Gay or Straight? Taste vs Smell?

[welsh]

Sorry if this offends anyone's sensitivities- but....

Ok, once on this boards somewhere I made an argument that the fundamental difference between gays and straights is what do you prefer to eat.

If you're a man and you want to suck cock- you're gay
If you're a man and you want to eat pussy- you're straight.

Likewise,

If you're a woman and you want to schlurp schlong- you're straight.
If you're a woman and you want to go fish diving on your partner- your gay.

I argued that it's all about preferences and ranking them. If you're bi-sexual, you probably can't decide which you like better. In the end, if you want a relationship with one sex or the other, you have to choose because people pair up. Two is company, three is a crowd.

Alas, I was wrong.

It's not about what you want to eat. It's about what you want to smell-

Human pheromones

The perfumed garden

May 12th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Support for the idea of human sex pheromones

IT IS every perfume-maker's dream to find a spray that plugs straight into the hypothalamus—the part of the brain responsible for libido. Unfortunately, evidence for such brain-manipulating chemicals in humans is inconclusive. But it is not non-existent. General body odour, which is controlled by part of the immune system called the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), is known to be involved in sexual attractiveness in several species, and some research suggests mankind is one of them. In addition, studies using brain scanners have found that smelling a chemical called androstadienone (AND) activates the hypothalamus in women, but not in men, whereas smelling estratetraenol (EST) activates it in men, but not women. AND is a derivative of testosterone that is found in men's sweat. EST is a cousin of oestrogen found in women's urine.

Two results that have emerged this week strengthen the idea that all these odours are indeed sexual—but with a novel twist because it comes from work that includes homosexuals as well as heterosexuals. A forthcoming paper in Psychological Science, by Charles Wysocki of the University of Pennsylvania and his colleagues, shows that gay men prefer the smell of sweat collected from the armpits of gay men and heterosexual women to that collected from heterosexual men. Similar odours from gay men, however, were the least preferred by heterosexual men and women. Meanwhile, Ivanka Savic of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and her colleagues reported in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the hypothalamuses of gay men in brain scanners respond to AND and EST in a similar way to those of straight women.

The second result is, perhaps, the less surprising. If the brains of gay men are attracted to other men through sight and sound, then why not through smell, too? But the idea that men can, in effect, smell gay is harder to explain. It may be because the MHC is affected in the womb by exposure to testosterone. If homosexuality is caused by unusual in-utero testosterone exposure (a plausible hypothesis), then the system that controls body odour may change in related and detectable ways.

Dr Savic and her colleagues published their study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper by Charles Wysocki and colleagues will be published in Psychological Science.

Your thoughts?

 

[calculon000]

If they could determine what makes the odor "gay", then perhaps they could try and determine what determines sexuality as well.

 

[Starseeker]

LOL

I can see a new marketing slogan for my company's products now.

"Find out if he/she is really right for you! Get your HLA tested today!"



It has been known for a long time that MHC/HLA can actually influence/or be a direct cause for the human pheromones. The problem is that they were never sure of the exact mechanism involved of how this is actually accomplished. And throw in the problem of a fundamental debate on how the smell mechanism works in the molecular level, we have a case where nobody knows why it works, but it just does.

The problem pose by this study is this though - does being gay or bi actually affects your MHC/HLA in anyway? Meaning - does your sexual preference actually affects your immuno responses in any way shape or form?

The 3 current theories of how MHC may affect your mating selection are too long to type out, so I'll leave it at that.

 

[alec]

I don't like the smell of sweat -- period.
I don't particularly like the smell of pusy either, although I'm sure I'm heterosexual. I mean, come on: some pussies smell like urinals, some like seafood that has been lying in the sun a little bit too long, others smell like rotting teeth. And I don't fancy the smell of my cock, either, especially in the morning, shortly after getting out of bed. Or when I haven't taken a shower in, let's say, three days. Ewww, smells pretty bad then.

I do like the smell of strawberries, though. And cherries. Cherries smell goddamn good.

 

[Ashmo]

Oh, great. Another Bad Science thread.

Can't you Americans go and waste that tax money on something sensible rather than trying to get rid of your sexual insecurity with it?

There is no simple explanation for sexual preferences.

Next they're going to come up with potential proof that the world IS flat after all -- or at least that the universe is.

 

[welsh]

Ok, since we started this here, might as well continue-

Apparently the smells also matter whether the guy is dominant A personality or B personality loafer.

And who do the chicks dig- MR. A.

So perhaps now you know why you're not getting laid. Get a job and stop playing fallout!

Human behaviour

The smell of power

Jul 7th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Odour and mating preferences

WHAT'S a girl to do when faced with the choice between a powerful action man who has great DNA but is likely to love her and leave her, and a carpet-and-slippers kind of bloke who will hang around and bring up the kids but may not be Mr Right in the genes department? Well, ideally, she should fool the latter into bringing up the former's children. And a piece of evidence that this is exactly what happens emerged this week from a research group led by Jan Havlicek of Charles University, in Prague.

Dr Havlicek and his colleagues were interested in discovering whether women are attracted by the smell of dominant men. A preference for the scent of dominants has been found in the females of other species, and scent is known to be important in attraction between the human sexes in other contexts, such as avoiding inbreeding. The attractiveness of body odour is also correlated with the attractiveness of the body it came from, even when presented separately from that body. But whether the odour of power—or, at least, of powerfulness—is attractive to women had not been established.

Deciding who is and is not a dominant male is the first question, of course. To do this, the researchers turned to one of the world's most widely used experimental animals, the hard-up male student. Their subjects were asked to rate such things as their tendency to correct others, to want to control conversations, and to surpass others' accomplishments, in a questionnaire designed to assess their dominance. In their paper in Biology Letters the researchers laconically observe that dominance in this questionnaire “corresponds to the scale ‘Narcissism’ in the widely used California psychological inventory”.

After baring their all in this manner, the volunteers had to wear cotton pads under their armpits for 24 hours to collect the sweat therefrom, and also had to lay off curries, beer, cigarettes and similar delights of student life that might affect the smell of their sweat. Surprisingly, given these constraints, the researchers managed to persuade 48 men to volunteer.

Compared with this, the female volunteers had it easy. They had to smell the pads and rate them for “intensity”, “sexiness” and “masculinity”. Okay, perhaps not that easy. They also had to vouchsafe whether they were single or in an on-going relationship with a man, and to submit to a saliva test that would show the phase of their menstrual cycle.

The upshot of the trial was that women did, indeed, find the odour of dominants sexier than that of wimps—but only in special circumstances. These circumstances were first that the woman was already in a relationship and second that she was in the most fertile phase of her cycle. In other words, dominant males' scent was only more attractive at the point where a woman could both conceive and cuckold her mate. Which, given previous studies that show dominant men are indeed more likely than others to leave a woman holding the baby, makes perfect sense.