, you're the best dancer in the room and you're noticing something wonderful: This is the sexiest fucking club on the planet!

You're looking good, the women are looking good and you're a bit confused by the fact that even that guy at the bar is looking pretty damn fine too. The next morning, you roll over to find that you are face to face with a wrinkly sea of back fat featuring the largest tattoo of Satan you have ever seen.

Science Shows...

As it happens, beer goggles are a real live scientific phenomenon. Scientists tested a group of 84 British students with some lime-flavored drinks. Some of those drinks were non-alcoholic, some were spiked with vodka to get the subject good and sauced. We like to think they served these drinks in beakers and graduated cylinders, in true nerd fashion.

In a laboratory simulation of 'cruising for chicks on Facebook after downing a six pack,' the scientists chowed the college students photos of both males and females and had students play the scientific method's first documented instance of would you rather. What they discovered was that the students with the spiked drinks found the people in the photos more attractive--even the heterosexual students looking at people of their own gender.

So the good news is if you're a dude who dreams of going out to the bar and winding up as some hot chick's drunken mistake, you've got a chance. The bad news is, the same scenario could lead to the burly arms of some dude who looks like Ed Asner.

5. Chicks Dig the Car

The Conventional Wisdom

Most of the auto industry's sales come from this long-held assumption of frat boys everywhere: the nicer the car, the better your chances with the ladies.

If you think you're going to pick up a woman in a beat up hatchback, then you'd better listen to those Free Credit Report guys, because as their catchy jingle says, women won't give you the time of day if you drive a '98 Daewoo.

Science Shows...

The Free Credit Report guy is right.

A British insurance company called Hiscox (seriously?) conducted the study. They found when female subjects heard the roar of a Maserati's engine, they went to their happy place down south. Out of the 40 women who participated in the study, every last woman reported getting that tingly sensation from the sports car.

So maybe you're thinking that being "green" and "economically responsible" might turn some women on, right? After all, chicks dig a guy who cares about the earth! Well, not so much. The study also concluded that not only were both guys and chicks turned completely off by the sound of a VW Polo, but it actually lowered everyone's testosterone level.

So when you're rolling around in the Volkswagon or Prius and some frat boy named Tyler calls you a pussy, sadly he's actually got science on his side.

4. Sex Makes Men Sleepy

The Conventional Wisdom

Ladies, you've just had a passionate roll in the hay with your significant other (or drunken mistake). Since you're a girl, all you want to do after sex is cuddle and talk about marriage and missing your period. But when you roll over, he's already snoring into his pillow!

Anyone who's ever seen a female stand-up comedian has heard this story. He just wants to shoot his wad and doze off, probably immediately after leaving the toilet seat up! Am I right ladies? It fits in nicely with the stereotype that men don't care about romance, and that women are emotionally needy. But it's just a cliche, right?

Science Shows...

Actually no. There's a scientific reason men fall asleep after sex. It's not their fault.

According to experts, an orgasm literally changes a man's body chemistry. Combine that with the physical exertion of sex and chances are that most dudes will go down like they were hit with a tranquilizer dart.

So please, ladies, stop treating it like a personality flaw. And don't let him have sex with you if he's also flying a helicopter at the time.

3. She Likes the Way You Move

The Conventional Wisdom

Supposedly, having some sweet dance moves like the Typewriter or a hot looking Moonwalk, will get chicks on your junk faster than you can say "Electric Slide."

Of course, the opposite holds true as well. If you've got the rhythm of an epileptic monkey then the odds are you're leaving the club alone.

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A researcher in England named Dr. Peter Lovatt spent many nights in dance clubs observing how women reacted to dancing guys, probably in hopes of picking up some pointers. What Dr. Lovatt (who followed in the footsteps of such great minds as Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein in transitioning to science from the world of professional dance) discovered was that by mimicking those sexy Saturday Night Fever moves of John Travolta, you (he?) will stand a better chance of getting laid.

After first creepily watching guys dance at clubs from afar, the doctor increased the creepiness factor and filmed himself dancing many of those same styles, and then showed the videos to 55 women, who voted on which moves were the most attractive.

Later he figured he might as well make a science experiment out of it and shared his results with the world. Presumably because he could not handle all of the boobage that came his way after that video made the rounds.

