Elephants on Acid (19 page)

More surprisingly, the implantation of septal electrodes for purely recreational use never caught on—despite the predictions of some, such as Timothy Leary, that it would soon be all the rage. It’s probably just as well this hasn’t become the
⁴⁶
stimulant of choice. Would the world be ready for pleasure at the push of a button?

It’s a sunny day. A young guy is walking alone on a college campus, minding his own business. He’s reasonably attractive, though he has never considered himself a babe magnet. But suddenly a good-looking woman stops him and says, “I have been noticing you around campus. I find you to be attractive. Would you go to bed with me tonight?” He looks at her, startled but intrigued. “Well, isn’t this my lucky day,” he thinks.

Actually, it wasn’t his lucky day. The poor guy was just an unwitting subject in an experiment conducted in 1978 on the campus of Florida State University.

It all started in the classroom of Russell Clark, during a meeting of his course on experimental social psychology. Clark was discussing James Pennebaker’s Don’t the girls get prettier at closing time? experiment—the same one described just a few pages earlier. He made an offhand comment to the effect that only guys need to worry about honing their pickup lines; women can just snap their fingers and men come running. Some of his female students took exception to this generalization, so Clark issued a challenge: Let’s put it to an experimental test. Let’s find out in a real-life situation which gender would be more receptive to a sexual offer from a stranger. The students took him up on the challenge, and a bizarre experiment was born.

Nine of Clark’s students—five women and four men—fanned out across campus. When any one of them spotted an attractive stranger of the opposite sex, he or she approached and delivered a sexual proposition, exactly as worded in the scene above.

The results were not surprising. Not a single woman said yes. Frequently they demanded the men leave them alone. By contrast, 75 percent of the guys were happy to oblige. Many queried why they needed to wait until the evening. The few who turned down the offer typically apologized for doing so, giving explanations such as “I’m married.” Here, at last, was experimental proof that men are easy.

When the students tried a slightly less forward approach and asked, “Will you come over to my apartment tonight?” the results were almost identical. Sixty-nine percent of the men assented, versus only 6 percent of the women. But the more innocuous question, “Would you go out with me tonight?” produced an affirmative answer from approximately 50 percent of both men and women. To Clark, this was the most surprising finding. He joked that had he known all he had to do was go up to attractive females, ask them out, and half would say yes, his dating years would have been a lot easier.

It took Clark over a decade to get his experiment published. Journal after journal rejected it. For a while he stopped trying. But then, thanks to a chance conversation at a seminar, Elaine Hatfield came to his aid. (We previously met Elaine when her last name was Walster and she was investigating whether women who play hard to get are more desirable.) Hatfield helped Clark revise the paper and signed on as coauthor. Then they began the process of submitting it all over again. Still they met with rejection. One reviewer wrote:

The study itself is too weird, trivial and frivolous to be interesting. Who cares what the result is to such a silly question, posed in such a stranger-to-stranger way in the middle of the FSU quadrangle? I mean, who cares other than
Redbook
,
Mademoiselle
,
Glamour
, or
Self
—all of which would cream their jeans to get hold of this study. This study lacks redeeming social value.

Finally, just when the authors were about to give up, the
Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality
accepted it. Clark and Hatfield then had their revenge. The article generated a huge amount of interest, both from the mainstream media and within the academic community. In 2003 the journal
Psychological Inquiry
hailed the study as a “new classic.”

The reason for the experiment’s continuing popularity is that it dramatically highlights the differing sexual attitudes of men and women. These attitudes appear to be quite stable over time. Clark repeated the experiment in 1982 and 1990 with virtually identical results.

Why do women say no, and men say yes? Clark considered this a sociobiological legacy. Women, he argued, evolved to be more selective about mates because they could only conceive a limited number of children. They needed to be sure about the father. Men, on the other hand, could father an unlimited number of children, so it was a better strategy for them to be always ready and willing. Many critics disagree. They argue either that these attitudes are merely socially learned behavior, or that the women said no because they deemed the invitation too risky. Clark counters that half the
⁴⁷
women were willing to go on a date with a total stranger. This may indicate that their behavior was motivated less by fear than by a desire to have more time to assess the potential mate.

Whatever the reason for the differing attitudes, the difference itself appears to be real enough (assuming things haven’t changed much since 1990). For this reason, your average man should realize that if a beautiful stranger ever does approach him out of the blue on a college campus and invite him to have sex with her, the appropriate response is not “I’d love to,” but “Who is conducting this experiment?”

During the mid-1990s six employees at the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences received an unusual homework assignment. Each was to go home, have sex with his spouse, and, immediately following intercourse, place a swabby towel beneath the buttocks of his partner and thoroughly comb her pubic hair. This wasn’t a lesson in postcoital grooming. The point was to collect any fallen hairs on the towel for later examination. The employees were voluntary participants in an experiment to determine the frequency of pubic hair transfer during intercourse.

Forensic scientists had long been trained to search for foreign pubic hairs on victims of sexual assault. Such hairs, if found, can serve as valuable evidence, either implicating or
⁴⁸
ruling out suspects. But what forensic scientists didn’t know was whether it was actually common for pubic hairs to transfer between partners during intercourse. Should they expect to find transferred pubic hairs frequently, or infrequently? It was the kind of question only a strange experiment could answer.

The Alabama researchers collected 110 pubic-hair-bearing towels from the six couples over a period of a few months. They carefully examined all of them and identified a grand total of 334 pubic hairs, as well as seven head hairs, twenty body hairs, and one animal hair. We won’t speculate about where the animal hair came from.

Foreign pubic hairs (i.e., hairs transferred from a spouse) were present on only nineteen of the towels. This gave a fairly low transfer rate of 17.3 percent. The transfer of hairs from women to men proved more than twice as common as the transfer of hairs from men to women. No sexual position appeared to cause significantly more hair transfer than any other position.

