Here’s 25 Comebacks to the age old question:
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You haven’t asked yet.
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What? And spoil my great sex life?
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Nobody would believe me in white.
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Because I just love hearing this question.
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Just lucky, I guess.
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I’m waiting until I get to be your age.
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It gives my mother something to live for.
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My fiancé is awaiting parole.
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I’m still hoping for a shot at Miss/Mr. World.
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Do you know how hard it is to get two tickets to Miss Saigon?
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It didn’t seem worth a blood test.
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I was hoping to do something meaningful with my life.
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I already have enough laundry to do, thank you.
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Because I think it would take all the spontaneity out of dating.
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My landlord doesn’t allow spouses.
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I’d have to forfeit my multi-million pound trust fund.
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They just opened a great singles bar on my street.
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I wouldn’t want my parents to drop dead from sheer happiness.
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I guess it just goes to prove that you can’t trust those voodoo doll rituals.
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What? And lose all the money I’ve invested in running personal ads?
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We really want to, but my lover’s husband just won’t go for it.
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I don’t want to have to support another person on my salary.
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Why aren’t you thin?
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I’m married to my career, although recently we have been considering a trial separation.
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(Bonus reply for Single Mothers) Because having a husband and a child would be redundant.
Posted by Jonathan as Humour at 2:03 PM EST
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The Singapore Government is offering students lessons in Seduction to boost the city state’s low birth-rate.
Students at two Polytechnics can earn two credits towards their final degree by choosing the love elective. Activities include watching romantic films, holding hands and “love song analysis”.
Isabel Seet, an 18-year-old mechanical engineering student, was quoted as saying:
My teacher said if a guy looks into my eyes for more than five seconds, it could mean that he is attracted to me and I stand a chance.
Besides “love and sexuality”, the curriculum also deals with the importance of family life.
The “trainers” are provided by the Social Development Unit, a government match-making agency.
Posted by Jonathan as Miscellaneous at 1:14 AM EST
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Seduction Labs has frequently noted that subjects such as Body Language are pseudo-psychological mumbo jumbo, and now it seems that science is catching up with our opinion.
An interesting piece of research turned up recently, which, possibly due to some shallow reporting, was generally criticised as “man bashing“, although that seems to be a straw man, allowing Body Language experts to avoid facing up to some inconvenient information.
According to the paper “Decoding Women’s Sexual Intent“, to be published in the journal Psychological Science, Coreen Farris and colleagues, of Indiana University’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, examined non-verbal communication in a mixed group of 280 heterosexual undergraduates.
Volunteers viewed images of women on a computer screen and then had to categorize each as friendly, sexually interested, sad or rejecting. Then, each volunteer reported on 280 photographs, which had been previously sorted into one of the above categories, based on surveys completed by different groups of people.
When it came to friendly gestures, men were more likely than women to interpret these to mean sexual interest. But, men also interpreted sexual cues as friendly interest. According to the researchers, this is because men have trouble noticing and interpreting the subtleties of non-verbal cues, in either direction.
The results, which were widely reported as men are somewhat oblivious to the emotional subtleties of women’s non-verbal cues, also showed that whilst women were more precise in categorizing the facial expressions correctly overall, the women’s results were only slightly better than the men’s.
Lead researcher Coreen Farris said:
Young men just find it difficult to tell the difference between women who are being friendly and women who are interested in something more. This ‘lost in translation‘ phenomenon plays out in the real world, with about 70% of college women reporting an experience in which a guy mistook her friendliness for a sexual come-on.
It had been previously suggested that both men and women would be aware of the same behavioural cues, but men would tend to have a lower threshold for what qualifies as sexual interest, whereas women, presumably more interested in a stable relationship, would wait for compelling evidence before labelling behaviour as sexual interest.
However, Farris and her colleagues found that this wasn’t the case, since men also had difficulties discerning the difference between sadness and rejection.
Now, it is frequently noted that women tend to be better communicators that men, so it is therefore unsurprising that women scored slightly higher in their categorizations compared to men. What is more interesting is that both genders achieved such low accuracy.
Therefore, if there were solid foundations for claims made by students of Body Language, we would see both genders accurately identifying the non-verbal cues at high rates, especially in a controlled laboratory environment, where participants only needed to differentiate between four possible states, and not the multitude of conditions that they would be faced with in the real world.
