In the past decade scientists have learned amazing things about how women react to men’s smelly t-shirts. The trick works like this: get a whole bunch of men to wear t-shirts for two days—no deoderant allowed!—and then put each shirt in a box with a “smelling hole”. Next you inv
ite a parade of women—some ovulating, some not—to smell each shirt and tell you how sexy the wearer was.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Evolutionary Psychology. (And yes, some of these studies get federal funding.)
These smelly t-shirt studies have shown that women in the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle are like Robert Parker when it comes to a man’s bouquet; for example, they (unconsciously) distinguish a symmetrical, well-proportioned man’s smell from that of an asymmetrical man, and report the former as sexier. And they also prefer the smell of men who are genetically different from them in one key area of the human genome known as the Major Histocompatibility Complex.
And that last one got scientists thinking: with a recent study in the British Medical Journal indicating that one in 25 dads are unknowingly raising another man’s child, could we predict infidelity based on how genetically similar a woman is to her spouse? A new report published in the Journal of Psychological Science says the answer yes.
The Chicago Tribune summarizes thusly,
The term "opposites attract" has new meaning in a lab at the University of New Mexico, where scientists have discovered that women are more attracted to men who are genetically dissimilar to them. After studying 48 romantic couples, researchers found women were more apt to find their partners less sexually desirable and more likely to be unfaithful if they shared similar sets of certain genes.
So my question here: what in God’s name does this mean for Ashkenazi Jewish couples? Ashkenazis are, after all, legendary among geneticists for being an unusually inbred group, what they call an “endogamous population.” Not a lot of genetic diversity there. Does this mean that Jewish women are doomed to find Jewish partners unattractive once they get a whiff of their genetic similarity?
Hey, maybe this helps explain our skyrocketing intermarriage rates. All these traditional Jewish orgs are taking the wrong tack in their campaign against intermarriage. Maybe we don't need trips to Israel and social mixers…we need a cologne that smiles like a gentile.
These questions need answers. Keep the smelly t-shirts coming.
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