Lab Study Shows Boys Like Girls in Small, Tight Clothes

But the real news is that it's male rats, the actual rodents as opposed to the rest of us: Why Men Love Lingerie: Rat Study Offers Hints

Just as lingerie turns on human males, tiny jackets do the same for male rats, a new study finds.

In an unusual study, researchers allowed virgin male rats to have sex with females wearing special rodent "jackets." Later, when scientists gave the males a chance to mate again, the animals preferred to mate with jacket-wearing female rats rather than with unclad ones.

The findings suggest that male animals can learn to associate the sight and feel of clothing with sex.

So, as I see this, they haven't learned anything new since Pavlov and his dogs, but they had fun dressing rats up  like little dolls, and encouraging them to have sex. Oh, bright college days, oh carefree days that fly . . .

In other words, male rats learn that "each time my partner wears lingerie [a jacket], I'm going to have sex," said study co-author Gonzalo R. Quintana Zunino, a psychologist working in the lab of psychologist Jim Pfaus at Concordia University in Montreal.

In previous studies, Zunino, Pfaus, and their colleagues trained rats to associate a particular odor (almond) with having sex, and male rats preferentially mated with females bearing that scent.

And here I thought the tradition of perfumes and scents started to conceal the smell of bodies left unwashed for months. Women are just training us.

This time, the researchers wanted to know whether rats could learn to associate sex with other contextual cues, such as texture. In one experiment, a dozen virgin male rats were allowed to mate with females wearing jackets. Then, the males were put in a chamber with two sexually receptive female rats, one wearing a jacket and one "au naturel."
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The trained male rats chose to mate with the jacket-clad females more often than with the unjacketed females, the researchers found. In addition, the males made more mounting attempts and ejaculated more quickly with the jacketed females.

But is was not all wine and roses for the poor male rats.

Zunino and his colleagues also wanted to know how the jacket experience affected activity in the rats' brains. Right after the male rats mated with the jacketed females, the researchers sacrificed the animals and injected a dye into their brains that shows the activity of a gene called c-fos, which is a measure of neural activation. Specifically, they looked at c-fos activity in the pleasure centers of the rats' brains, including regions called the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbens.

Males that mated with jacket-wearing females showed more c-fos activity in these brain areas than did males who mated with jacketless females, preliminary results showed.

They gave their all for science. . . I wonder if Victoria's Secret paid for this study; it seems a natural fit.

Wombat-socho got around to Rule 5 Sunday on Monday this week with "Rule 5 Monday: Midnight Snack."