The idea of being able to detect non-verbal cues is an interesting one, and would certainly be valuable, were there some reasonable evidence to support it. Please note that here we are not disputing the fact that most people can identify general gross states from facial expressions (happy, worried, upset, angry, etc.). However, amongst more subtle (often likely to be suppressed) cues, one would need to have seen a stable baseline of past cues, in order to learn to correctly identify the corresponding state. Some states are very closely related, so it appears perfectly logical to assume that if some sort of non-verbal communication channel were open, a ‘friendly’ message would accompany or precede a ‘sexually interested’ message.
In the case of women being sexually interested in a man, there will be extreme variation in how this is likely to be expressed, since there is no such thing as a standard women: Some women will be strongly expressive, giving hugs and kisses, and possibly touching a man more intimately, whilst others will be less expressive and even conceal the fact that they are interested in a man, for fear that he, will brand her ‘easy‘ or a ‘slut‘. Similarly, other people will express non-sexual friendliness with hugs and kisses. Alcohol or environmental factors may also come into play, with a woman possibly feeling more inhibited amongst large groups, and thus not being as expressive as when alone, alternatively alcohol consumption may cause her to become less inhibited.
Some women may choose to display what they believe are signals of sexual interest, in the hope that she will avoid consequences for some transgression. The same signals might also profitably be used by a woman attempting to gain material benefits from a man, if she believes that he will dispense resources, after a false show of sexual interested in him.
A woman may show initial sexual interested in a man, but quickly change her mind, as new information or better options becomes available. In this case, from a male perspective, the man will conclude that she is “blowing hot and cold“, since the woman is unlikely to disclose the source of information which caused her change of mind, in case it were to cause severe disappointment or reprisal.
Women are also frequently reported as being ambiguous in their verbal communication, so a woman could state “I’m not in the mood right now“. This statement is not outright refusal, but is essentially an unlimited open ended statement. In other words, “…not [...] right now” could reasonably represent anytime from a few minutes in the future to many years away, and could therefore represent anything from token resistance to a veiled brush off.
The above descriptions should amply illustrate why the hypothetical non-verbal route does not work. There is no stable baseline to compare signals with, and thus correlate a response, further, were it even possible that such a communication route existed, a man would then always fall prey to a woman displaying deceptive signals.
Now, since women tend to deliberately avoid initiating contact with men they are interested in, the responsibility for initial contact must therefore fall to men. Thus, given that misinterpreting a ‘sexually interested’ signal for a ‘friendly’ signal would prevent the man from enjoying sexual relations with the woman, there is therefore a high associated cost of failure to incorrectly interpreted signals. Thus, the obvious answer for the man is to always assume sexual interest, until clearer signals indicate otherwise.
Finally, if a heterosexual man desired to go the theatre, eat in a restaurant, enjoy some drinks or engage in any other similar activity typically undertaken on a “Date”, he could almost certainly call upon a network of male friends, family or co-workers to accompany him. Thus, if a man goes out with a woman that he is not familiar with, there is clearly sexual interest by both parties; since sex is the only activity that he cannot take part in, with male friends.
One only has to look at the number of internet dating profiles that contain some variation on the phrase “Let’s be friends first“.
The original research paper can be downloaded here:
Posted by Jonathan as Psychology, Sociology at 12:51 AM EST
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Women’s magazines have previously been blamed for encouraging teenagers to smoke and diet, by glamorising an unhealthy “size zero” body image.
Now, new research shows that men are not immune from similar effects, since the laddish culture promoted by men’s magazines has spawned a new medical condition: Athletica nervosa, or an obsession with exercise. Some readers apparently become so anxious about their own physique that they embark on excessive exercise, spending hours every day running, swimming, or working out at the gym.
The research conducted by University of Winchester Psychologist Dr David Giles and colleagues found that men who read the magazines, were more influenced by the flawless body imagery promoted in the publications.
Dr Giles said:
The message in typical lads’ magazines is that you need to develop a muscular physique in order to attract a quality mate,
Readers internalise this message, which creates anxieties about their actual bodies and leads to increasingly desperate attempts to modify them.
Some of the most worrying findings were that heavy consumers of lads’ mags think about taking anabolic steroids or use protein or energy supplements as part of their diet and exercise regimes to improve the way they look.
The researchers surveyed 161 males aged between 18 and 36 about the Men’s magazines they read and for how long, their relationship status, their dietary habits, exercise regime and how they felt about their looks.
