Jewish Women Say Goodnight
They’ll cry instead
January 07, 2011
Barbra Streisand, about to cry, in The Way We Were.(IMDB)
A new study shows that women’s tears act as an anti-aphrodisiac to men. Specifically, the scent of women’s emotionally-provoked tears lowers various signs of male sexual arousal. The study was performed at none other than the Weizmann Institute for Science, south of Tel Aviv, and it involved several roughly 30-year-old women with a known proclivity for crying being shown sad movies and having their faces sniffed by men in their late 20s. So presumably these were all Jewish women crying and Jewish men licking their faces. It’s enough to make one … well, not cry, so much as laugh really, really hard.
Gosh, where to begin? Maybe: “Dr. Sobel said the researchers started with women because, when they advertised for ‘volunteers who can cry with ease,’ they could not find men who were ‘good criers.’”
Or perhaps the part where the Jewish women are shown Life is Beautiful so that they’ll cry.
And then there’s, “They showed men scenes from 9 ½ Weeks—specifically, from the more explicit European version, which, Dr. Sobel said, ‘has been validated as being particularly arousing.’” You’re telling me!
But ultimately, first prize for Best Line in This Amazing Article goes to: “They had assumed chemical signals from tears would trigger sadness or empathy in others. But initial experiments found that sniffing women’s tears did not affect men’s mood or empathy, but ‘had a pronounced influence on sexual arousal.’” Sorry, ladies. You know we love you.
Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.
