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.

I have to wonder how much, if any, tax dollars went to fund this study. I suppose this has some application to human psychology, but I’m not sure that we really needed a study to understand that anything that signals an increased opportunity for procreation is going to have a positive effect on males wishing to reproduce.

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.

Seems a tad unfair, but at least the rats died with a smile on their face.

And no, this is not from The Onion.

That might be the most interesting part of the entire article.