The study also found differences between dating and non-dating men.
The effect was stronger among single men than those in stable romantic relationships. This suggests that dating men are less anxious about their body image,
Although it could simply mean that they have less time to go to the gym when they have a partner.
The research was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
Posted by Jonathan as Psychology, Sociology at 9:39 AM EST
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The highly informative WebMD website points out that there are a number of scientific studies showing that sex can help with your weight, your brain, your blood pressure and a whole lot more besides.
Amongst the benefits of healthy loving:
1. Sex Relieves Stress
A big health benefit of sex is lower blood pressure and overall stress reduction, according to researchers from Scotland who reported their findings in the journal Biological Psychology. They studied 24 women and 22 men who kept records of their sexual activity. Then the researchers subjected them to stressful situations - such as speaking in public and doing verbal arithmetic - and noted their blood pressure response to stress.
Those who had intercourse had better responses to stress than those who engaged in other sexual behaviours or abstained.
Another study published in the same journal found that frequent intercourse was associated with lower diastolic blood pressure in cohabiting participants. Yet other research found a link between partner hugs and lower blood pressure in women.
2. Sex Boosts Immunity
Good sexual health may mean better physical health. Having sex once or twice a week has been linked with higher levels of an antibody called immunoglobulin A or IgA, which can protect you from getting colds and other infections. Scientists at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., took samples of saliva, which contain IgA, from 112 college students who reported the frequency of sex they had.
Those in the “frequent” group - once or twice a week - had higher levels of IgA than those in the other three groups - who reported being abstinent, having sex less than once a week, or having it very often, three or more times weekly.
3. Sex Burns Calories
Thirty minutes of sex burns 85 calories or more. It may not sound like much, but it adds up: 42 half-hour sessions will burn 3,570 calories, more than enough to lose a pound. Doubling up, you could drop that pound in 21 hour-long sessions.
“Sex is a great mode of exercise,” says Patti Britton, PhD, a Los Angeles sexologist and president of the American Association of Sexuality Educators and Therapists. It takes work, from both a physical and psychological perspective, to do it well, she says.
4. Sex Improves Cardiovascular Health
While some older folks may worry that the efforts expended during sex could cause a stroke, that’s not so, according to researchers from England. In a study published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, scientists found frequency of sex was not associated with stroke in the 914 men they followed for 20 years.
And the heart health benefits of sex don’t end there. The researchers also found that having sex twice or more a week reduced the risk of fatal heart attack by half for the men, compared with those who had sex less than once a month.
5. Sex Boosts Self-Esteem
Boosting self-esteem was one of 237 reasons people have sex, collected by University of Texas researchers and published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour.
That finding makes sense to Gina Ogden, PhD, a sex therapist and marriage and family therapist in Cambridge, Mass., although she finds that those who already have self-esteem say they sometimes have sex to feel even better. “One of the reasons people say they have sex is to feel good about themselves,” she tells WebMD. “Great sex begins with self-esteem, and it raises it. If the sex is loving, connected, and what you want, it raises it.”
6. Sex Improves Intimacy
Having sex and orgasms increases levels of the hormone Oxytocin, the so-called love hormone, which helps us bond and build trust. Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of North Carolina evaluated 59 pre-menopausal women before and after warm contact with their husbands and partners ending with hugs. They found that the more contact, the higher the Oxytocin levels.
“Oxytocin allows us to feel the urge to nurture and to bond,” Britton says.
Higher Oxytocin has also been linked with a feeling of generosity. So if you’re feeling suddenly more generous toward your partner than usual, credit the love hormone.
7. Sex Reduces Pain
As the hormone Oxytocin surges, endorphins increase, and pain declines. So if your headache, arthritis pain, or PMS symptoms seem to improve after sex, you can thank those higher Oxytocin levels.
In a study published in the Bulletin of Experimental Biology and Medicine, 48 volunteers who inhaled Oxytocin vapour and then had their fingers pricked lowered their pain threshold by more than half.
8. Sex Reduces Prostate Cancer Risk
Frequent ejaculations, especially in 20-something men, may reduce the risk of prostate cancer later in life, Australian researchers reported in the British Journal of Urology International. When they followed men diagnosed with prostate cancer and those without, they found no association of prostate cancer with the number of sexual partners as the men reached their 30s, 40s, and 50s.