2. Stay Away from Your Hot Cousin Unless You Want Deformed Flipper Babies

The Conventional Wisdom

If there's anything we can learn from our history lessons, it's that years and years of inbreeding leads to bad things. Just look at the royal families, where Charles II of Spain was thought by many people to be mentally retarded due to generations of inbreeding, or Prince Charles, who wound up with those terrifying ears.

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After 30 years of extensive research, which we assume involved spiking the punch bowls at many a family reunion and studying the shenanigans as they unfold, scientists in Western Australia have concluded that most babies born to first cousins are just as healthy as others.

If you're wondering why they felt the need to conduct this study in the first place, it's because the practice is remarkably common, at least by most standards, in that part of the world.

In Western Australia, there are at least 500 marriages between first cousins, and many more throughout the world (we're looking at you, West Virginia), making this research essential if we're ever to thwart any X-Men-style mutant uprising that could result.

1. Jocks Get All the Girls

The Conventional Wisdom

If we can learn anything from countless classic 80s movies and television shows, it's that rich kids and jocks get all the girls. Oh sure, every once in awhile a nerd from Lambda Lambda Lambda can steal the starting quarterback's woman, but more often than not you're going to end up being the Duckie to some pretty boy's Andrew McCarthy.

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Well we've got good news, Poindexter. Despite lacking the social skills and rugged good looks of your athletic counterparts, it turns out that chicks really do dig brains over brawn.

At least, that's what this study has concluded. As it turns out, it doesn't matter if a woman wants a long term relationship or just a little fling. The common denominator (that one's for you, dorks!) in what a woman really wants is a dude with a high IQ. No, seriously.

Using a series of tasks that apparently combined Survivor with Mr. Wizard, researchers filmed 15 different men ranging in intellect and athleticism and then showed those videos to 200 college-aged women. The men would then be judged based on perceived intelligence, creativity and the ability to do physical tasks like catching a Frisbee and kickboxing.

What the studies showed was that, more often than not, the creativity and overall braininess of these potential Dating Game-style suitors won out over simply being good looking. Now don't get us wrong, the study also showed that women still preferred guys who were the best of both worlds, being smart while still bearing an uncanny resemblance to Zack Morris.

We should also point out the study was carried out by scientists who were almost certainly nerds themselves. So maybe we shouldn't be surprised if the next study is called, "An Analysis of the Prevalence of Enormous Genitalia Among Scientists (and We Do Mean Enormous, Ladies)".

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Why is life expectancy longer for women than it is for men?

Men dying sooner than women makes sense biologically: because 105 males are born for every 100 females, it would assure that there are about the same number of men and women at reproductive ages.

But even though women showed a longer life expectancy in almost every human society in the last decade of the 20th century, the size of the advantage varied greatly.

For example, in the U.S. male life expectancy was 73.4 years for males and 80.1 years for females, a difference of 6.7 years, whereas in France it was 7.8 years and in the U.K., 5.3 years. The discrepancy was much greater in some countries, with the difference in Russia reaching more than 12 years, but in others, such as India (0.6 year) or Bangladesh (0.1 year), it was much less.

The diversity in worldwide longevity alone indicates that the difference in mortality between the sexes is not purely biological and that there are intervening social factors. The current range of situations actually reflects different stages of a three-part historical evolution. Women most probably have a biological advantage that allows them to live longer, but in the past--and in several places, still today--the status and life conditions of women nullified this benefit. Today, given the general progress in female life conditions, women have not only regained their biological advantage, but have gone much beyond it, both because they tend to engage in fewer behaviors that are bad for health than men do and because they better profit from current advances in health care and living conditions.

The biological advantage that women have is taken as a certainty, because the mortality of males is higher than that of females from the very outset of life: during the first year of life, in the absence of any outside influence which could differentiate mortality between the sexes, male mortality is 25 to 30 percent greater than is female mortality. The genetic advantage of females is evident. When a mutation of one of the genes of the X chromosome occurs, females have a second X to compensate, whereas all genes of the unique X chromosome of males express themselves, even if they are deleterious. More generally, the genetic difference between the sexes is associated with a better resistance to biological aging. Furthermore, female hormones and the role of women in reproduction have been linked to greater longevity. Estrogen, for example, facilitates the elimination of bad cholesterol and thus may offer some protection against heart disease; testosterone, on the other hand, has been linked to violence and risk taking. Finally, the female body has to make reserves to accommodate the needs of pregnancy and breast feeding; this ability has been associated with a greater ability to cope with overeating and eliminating excess food.

