A Triumph Of Neuroscience

I’m not a big fan of doctors, generally speaking. I went through a series of “issues” a few years back which sort of filled my quota of seeing doctors, and I do so now pretty much only when my wife browbeats me into it. The exception is the neurologist I see every six months. He’s apparently known nationally as one of the best for treating movement disorders, but you’d never know it. His office is small and sort of dumpy, and the people in his waiting room are mostly working class like me. He’s a nice guy, and visits to him are by no means a tribulation.

He also doesn’t tell me something is “idiopathic.” He says, “I have no idea what is causing that.”

What made me write that is an article in the Los Angeles Times which refers to a “study published Tuesday in the Journal of Neuroscience” which supposedly offers a possible explanation why David Petraeus could not keep his pants zipped.

Apparently there is a human pheromone called “oxytocin” which, when smelled by a “monogamous male” (which I assume to mean a married man) causes him, later on, to avoid hot women, standing 6-1/2” further away from them than an unmarried man would do who had also smelled the same stuff. So, it appears, if a man stands 12” away from a hot chick he is going to succumb to her charms, while if he stands 18-1/2” away from her he will not even notice her. Is it a cooincidence that the difference is the average length of a man's...? I don’t make this shit up, I’m merely reporting.

The article goes on to say that the source of this substance which will assure his fidelity is, of course, his wife. We all saw that coming. Equally obvious is that he has to be pretty close to his wife in order to smell it, and we all know what is going to be next. It turns out that oxytocin “floods the body in response to orgasm,” and there you have it.

In order to bring it on home, though, the article goes on to explain that for married women, “It might make a lot of sense to remind him of the relationship, and sexual activity might be one means of achieving this.”

Or, in male terms, if David Petraeus had been getting more sex at home, he might not have been getting sex on the road. Like we needed neuroscience to provide that tired, old, lame excuse.