But they found men who had five or more ejaculations weekly while in their 20s reduced their risk of getting prostate cancer later by a third.
Another study, reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that frequent ejaculations, 21 or more a month, were linked to lower prostate cancer risk in older men, as well, compared with less frequent ejaculations of four to seven monthly.
9. Sex Strengthens Pelvic Floor Muscles
For women, doing a few pelvic floor muscle exercises known as Kegels during sex offers a couple of benefits. You will enjoy more pleasure, and you’ll also strengthen the area and help to minimize the risk of incontinence later in life.
To do a basic Kegel exercise, tighten the muscles of your pelvic floor, as if you’re trying to stop the flow of urine. Count to three, then release.
10. Sex Helps You Sleep Better
The Oxytocin released during orgasm also promotes sleep, according to research.
And getting enough sleep has been linked with a host of other good things, such as maintaining a healthy weight and blood pressure. Something to think about, especially if you’ve been wondering why your guy can be active one minute, and then snoring the next.
Posted by Jonathan as Biochemistry, Biology at 10:06 PM EST
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Palaeontologists believe a rope-like organism called Funisia dorothea, which lived on the seabed up to 570 million years ago, was the first creature on earth to have sex.
Fossilised remains of the primitive tubular creatures have been uncovered in the Australian outback, from what was once seabed, and have put back the history of sex by about 30 million years. But, whilst the experience was unlikely to have been earth-moving for the animals, the discovery has excited scientists who said that the fossils open a window on one of the most ancient ecosystems, indicating that the planet’s earliest animal ecosystem was complex and included sexual reproduction.
What has gotten the scientists excited is that, until now, Palaeobiologists were generally agreed that the earliest multicellular animals were simple, and that strategies which organisms use today to survive, reproduce and grow in numbers had arisen over time due to many factors, including evolutionary and ecological pressures, imposed by competition for food and other resources.
But in describing the ecology and reproductive strategies of Funisia, the researchers found that the organism had multiple means of growing and propagating - similar to strategies used by most invertebrate organisms for propagation today.
Researchers identified the creature’s capacity for sexual rather than asexual reproduction, because fossil specimens were found in groups that all appeared to be the same age. Since they had all found a foothold in a sandy seabed at the same time, it was considered they must have resulted from a simultaneous spawning instead of uncoordinated asexual births.
Funisia dorothea would have grown in abundance, covering the sea floor, during the Neoproterozoic era, which ended about 540million years ago and lasted for about 100million years of Earth’s history, during which no predators or scavengers were around. Funisia would have lived in dense groups of similar size and age animals, much like Mussels and Oysters do, today.
Mary Droser, one of the Palaeontologists involved in the study and a professor of Earth sciences at the University of California in Riverside, first discovered the organism in 2005 near Ediacara, South Australia, and gave it its name - Funisia after “rope” in Latin - Dorothea after her 80-year-old mother, Dorothy, who took care of the palaeontologist’s young children and cooked for the research team on several digs.
Mrs Droser snr. said she was “thrilled to tears” at having a fossil named in her honour, and thought it appropriate that the ancient animal was the first to have sex:
My family thinks it’s humorous. I have 11 grandchildren - obviously reproduction is a good thing.
Professor Droser and James Gehling of the South Australia Museum reported in the journal Science that Funisia was a soft-bodied creature that grew as 30cm-long tubes. Once the tubular animals had fixed themselves to the seabed, either as a larva or a fertilised egg, they were immobile and unable to go off in search of mates. They were also unable to identify a mouth or any other recognisable anatomy.
Professor Droser said:
In general, individuals of an organism grow close to each other, in part, to ensure reproductive success,
It is common modern ecological strategy, and these guys were doing it in the earliest animal ecosystems on this planet,
In Funisia, we are very likely seeing sexual reproduction in Earth’s early ecosystem – possibly the very first instance of sexual reproduction in animals on our planet. How Funisia appears in the fossils clearly shows that ecosystems were complex very early in the history of animals on Earth.
Posted by Jonathan as Biology, History at 2:33 AM EST
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Subliminal audio recordings started with Hal Becker, an engineer who experimented with visual subliminal techniques in the 1950s. Then, in 1978 he produced a device to insert subliminal messages into music audiotapes. According to Time magazine in 1979, fifty department stores had used the device to insert messages such as “I am honest; I will not steal”, many times at a low (i.e. subliminal) level into their background muzak, in an attempt to discourage shoplifting. Time magazine claimed that the stores reported a significant reduction in theft, although no evidence was offered to substantiate the claim1.
