Bikini-Clad Women Make Men Impatient

Images of sexy women tend to whet men’s sexual appetite. But stimulating new research in the Journal of Consumer Research says there’s more than meets the eye. A recent study shows that men who watched sexy videos or handled lingerie sought immediate gratification—even when they were making decisions about money, soda, and candy.

Authors Bram Van den Bergh, Siegfried DeWitte, and Luk Warlop (KULeuven, Belgium) found that the desire for immediate rewards increased in men who touched bras, looked at pictures of beautiful women, or watched video clips of young women in bikinis running through a park.

“It seems that sexual appetite causes a greater urgency to consume anything rewarding,” the authors suggest. Thus, the activation of sexual desire appears to spill over into other brain systems involved in reward-seeking behaviors, even the cognitive desire for money.

“After they touched a bra, men are more likely to be content with a smaller immediate monetary reward,” writes Bram Van den Bergh, one of the study’s authors. “Prior exposure to sexy stimuli may influence the choice between chocolate cake or fruit for dessert.”

The authors believe the stimuli bring men’s minds to the present as opposed to the future. “The study demonstrates that bikinis cause a shift in time preference: Men live in the here and now when they glance at pictures featuring women in lingerie. That is, men will choose the immediately available rewards and seek immediate gratification after sex cue exposure.”

Do all straight men respond the same? Actually, no. Some men are highly responsive to rewards while others are not so sensitive, and the more reward-sensitive men are the impatient ones.

In fact, doing a task designed to inspire financial satisfaction reduced the bikini-inspired impatience, just as feeling full reduces food cravings. Men may want to be aware of bikinis’ effects on their bank accounts and waistlines.

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Further Evidence Genetics Has Role in Determining Sexual Orientation in Men

Canadian scientists have uncovered new evidence which shows genetics has a role to play in determining whether an individual is homosexual or heterosexual.

The research was conducted by Dr. Sandra Witelson, a neuroscientist in the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine at McMaster University, and colleagues at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto who studied the brains of healthy, right-handed, 18- to 35-year-old homosexual and heterosexual men using structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).

About 10 years ago, Witelson and Dr. Cheryl McCormick, then a student of Witelson’s, demonstrated there is a higher proportion of left-handers in the homosexual population than in the general population – a result replicated in subsequent studies which is now accepted as fact.
Handedness is a sign of how the brain is organized to represent different aspects of intelligence. Language, for example, is usually on the left - music on the right.

In other research, Witelson and research associate Debra Kigar, had found that left-handers have a larger region of the posterior corpus callosum – the thick band of nerve fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain – than right handers.

This raised the hypothesis for the current study – whether the anatomy of the brain of the sub-group of right-handed homosexual men is similar to that of left-handers.

They found that the posterior part of the corpus callosum is larger in homosexual than heterosexual men.

The size of the corpus callosum is largely inherited suggesting a genetic factor in sexual orientation, says Witelson. “Our results do not mean that heredity is destiny but they do indicate that environment is not the only player in the field,” she says.

While this is not a litmus test for sexual orientation, Witelson said this finding could prove to be one additional valuable piece of information for physicians and individuals who are trying to determine their sexual orientation. “Sometimes people aren’t sure of their sexual orientation.”

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Estrogen Is Important For Bone Health in Men as Well as Women

Although women are four times more likely than men to develop osteoporosis, or porous bone, one in 12 men also suffer from the disease, which can lead to debilitating - or even life-threatening - fractures, mainly of the spine, hip and wrist. The underlying causes of osteoporosis are numerous, but in women, low estrogen levels after menopause have been considered an important factor.

As for men - new research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has shown that low amounts of active estrogen metabolites also can increase their osteoporosis risk.
"Most people don't think about estrogen in men, but men actually have somewhat more estrogen on average than do postmenopausal women," says Reina Armamento-Villareal, M.D., assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Bone and Mineral Diseases and a bone specialist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. She is senior author of a new study in the journal Calcified Tissue International.

"Research by other groups had suggested that estrogen may be more important than testosterone for maintaining bone health in men," she says. "So we designed a study to look at male estrogen levels and bone density."

When estrogen circulates in the body, it passes through the liver where several enzymes convert the standard hormone to other forms - some of these forms, or estrogen metabolites, are active and some are inactive. Individuals differ in how they process estrogen, so the levels of these estrogen metabolites will vary among people. No previous studies have addressed the role of estrogen metabolism and the forms of circulating hormone in male osteoporosis.

The Washington University researchers found that the amounts of active estrogen metabolites are a strong predictor of bone mineral density in the men they studied. Testing hormone levels and bone density as measured by DXA (dual X-ray absorptiometry) scans in 61 men age 50 or older, the researchers saw that men with higher levels of active estrogen metabolites also tended to have higher bone density. Conversely, men with lower levels of these hormones tended to have lower bone density.

Testosterone levels did not affect bone density in these study subjects. Testosterone seems to be responsible for the larger size and thicker outer layers of male bones, but estrogen is possibly a key hormone for maintaining peak bone mineral mass in men, according to the authors.
The researchers also looked at whether other factors, including smoking, alcohol consumption, daily calcium intake and body mass index (BMI) affected bone density. Only BMI correlated with bone density: Men with higher BMI tended to have higher bone density, possibly because they also had higher levels of active estrogen metabolites.

Fractures due to osteoporosis are a significant health threat in the elderly. According to Villareal, 25 percent of those who suffer a hip fracture die within a year, and 40-50 percent have some degree of disability or need nursing home care. "It's a very serious problem," she says. "People of retirement age are looking forward to their leisure time, but if they fracture a hip, there are so many things they won't be able to do."

Villareal thinks the health-care system may need to reflect what research is now revealing about estrogen in men. "It would be a good idea to measure estrogen levels in older men who present with low bone mineral density or osteoporosis," Villareal says. "Not only does estrogen and its metabolism affect bone health in men, but it may also influence the risk for prostate cancer."

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