quelle surprise

Buried toward the end of this story about "the first real, honest-to-God, horny-making, body-shaking, equal-opportunity aphrodisiac", PT-141, is a little piece of behavioural research that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere else:

When Jim Pfaus tested PT-141 on his female rats, he based his experimental design partly on the work of Raul Paredes, a fellow rat sexologist testing the effects of something more elusive: personal autonomy. That’s a tricky thing to measure, but it can be done. Paredes did it like this: First, he looked at rat couples living in standard, box-shaped cages and recorded the details of their sexual behavior. Then, he altered the cages in only one particular: He divided them into two chambers with a clear wall broken only by one opening, too small for the males to get through but just right for the females. Architecturally it was a minor change, but what it did for the females was huge. It let them get away from the males whenever they chose to, and thereby made it entirely their choice whether to have sex. Paredes then observed the rats’ behavior in this altered setting. Here’s what he found: The effects of giving a female rat greater personal control over her sex life are essentially the same as those of giving her PT-141. Autonomy, in other words, is as real an aphrodisiac as any substance known to science.
The thing about PT-141 that's generating all the buzz is that, wonder of wonders, it makes women want to get busy. It's the first genuinely effective female aphrodisiac drug. Now, that's a wonderful thing and I'm not trying to say otherwise. All I am pointing out is that maybe it would also be a wonderful thing if we, as a society, were to explore the idea of personal autonomy as female aphrodisiac.

science | sennoma | 05 Dec, 2005 |

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