Thus, the idea of subliminal persuasion is very attractive - play a recording in the background and have your life improve magickally, and without any effort on the listener’s behalf; and thus a whole industry has sprung up attempting to sell subliminal self-help products to the more ill-informed and credulous members of society.
The problem is that although some areas of the popular imagination have caught onto the idea of using subliminal technologies to cure various problems, there are some fundamental flaws in subliminal audio technologies.
Proponents seem to assume that to obtain subliminal effects, one modality is as good as another, so therefore claims about subliminal recordings have as little evidence as claims about subliminal images.
But it doesn’t stop there, because this modality switch is not obvious: in the visual domain the masking of the image doesn’t distort or change the target stimulus, so were the masking to be removed, the target stimulus would be easily perceived. In the auditory domain, the target signal is decreased in volume and attenuated by the superimposition of other higher energy “supraliminal” material. Often the subliminal “message” is accelerated, reversed or compressed to such a degree that the “message” would be unintelligible, even if the supraliminal material were removed. It is therefore an extraordinary claim that an unintelligible speech signal can be perceived consciously or otherwise. If the critical signal is drowned out by other sounds, then on what basis are we supposed to believe that the weaker of the two signals becomes disentangled, and engages with our nervous system? Even supposing that this were possible and our brains could somehow interpret the signal, how or why should a repeated sub-audible message affect our motivation to lose weight or increase self-esteem, when the repeated supraliminal presentation of the same message would produce nothing but boredom?
Researchers have found that subliminal self-help tapes are of no benefit to the user. In a series of three experiments, Auday, Mellett, and Williams2 tested the effectiveness of bogus and real subliminal tapes designed either to improve memory, reduce stress and anxiety, or increase self-confidence. The subliminal tapes proved ineffective in all three cases. Russell, Rowe, and Smouse3 tested subliminal tapes designed to improve academic achievement and found the tapes improved neither grade point average nor final examination scores. Lenz4 had 270 Los Angeles police recruits listen for 24 weeks to music with and without subliminal implants designed to improve either knowledge of the law or marksmanship. Both sets of tapes were ineffective. Merikle and Skanes5 found that overweight subjects who listened to subliminal weight-loss tapes for five weeks showed no more weight loss than did control subjects. Remarkably, Merikle6 subjected a collection of supposedly subliminal audiotapes to sensitive spectrographic analysis (i.e. equipment far more sensitive than the human ear), and found nothing on the tapes, beyond music, wave sounds, cricket chirps, and bird calls. There were no signs of speech insertions. Unsurprisingly, Merikle went on to show that people reacted the same way to subliminal message tapes as they did to placebo, no-message tapes.
One of the most interesting studies was conducted in Santa Cruz, by Pratkanis, Eskenazi, and Greenwald7. They used mass-marketed audiotapes with subliminal messages designed to improve either self-esteem or memory abilities. Both types of tape contained the same supraliminal content (pieces of classical music). However, they differed in their subliminal content. According to the manufacturer, the self-esteem tapes contained subliminal messages like “I have high self-worth and high self-esteem.” The memory tape contained subliminal messages like “My ability to remember and recall is increasing daily.”
The researchers recruited volunteers who appeared most interested in the value and potential of the subliminal self-help therapies (who they suspected were probably similar to those most likely to buy subliminal tapes). On the first day of the study, they asked the volunteers to complete three different self-esteem and three different memory measurement tests. They then gave the volunteers a randomly assigned subliminal tape. However, half of the tapes had been mislabelled, so that some of the subjects received a memory tape, which lead them to believe it was to improve their self-esteem, whereas others received a self-esteem tape that had been mislabelled as memory improvement. The remaining half of the subjects received correctly labelled tapes.
The volunteers took their tapes home and listened to them every day for five weeks (the period suggested by the manufacturer for maximum effectiveness). After five weeks of daily listening, they returned to the laboratory and once again completed self-esteem and memory tests, and were also asked to indicate if they believed the tapes to be effective.