Even though many biological and genetic factors have been identified, their overall effect is impossible to measure, especially given the influence of social factors on mortality. The extraordinary economic and social progress that has occurred since the 18th century has been accompanied by a dramatic reduction of the social differences between men and women and of the burden of motherhood, which had previously negated women's biological advantage. But the recent mortality trends have gone much farther than the mere recovery of an original advantage, creating instead a new advantage of greater magnitude for women. Observations indicate that the growing excess male mortality in industrial countries could be explained by the rise of so-called "man-made diseases," which are more typically male. These include exposure to the hazards of the workplace in an industrial context, alcoholism, smoking and road accidents, which have indeed increased considerably throughout the 20th century.

But if these diseases are the only explanation for longer female life expectancy, why has the gap continued to grow even though male and female behavior and life conditions have been converging in recent years? Part of the paradox can certainly be explained by the fact that this convergence is not absolute: male smokers tend to smoke more cigarettes than female smokers do, and men drive more recklessly than females drivers, for instance.

French demographer Jacques Vallin has long been monitoring longevity in general and sex differences in mortality in particular. He adds to the above an interesting explanation of women's current mortality advantage that could explain the more recent trends: the dramatic increase in excess male mortality emerged as an equally dramatic progress in the general health conditions of our societies was taking place. He thus argues that beyond the negative behavioral or environmental factors that affect men more than they do women, there could be very well be a more fundamental difference in lifestyles that allows women to better benefit from the general progress in health. For example, although women now participate massively in the work force, their roles remain different and their professional activities are, on average, less prejudicial to their health. In addition, women often relate to their bodies, their health and their lives in general in a much different way than men do.

To caricature, women seek beauty, men seek strength and power; thus, a woman's body must remain young and healthy as long as possible, whereas a man's body must be submitted to risks and challenges from an early age. The result is that women, much more than men, are attentive to their bodies and their needs and often carry on deeper dialogs more easily with their doctors. Hence, women, being more inclined to take care of their bodies and to prolong their lives, may be better able to glean greater profit from modern medical and social advances by practicing activities that are healthier and better protect their bodies. In this context, women's biological advantage now appears relatively minor in the total mortality differences between the sexes.

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History's 10 Most Terrifying Contraceptives

The three most terrifying things in the world are werewolves, clowns and unplanned pregnancy.

Humanity has known this since time began and as such has endeavored to make sure the last one of these would happen as infrequently as possible.

When you combined extreme motivation, human ingenuity and the fact that most people are stupid, you wound up with contraception methods that will blow your mind. Or at least leave you feeling a little weird down there.

10.Weasel Testicles

In the Dark Ages in Europe, things were dark for a reason, not the least of which was that, with the lights on, a typical man might wonder why his girlfriend had weasel balls strapped to her leg.

The reason is obvious to anyone with a degree in Magickery or Weasel Ballogy, as any magician at the time would tell you that the weasel balls would prevent pregnancy. Through the power of magick, you see. Yes, being a magician during the Dark Ages pretty much gave you a blank check.

We may not be magicians and our amateur dabbling in gynecology has been less than revealing, but we're pretty sure this method is aces since we don't know many men who would be able to perform sexually after seeing a pair of innocent, severed balls hanging from his mate as decoration.

9.Diaphragms ... Made of Crocodile Poo

Ancient Egyptians were a crafty lot, what with those pyramids and that cool dance and mummies and all. It's no surprise then that they were some of the first people to cook up a method of birth control that actually worked. They had figured out that you could stop the pregnancy if you had some kind of, uh, blockage there.

Still, these were ancient times and there was an unspoken agreement that everything they did had to be horrible in some way. Thus, they made their sperm barriers out of honey and crocodile shit.

Who exactly was the first to try this, and what their logic was, is lost to history. We know one thing though: When they finally invent a time machine, the first thing we're doing is going back to find out.

8. Beaver Testicles, With Alcohol

In the 16th century, Canadians agreed that the testicles of small furry animals were key to pregnancy prevention. They were far more advanced than those silly, superstitious Europeans, so they got the brilliant idea to use moonshine with beaver testicles in it.

