Weird
While sniffing my own sweat doesn’t seem to have much effect on my libido, a new study conducted in my home town found that sniffing the sweat of breastfeeding mothers can boost sex drive. This puzzles me. I’d feel pretty strange taking sweat sniffing pills to get in the mood, but if any of my friends are feeling like they need some action, I suppose I could invite them to sniff my sports bra after a go on the stairmaster. Anyway, here’s the article in all of it’s weirdness.
Mothers put scientists on scent of an aphrodisiac
The sex drive of women could be boosted by drugs based on chemicals that are found in the sweat of breast-feeding mothers, a scientist predicted yesterday.
The research, which Martha McClintock, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, discussed at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine conference in Washington, established that chemical cues found in the sweat of nursing mothers can raise sexual desire among women, suggesting that extracts could be developed into an aphrodisiac drug.
Professor McClintock, who led the study of libido in women, said: “It could be used for the treatment of disorders of desire . . . For men the major problem is erectile dysfunction, for which there is Viagra, but for women it is a disorder of desire and there isn’t anything as effective.”
In the study, a team from the University of Chicago and the Monell Chemical Senses Centre in Philadelphia used a daily questionnaire about moods and sexual desire that was completed by a group of women who were asked to sniff a pad twice a day that had been scented with sweat from a breast-feeding mother. The women were not told the reason for the research.
The results showed that sexual desire increased by 24 per cent in women with partners, and the number of sexual fantasies increased by 17 per cent in women without partners. In a control group, women without partners reported a 28 per cent decrease in sexual fantasies.
The scientists said it was possible that the effect emerged thousands of years ago in human evolution, when food was scarce. Because pregnancy and lactation require more energy than usual, a chemical cue in the scent of recent mothers may have signalled to other women that it was a good time to breed.
The findings of the research group have been published in the journal Hormones and Behaviour.
And in totally unrelated weird news, Britney’s visitation rights have been suspended.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that she’s not big on breastfeeding.
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October 18th, 2007 at 9:59 am
Smelling nursing mothers’ sweat might work this way because when women breastfeed, their bodies make more oxytocin, the hormone that stimulates milk let-down. Oxytocin has the side effect of increasing the urge to bond. For nursing mothers, the object of this urge is their baby. But oxyticin is also released during sex, which is why we feel so connected to our sex partners. And for many women, sex is tightly connected with love. So … inhale that nursing mom’s oxytocin = feel like bonding with (having sex with) your partner. Makes perfect sense to me.