The results were that the subliminal tapes produced no effect (improvement or otherwise) on either self-esteem or memory; but the volunteers didn’t believe this to be the case. Subjects who thought that they had listened to a self-esteem tape (regardless of whether they actually did or not) were more likely to be convinced that their self-esteem had improved, while those who thought they had listened to a memory tape were more likely to believe that their memory had improved, as a result of listening to the tape. The researchers called this an illusory placebo effect.
In summary, the subliminal tapes did nothing to improve self-esteem or memory abilities but, to some of the subjects, they appeared to have had an effect.
This demonstrates one reason why testimonial evidence for the efficacy of some product or service is almost always worthless.
References:
- McIver, T., ‘Backward masking, and other backward thoughts about music’, Skeptical Inquirer (1988) 13:1
- Auday, B.C., J.L. Mellett & P.M. Williams, ‘Self-improvement Using Subliminal Selfhelp Audiotapes: Consumer Benefit or Consumer Fraud?’, Paper presented at the meeting of the Western Psychological Association, San Francisco, California (1991)
- Russell, T.G., W. Rowe & A.D. Smouse, ‘Subliminal self-help tapes and academic achievement: An evaluation’, Journal of Counseling & Development (1991) 69:359-362
- Lenz, S., ‘The Effect of Subliminal Auditory Stimuli on Academic Learning and Motor Skills Performance Among Police Recruits’, Unpublished doctoral dissertation, California School of Professional Psychology, Los Angeles, California (1989)
- Merikle, P. & H.E. Skanes, ‘Subliminal Self-help Audiotapes: A Search for Placebo Effects’, Unpublished manuscript, University of Waterloo, London, Ontario (1991a)
- Merikle, P.M., ‘Subliminal auditory messages: An evaluation’, Psychology and Marketing (1988) 5:4
- Pratkanis, A.R., J. Eskenazi & A.G. Greenwald, ‘What You Expect Is What You Believe (But Not Necessarily What You Get): On the Effectiveness of Subliminal Self-help Audiotapes’, Paper presented at the meeting of the Western Psychological Association, Los Angeles, California (1990)
Posted by Jonathan as Psychology at 1:11 AM EST
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Depressed women have more sex than those who are happier, a recent study of the sexual experiences of more than 100 depressed and non-depressed women, who were in relationships, has found.
Women suffering from mild to moderate depression were found to have a third more sex, regardless of whether they were in a relationship or not, according to the survey.
They also had more sexually liberated attitudes, a bigger variety of sexual experiences, and if single, were more likely to partake in casual sex.
Lead researcher Dr Sabura Allen, a clinical psychologist at Monash University, said:
It was more sex and more of everything from kissing to petting, foreplay and intercourse.
We knew this anecdotally from clinical samples but this is the first time it’s been shown in research.
She added that depressed women were likely seeking out sexual intimacy more often, to help themselves feel more secure.
When people are depressed they feel more insecure about their relationships and concerned that their partner may not care about them or find them valuable.
Having sex helps them feel that closeness and security.
Dr Allen noted that Australian couples
… tend to have sex between once and three times a week [with] very much the majority in the once a week group.
Single women have it significantly less, but the same is not necessarily true in the case of single men.
After delivering her findings to the conference, The Sydney Morning Herald asked Dr Allen whether intercourse could be an effective aid for lessening or beating depression, and the psychologist was quoted as saying:
We really don’t know but we presume it helps as it gives these women opportunities to be close to their partner and loved.
The findings, which were presented at the International Congress on Women’s Mental Health in Melbourne, where the latest research in mental illness and hormone-related conditions are being showcased, are shortly to be published in full, in the British Medical Journal.
Posted by Jonathan as Psychology, Sociology at 6:12 PM EST
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Many people believe that a lot of advertisements contain hidden sexual images, or words that affect our susceptibility to said adverts. This belief is widespread even though there is no evidence for such practices, let alone evidence for the claimed effects. “Embedded” stimuli are difficult to characterize in terms of signal-detection theory or threshold-determination procedures, simply because most of them remain unidentifiable even when the focus of attention is directed to them.
However, using the term subliminal is a fait accompli, and thus deceptive self-appointed experts can claim there is something having an effect, even though it can’t be detected.