The hooch was incredibly strong and the beaver balls were ground up into a fine powder, all to ensure the rampant Canadian sex would have no unfortunate side effects, other than having to drink grain alcohol with dried balls in it. This was presumably exactly as effective as the aforementioned magic weasel balls, but with the bonus of getting drunk off your ass (it should be noted that most Canadian scientific advancement can be summed up with these same words).

7. Mercury

Ah, delicious, hot mercury. From the old days when it was considered a cure for almost everything, to the future when we'll make terminators out of it, mercury never goes out of style.

Several thousand years ago in China, somebody logically came up with the idea of using mercury as birth control. Why not? After sex, women would do some shots of mercury, and we like to think they called it "Riding the Quicksliver Pony," then voila, no pregnancy. There may have been some sterility, brain damage and kidney failure, of course, but stopping the baby was the main thing. This was China, after all.

But, hey, at least they were taking it orally.

6. Diaphragms of Gold and Silver

Hey! This one doesn't sound so bad! While today's cervical caps are the idiot cousin of the diaphragm and not used all that often, a couple thousand years ago they were the shit. The basic idea was to make a little thimble that fit way up inside a woman over her cervix. While the unwashed masses were busy using oiled paper and beeswax to make these caps, the sluterati were having them made out of gold, silver and ivory.

While these substances were no doubt awesome to anyone going spelunking in a woman's vagina and could give you a cool girl-band name like Ivory Twatter or Silver Coochella, they sometimes lead to things like Toxic Shock Syndrome, unusual odors, discharge and infections, not to mention pregnancy since they only work if properly fitted and have a chance of falling out during sex.

But, hey, if things play out just right, your penis could come out wearing a shiny little top hat! And wouldn't that make it all worth it?

5. Animal Intestines

Condoms are not, as you'd suspect, the result of some drunken man looking at a party balloon and getting an idea. The idea of wrapping one's wang for delivery has been around for ages, long before latex, Saran Wrap and tube socks were viable options.

Back then, animal intestines were the order of the day, most likely because somebody was making sausage and made the logical connection. One of the oldest known condoms is made from a pig intestine and even has a user manual that suggests soaking it in warm milk before use, probably because just humping with a pig intestine was only half gross, but if you could somehow include sour milk in the mix well, that'd put it right over the top.

Again, you have to remember that ancient civilizations existed mainly to disgust the future.

4. Diaphragms of Opium

You know what else will never go out of style? Opium. Long before recorded history, there have been segments of the population who decided that everything could be made a little better with a little bit of opium thrown in.

This includes the people of ancient Sumatra, who figured they might as well use it for birth control. So, they'd take a sticky wad of opium and, you know--wedge it in there. Now, we hesitate to even include this because we have a feeling right now there is some dude at his computer, gel in his hair and three buttons open on his shirt, reading this and suddenly having an awesome idea for Saturday night.

PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS. We don't know what the side effects are, let's just assume they're unimaginable and move on with our lives.

3. Lemons

By the 1700s, most had realized that dried turds and hard metals probably had no rightful place in a woman's lady parts. That's when some enterprising man or woman looked at a lemon half, and got an idea. OK, it was probably a man.

"Honey! I'm going to try something here ... "

The shape would act as a diaphragm and (though the inventor may not have even known this) the acid in the citrus would kill the sperm. And the scent would be just like a freshly cleaned bathroom each and every time! Considering what they were using before that, the guy who came up with it probably won a Nobel prize.

As a bonus, the various shapes and sizes of citrus meant it was great for every woman, though it probably made for some awkward moments with the fruit seller.

2. Blacksmith water

Nothing says "baby-free" or "massive brain damage" quite like drinking filthy, toxic sludge--a theory proved positive by the childless, Listerine-drinking hobo who lives by the dumpster out back.

Dating way back to ancient Greece and spanning a good 1,800 years of human history is the idea that drinking the water a blacksmith used to cool the materials he was working with would stop you from getting pregnant. Though it's not really known why anyone believed this, the idea that the water contained lead is a strong possibility as even up through the first World War, women were volunteering to work in factories with lead just so it would keep them sterile.

The only real downside was a pantload of neurological problems, nausea, kidney failure, seizures, coma and death. Hell, they'd probably have been better off sticking with the mercury.