Given that the hair collection occurred under ideal circumstances, immediately following intercourse, the researchers determined that, in most cases of sexual assault, pubic-hair transfer probably does not occur. Therefore, “Failure to find transferred pubic hairs does not indicate that intercourse did not occur.” These results remain the cutting edge (or should we say shedding edge?) of pubic-hair-transfer science.

The pursuit of knowledge can take researchers to many exotic, out-of-the-way locations—the depths of the ocean, inside the craters of volcanoes, the surface of the moon. In the case of Gordon Gallup, it took him to the Hollywood Exotic Novelties sex store, where he obtained a latex phallus and an artificial vagina. These were strictly for business, not pleasure.

Back at his lab at the State University of New York at Albany, Gallup whipped up some fake semen. The recipe, for those curious, was 7 milliliters of room-temperature water mixed with 7.16 grams of cornstarch and stirred for five minutes. This produced a substance “judged by three sexually experienced males to best approximate the viscosity and texture of human seminal fluid.”

Gallup and his team carefully poured the fake semen into the artificial vagina. Then they fully inserted the latex phallus. They repeated this procedure with phalluses of different sizes and semen of varying consistency.

It wasn’t sex-ed day at the lab. The point of all this simulated intercourse was to examine the fluid dynamics of sperm inside the vagina. Gallup theorized that the head of the human penis had evolved its distinctive shape to serve as a kind of semen scoop. This morphology, he argued, would have conferred an evolutionary advantage to a man if he had intercourse with a woman shortly after another man. His penis would scoop out the sperm of his rival and replace it with his own sperm.

Gallup’s tests confirmed that the penis indeed scoops sperm from the vagina quite effectively. When a penis was fully inserted into the artificial vagina, “semen flowed back under the penis through the frenulum and then collected over the top of the anterior shaft behind the coronal ridge.” When pulled out, the penis brought with it as much as 90 percent of the sperm.

Gallup’s theory stirred up controversy. Critics pointed out that if the penis does work as a scoop, then continued thrusting after ejaculation would be evolutionarily disadvantageous. The man would simply scoop out his own sperm. Gallup countered by noting the existence of a number of biological mechanisms that inhibit postejaculatory thrusting, such as penile hypersensitivity, loss of erection, and the refractory period (the postcoital period during which hormones temporarily shut down the male sexual response).

Gallup was no stranger to controversy. In 2002 he had made headlines when he announced the results of a study indicating semen may act as an antidepressant. Of the 293 women who participated in his study, those whose partners
did not
use condoms scored higher, on average, on tests assessing happiness than women whose partners
did
use condoms. Gallup was quick to note that these results should not be taken as a recommendation for abandoning the use of condoms. Contracting a sexual disease, after all, could prove extremely depressing.

Considering Gallup’s two studies together, you might get the idea that the penis is rather like an ice-cream scoop. After all, both are scoops that deliver viscous antidepressants. But there is one huge difference: What the ice-cream scoop
⁴⁹
delivers may make you happy and enlarge your belly, but it won’t make you pregnant.

Couples have been known to do many unusual things to increase their odds of conceiving a child—having sex only in certain positions, timing their lovemaking to the phases of the moon, and sometimes resorting to making the guy wear heated underwear. But what about hiring a clown? Not to be a sperm donor, but to entertain the woman. If the results of a recent study are to be believed, it might be worth a try.

Dr. Shevach Friedler arranged for women undergoing in vitro fertilization embryo-transfer procedures at the Assaf Harofeh Medical Center in Israel to enjoy a “personal encounter with a professional medical clown.” The clown performed the same bedside act for all the women. Dressed as a character called Chef Shlomi Algussi, he did magic tricks and told jokes.

Thirty-three of the ninety-three women who received the clown therapy conceived. This was a success rate of 35.5 percent. By contrast, only eighteen of ninety-three women who didn’t meet Chef Shlomi conceived—a significantly lower rate of 19 percent. The clown literally worked magic with the patients. Friedler concluded, “Medical clowning has been shown as an original, effective adjunctive intervention having a beneficial effect upon outcome of IVF-ET.”

⁵⁰
Friedler himself had studied mime in France before becoming a doctor. This gave him the idea for the clown therapy. He suspected humor might relieve some of the stress the women were experiencing, and thus boost their odds of getting pregnant.

Of course, women who suffer from coulrophobia—a fear of clowns and mime artists—should probably avoid the use of medical clowning. Unless, that is, they hope to benefit from its contraceptive possibilities.

Experimenters love babies—partly because babies are cute and smell good, but mostly because babies make fascinating research subjects. They allow experimenters to get a glimpse of the human mind in its original state, before the world has left its mark. So there’s no shortage of odd situations infants have been placed in for the sake of science. The experimental appeal of newborns dates all the way back to the seventh century
BC
when King Psammetichus I ruled Egypt. Psammetichus believed his people were the most ancient in the world, but the Phrygians also claimed this title. To settle the dispute, Psammetichus devised an experiment. He confined two infants to an isolated cottage. Every day a shepherd fed and cared for them, but never uttered a word. Psammetichus reasoned that the first word the children spoke would be the original, natural language of humankind. Two years passed, then one day the shepherd opened the door and heard the children shouting “becos.” The shepherd informed the king, who inquired what this meant. He was told “becos” was the Phrygian word for bread. Therefore, Psammetichus yielded the claim of greater antiquity to the Phrygians. However, modern scholars have suggested that—assuming the story is true—the children were possibly mimicking the sounds of the sheep and goats the shepherd tended and the shepherd simply misunderstood their cries. Appropriately, this would make Psammetichus’s study not only one of the first experiments in recorded history, but also one of the first examples of experimental error.