Woman's Tears Turn Off Men

It turns out that a woman's tears actually chemically turn off men.  Not only do tears of sadness kill a mans sexual appetite, it also temporarily lowers his testosterone level as well.

The findings were discovered by a team at Weizmann Institute of Science.  They ran a variety of experiments, they are as follows:

The team collected tears from a group of women who were told to watch a sad movie. The team then had men sniff the tears and a saline solution to see if they could tell the difference between the two, they could not. The tears and saline solution were soaked in cotton pads, and held under the nose

The group of men were then told to rate a series of women on attractiveness three times.  Once with the saline solution, once with the tears, and once with nothing.  The team found that when sniffing the tears, men rated women lower then when not sniffing tears.

The team wanted to test if it was the actual tears, or just the perception of sadness that was lowering their sexual arousal.  So they had the group of men watch a sad movie with either tear soaked pads, saline soaked, or nothing.  The men's testosterone level did drop, but only in the group sniffing the tear soaked pads.

Finally they did the same test again, but this time with a sexually arousing film, and they measured brain activity during the experiment.  Again, the team smelling the tears were less aroused sexually, having less activity in the part of the brain associated with arousal then the other participants.

As a conclusion, the research suggests that tears actually contain chemicals that lower a mans sexual arousal and testosterone levels.  There are two possible evolutionary purposes to this, the first is that the tears primary purpose is to lower testosterone, which makes men less aggressive, and lowered sexual arousal is just a side effect of this. The second possible reason is that women cry more often during their menstrual cycle, when they are less likely to conceive. So the tears are a way of telling the man "no", because the woman is not in prime mating condition at the moment.

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