The first big Subliminal advertising scam, and the one most often quoted, was James Vicary’s notorious “Eat Popcorn / Drink Coke” scheme. Whereby, in 1956 Vicary claimed that his Subliminal Projection Company had conducted six weeks of studies, involving thousands of unknowing movie-goers, at a cinema in Fort Lee, New Jersey; using a device that secretly flashed the messages “Eat Popcorn” and “Drink Coke” for a third of a millisecond every five seconds during the film. Vicary claimed almost a 58% increase in sales of popcorn, and an 18% increase in Coke sales1. The public, instead of asking why the technique was so much more effective for sales of popcorn than for sales of cola, was immediately outraged.
An influential article of the time warned of the serious consequences of such a device, and argued that it should be banned, stating:2
if the device is successful for putting over popcorn, why not politicians or anything else?
If it was possible to affect yearning for popcorn, perhaps the device could be used to:
break into the deepest and most private parts of the human mind and leave all sorts of scratchmarks
The article concluded that the best course of action would be:
to take this invention and everything connected to it and attach it to the center of the next nuclear explosive scheduled for testing.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) undertook an immediate investigation, and ruled that the use of Vicary’s techniques could result in the loss of a license to broadcast. Further, members of the U.S. National Association of Broadcasters were prohibited from using subliminal advertising; a Nevada Judge ruled that subliminal communications were not protected as free speech. And subliminal advertising was outlawed in both Britain and Australia.
Unfortunately, whilst Vicary had claimed he was conducting a scientific study, the research was never actually written up, despite repeated demands from research Psychologists, professional advertisers and the FCC. Consequently, except for a brief summary prepared for an article in a magazine intended for high-school students, the study was never subjected to any proper scientific review.
As a way of responding to critics, Vicary subsequently attempted demonstrations of his machine, and frequently failed to get the machine to work at all, then when he did, no one in the audience felt compelled to comply with the flashed messages. Further, when the machine was finally subjected to a controlled test by an independent research company, no increase in the sales of either popcorn or cola was observed1.
As it turned out though, in a 1962 interview, Vicary actually admitted that he had made the whole thing up. His company did have the claimed device, but Vicary, in the interview revealed:
Worse than the timing, though, was the fact that we hadn’t done any research, except what was needed for filing for a patent. I had only a minor interest in the company and a small amount of data - too small to be meaningful. And what we had shouldn’t have been used promotionally3.
In 1958, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) also attempted to repeat Vicary’s experiment by subliminally flashing the message “Phone Now” 352 times during a popular Sunday night program called “Close-Up”. No increase in telephone usage was observed during that period, and nobody called the station. When asked to guess what the message said, viewers sent almost 500 letters, but not one contained the correct answer. Although, interestingly, about half of the respondents claimed to have been made hungry or thirsty during the show1. Apparently they guessed (incorrectly) that the message was aimed at getting them to eat or drink. Another company, Precon Process and Equipment, was formed in 1957 to embed subliminal messages in advertising hoardings and in films, they received a patent for the technique in 19624. The patent was awarded simply because the device could do what was claimed of it (insert subliminal messages) not because the subliminal messages themselves were shown to be effective.
Best selling author and lecturer Wilson Bryan Key popularised the cargo-cult science of subliminal seduction, arguing that the big advertisers and big government are in a conspiracy to control out minds using subliminal implants. According to Key:
Subliminal indoctrination may prove more dangerous than nuclear weapons. The substitution of cultural fantasies for realities on a massive, worldwide scale threatens everyone in this precarious period of human evolution. Present odds appear to favor total devastation5.
Professor Key6 argued repeatedly that advertisers embed the word ’sex’ into their advertising copy to obtain enhanced recall and recognition through implicit sexual association. To test this hypothesis, Vokey and Read7 produced three sets of slides of holiday experiences: in the first, the word ‘sex‘ was embedded three or four times; in the second, a three-letter nonsense trigram was inserted and in the third, there was nothing embedded. Volunteers examined an equal number of each type of slide before being tested for their ability to remember aspects of the scenes. None of the viewers reported seeing the word ‘sex‘, so the embedding was not noticed. Further, viewers could only see the word ‘sex‘ if it was pointed out to them. Key’s claim was therefore not supported. Slides that had been ‘sex‘ embedded during initial exposure were not better recognized than slides with nonsense syllables or nothing embedded. Additionally, there was no improvement when another test was administered two days later.
Thus, despite the apparent use of subliminal techniques in advertising, there is simply no evidence for effective subliminal persuasion in film or video, and there is no theoretical foundation to expect it.