1. Coca-Cola Douche

The modern age isn't all enlightenment and ribbed condoms. For a time, not too long ago (and in fact, probably as recent as last Wednesday) people were under the impression a can of Coke was as good as the morning after pill. And they weren't drinking it.

Yes, they would douche with it after having sex. The belief was that carbonation and sugar would be effective at stopping pregnancy, and also turning a vagina into a syrupy, caffeinated horror show of fizz and sticky spots. We like to think Dr. Pepper or Mr. Pibb were the carbonated no-baby douches of choice, but study by Harvard in the late '60s gave the honor to Diet Coke.

Sex Organ Up Your Nose

We humans have a bunch of highly-developed senses, but most of our communication happens with sound and vision.

Not much communication between people happens with smell.

But now we are beginning to prove that we humans can influence each other with our smells - and, that we pick up these smells with a strange sex organ inside our noses!

The anatomy scientists have known for a long time about the "olfactory epithelium". "Olfactory" means "related to smell". The olfactory epithelium is a patch of yellowish tissue high up in "ceiling" of the nose. Normally, it is poorly ventilated, but when we sniff deeply, we pass lots of air over it. In this yellow patch, there are sensory cells specially adapted for smelling. Chemicals in the air enter the nose, excite the sensory cells, and then we get the sensation of "smell".

There is also another area in the human nose that we can detect odours with - but until recently, most scientists didn't believe it existed! This is the VNO, which stands for "vomeronasal organ". Fishes, birds, and some mammals don't have a VNO, but it is very well developed in snakes and lizards.

It was first discovered by the Dutch anatomist, Ruysch, way back in 1703. It's right next to the wall that separates the nostrils, on the quot;floor" of the nose, and about a centimetre inside the nose. There's one in each nostril. It looks like a hollow tube, with only a very small opening (about one tenth of a millimetre across) into the nose. Each VNO is very small, and hard to see.

This might be why the vomeronasal organ fell out of favour, and soon the anatomists didn't even believe it existed. By the 1930's, physiologists said hat not only did we humans definitely not have a VNO, but there was no structure in the brain to process the information from any such organ. However, in 1991, a careful study found that 910 out of 1,000 people had an easily-found VNO. But the fact that we humans have a vomeronasal Organ, does not mean that it does anything.

In 1994, Luis Monti-Bloch and his team from the University of Utah actually managed to thread very fine insulated electrical wires into the VNOs of volunteers. They then wafted various smells up the noses of their volunteers, and looked for electrical activity in the cells of the VNO. These smells were various odourless chemicals from the skin of men and women. The volunteers had absolutely no conscious idea that they were getting these smells - in other words, their olfactory epithelium which smells perfumes and pollutants, did not trigger. The cells in the males' VNOs fired when they got female skin smells, and female VNOs responded to male skin smells. But the VNOs did not respond to skin smells from the same sex.

It was odd that the volunteers didn't consciously realise that their VNO was being stimulated. We can waft a smell up their nose, and their VNO can fire frantically with electrical activity - but all the volunteer gets is a vague, generalised emotion of feeling fine.

But in early 1998, an excellent experiment showed a more definite effect - that some female smells could trigger women's menstrual cycles. Kathleen Stern and Martha McClintock from the Psychology Department at the University of Chicago did the experiment. They had some "donor" women, who gave away the smells in their armpits (via a pad that they wore for 8 hours per day). They also had some "recipient" women, who were exposed to these smells. The smells were completely odourless, as far their conscious brains were concerned. And of course, the two groups, donors and recipients, never met face-to-face.

The smells were taken from the donor women at two different times in their menstrual cycle. When the smells were taken before the donors ovulated, the ecipient's menstrual cycles became shorter. But when the smells were taken right on the donors' ovulation, the recipient's menstrual cycles became longer. The overall effect was to synchronise the cycle of the recipient, with the cycle of the donor.

This was a pretty good experiment, but we're still not 100% sure that the smells from one human can influence another human. For one thing, this effect happened to only 70% of the volunteers - so what's going on in the remaining 30%? For another thing, our neuroanatomists have not yet proved that nerves from the human VNO go to the relevant parts of the brain. The only way to do that is to get several corpses, add some dye to the VNO, and wait a few month for the dye to migrate, and then very carefully cut open the brain.

So if your boyfriend or girlfriend gets up your nose, it may not be their fault.

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