References:
- Pratkanis, A.R., ‘The cargo-cult science of subliminal persuasion‘, Skeptical Inquirer (1992) 16:3
- Cousins, N., ‘Smudging the subconscious’, Saturday Review (1957) 40:20
- Danzig, F., ‘Subliminal advertising - Today it’s just historic flashback for researcher Vicary’, Advertising Age (1962) September 17
- McIver, T., ‘Backward masking, and other backward thoughts about music’, Skeptical Inquirer (1988) 13:1
- Key, W. B., ‘The age of manipulation: The con in confidence, the sin in sincere‘ (1989) New York: Henry Holt
- Key, W. B., ‘Media sexploitation‘ (1977) New York: Signet
- Vokey, J.R. & J.D. Read, ‘Subliminal messages: Between the devil and media‘, American Psychologist (1985) 40:1231-1239
Posted by Jonathan as Psychology at 2:58 AM EST
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Romance novels and soft core porn movies have a lot to answer for; because although the ideas they portray are wonderful in theory, they lose a lot in practical application.
Anyone who has tried emulating ideas such as sex on the beach will tell you that sand literally gets everywhere. And, whilst the idea of sex on a big thick rug in front of an open fire sounds terribly romantic, the practise is vastly overrated, since you fry after about ten minutes, and then whenever you attempt moving away, you start getting cold.
However, the shower is a much better option; it’s great for both sex and masturbation, but like all water-based sexual activity, it comes with some very real problems; the first being the lack of friction.
Like so much in life, you don’t realise how important something is, until you don’t have it any more. So, if you take two wet soapy bodies, and then try and make them hold onto each other for some serious making out or sex; you could rapidly end up in the casualty department unless you’re careful, because everything slides about so much.
This is very pleasant when, for example, it’s a breast in a hand (rather like playing find the soap,) but when it’s a case of a foot on tiles, or both arms round a waist for support, it gets pretty aggravating.
Therefore, if you decide to try full sex in the shower, make sure you leave out the soap and shampoo.
The next difficulty about sex in the shower is that it has to be done standing up; and the problem with standing up is that unless you’re both perfectly matched heights, the man has to hold the woman around his waist. This is tough enough on a carpet, whilst on a wet shower floor it’s very near impossible.
Another thing about sex in the shower is that you get cold if you don’t get enough of the shower. There’s little worse than a lovely warm feeling of water all over your body, and then long bouts of standing un-splashed in a bathroom draught.
So, don’t even think about sex in the shower if your “shower” is one of those hand-held doodahs with a metal tube from the taps. One of you will always be cold, while the other will have to hold their hand in the air.
Therefore, the best option may well be for you both to have a good play in the shower beforehand, and then go somewhere else to finish off. If you’re just making foreplay under water, you don’t have to worry about the grip, soap or friction. And even then, hand-held showers can be fun, since you don’t have all the complicated sexual mechanics to deal with.
Getting into showers with clothes on is an enormous turn on too, but the drawback is that you have to do something with them when your finished, and it’s extremely hard to get up for this sort of activity when you’ve just been hit by the post-orgasmic blues.
Washing each other can be great fun too, as well as very hygienic, but it might end up being a little revealing, if for example, you have an incipient bald patch that you’ve managed to keep pretty well hidden, thus far into your relationship. But then, this type of secret almost always comes out in the wash.
Also, don’t forget you’re on a strict time-limit. After about twenty minutes, wrinkles and blotches will start to appear, at a rate directly proportional to the fading eroticism.
You might also consider sex in the bath; the only real drawback here is that baths are almost always too small, unless your lucky enough to have a small swimming pool, or one of those gigantic free-standing baths that you could fit a football team into; in which case you are problem free, you can thrash about with abandon, and choose a horizontal position, which makes everything so much easier.
With normal-size baths however, one of you will always have to have the end with the taps, or else attempt to try and squeeze between the other’s legs. In this situation, you’ll find yourself wishing that you were alone after a few minutes, and chances are that generally after a few minutes more, you’ll end up rowing, and then you really will be alone.
What seems to be much more effective is for one person to sit in the bath and the other to kneel besides it, helping relax with their hands. After you’ve both had a turn in the water the sexual tingle will be so great that you’ll be rushing to find a big warm fluffy towel to wrap the two of you up together, quickly followed by a search for condoms.
Posted by Jonathan as Biology,
