(Photo by Lukasz Dunikowski/Flickr.)

Men are aroused by everything. Our libido responds to the naked human form, explicit photographs, explicit videos, audio, randy gramophone recordings, the act of waking up in the morning, silk boxers, slight breezes and two of anything round that are near each other. This includes pineapples, croquet balls and naval mines.
 
Now you can add a chromatic color to the never-ending list of things that embiggen the male libido.
 
Researchers have published a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that concludes that the color red leads men to view women as more attractive and sexually desirable. According to a Los Angeles Times blog:

“Researchers at the University of Rochester conducted five psychological experiments to assess how color can affect how men view a woman’s attractiveness. In one study, the men were shown photographs of women framed by a border of either red or white. The men tended to find the women more attractive when they appeared in the red frame. In another study, the men were shown pictures of women wearing red followed by pictures of the same women wearing another color. When wearing red, the women were more likely to score an invitation to the prom and to be treated to a more expensive date.”

This is one of those studies where you read it and go, “Hey, interesting stuff, but I think we already knew that.” True, but I do not think we know how well we already knew that. This is knowledge that was already there, but you did not know, you just suspected. It is like when you buy fries from Burger King. You know that sometimes an onion ring might fall in the fry box accidentally. This study is like peering into the fry box and seeing that the bonus onion ring is not hypothetical. The onion ring is real.

We all know the color red, as it pertains to what the researchers like to call “the mating game,” is useful. But did you realize how often the color red appears in the mating game? Off the top of my head – and please feel free to add more – I can think of red roses, red lipstick, red nail polish, red wine, red boxes of chocolates, red wrapped gifts, red bra, red panties, red teddy and to a lesser extent, steak, (the most sexual of all red meats), lobster, (the most sexual of all red crustaceans), and Red Roof Inn, (the most sexual of all freeway-adjacent hotels). You can add to this list red-light districts, red hearts on Valentine’s Day and lit cigarettes.

If you accept this research as true, it opens up a world of interpretations.

- Bull fighting is the perfect metaphor for sex.

- President Clinton was so attracted to Monica Lewinsky not even her blue dress could deter him.

- There is a reason our government is hell-bent on going to Mars. Our little blue-and-green planet is hot for some red-planet action.

(Above: Mars. What planet can say no to that? Photo by Gonzopowers/Flickr.)

Why are men attracted to the color red?

The researchers concluded, “Our findings confirm what many women have long suspected and claimed – that men act like animals in the sexual realm. As much as men might like to think that they respond to women in a thoughtful, sophisticated manner, it appears that at least to some degree, their preferences and predilections are, in a word, primitive.”

Considering how quickly male legs thump when we see two naval mines next to each other, it is hard to argue with that theory. I will add these two thoughts.

1. Many of the best parts of women – and you know what they are – tend to be red/pink. A red dress reminds men of the rest of the redness and pinkness underneath.

2. My second thought, which I will add to my Caveman Theory, is that red is the color of fire, blood and the heart. All three of these things are warm, pulsating and life-giving. They are good. On a subconscious level, when a man sees a woman in red he sees a good thing wrapped inside a good thing, like a fry lodged inside a bonus onion ring.

I used to work with this guy my age. He was cool. Everyone liked him. Whenever we talked one-on-one, he had a normal-sounding guy voice. But when a woman entered the conversation, his voice fell about nine octaves. It was like jumping from Fred Savage to Barry White. (Something only Madonna has ever literally done.)
 
It was obvious he lowered his voice to attract women. Somewhere along the line – maybe when he was 16 – he must have been in the backseat of a car with a girl, getting nowhere, when something got caught in his throat (Keystone Ice?), his voice sounded like Kathleen Turner’s for one shining moment and the panties started flying.
 
You don’t abandon a tactic that life-changing. You make it part of your everyday existence. I attended many a happy hour at which I saw him talking to women with a voice so low I swore the bar’s walls would crash in from a deluge of lonely blue whales. There was also some fear he might hit the Brown Note.

Turns out my buddy was a genius, a visionary, a true man of science. According to an article by Greg Soltis on LiveScience.com, “People with voices deemed sexy and attractive tend to have greater body symmetry upon close inspection, suggesting that what we hear in a person can greatly affect what we see in them.”

According to the article:

“The sound of a person’s voice reveals a considerable amount of biological information,” said Susan Hughes, an evolutionary psychologist from Albright College in Reading, Pa. “It can reflect the mate value of a person.”

Hughes, whose new study is detailed in the June 2008 edition of the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, cautions that an attractive voice does not necessarily indicate that this person has an attractive face. A symmetric body is genetically sound, scientists say, and in evolutionary terms, in the wild, it can be an important factor when selecting a mate.

According to Caveman Theory, which I will fully explore in another column, and have touched upon here, we select mates based upon factors that were important thousands of years ago, but are less relevant now. This ancient system of “mate value” often leads to dating insanity. Caveman attraction factors naturally include such things as bodily symmetry, which would allow a hunter to balance in a tree for hours while waiting for a delicious boar to walk by.

(Above: I could write 472 columns about this photo. It has a caveman. It has a robot. It has everything. Official Star Wars Blog/Flickr.)

Thanks to Hughes’s research, we now know why women like a man with a sexy voice. Because thousands of years ago he could be counted on to bring home the bacon. We also know why men like women with a sexy voice. Because thousands of years ago she could be counted on to balance those sticks with water jugs at both ends.

(Above: Looking sexy, ladies. peiqianlong/Flickr.)

All of which brings us – really? – to the telephone. The telephone is the most important sexual technology known to man. (I say this with full knowledge of what a 1991 Buick LeSabre can do to even the soundest woman’s judgment.) The telephone is the means by which two people learn about each other, build trust in each other and plan the dates that lead to sex. Alexander Graham Bell did far more good for couples than his arch rival Alexander Graham Vibrator.

I’ve heard it said – though I can’t seem to find the quote – that it takes a person at least seven hours to earn the average woman’s trust before she will begin — not necessarily have sex, but begin – a physical relationship. This is the Seven Hour Rule. Many of these seven hours happen over the telephone. Sometimes all seven hours happen over the phone. You know those calls – where everything the other person says is interesting and funny and you fall asleep together on the phone and you wake up and you still keep talking and you spend 15 minutes cutesy-poo arguing – a la this scene from “Friends” – over who should hang up first.
 
Now we know why the telephone brings people together. It’s not just the content of the conversation – although that is very important. You never want to hear, for instance, “I keep getting drunk and waking up in other people’s cars.” What is also important, according to Hughes’s research, is the sound of the other person’s voice and what it tells you about his or her body.
 
It’s the first time you get to see the other person naked.

Some words of wisdom are so right they stick with you forever. Fifty years from now when I am sitting in a futuristic retirement hover-home in the clouds of Upper Arizona, these words uttered by my buddy’s older brother my freshman year of college will still flash through my mind.

“Here’s all you need to know. All girls are crazy. And all guys just want to get laid.”

I call this the Lowell Hypothesis, named for its creator. My friends and I probably repeated the Lowell Hypothesis 87,000 times during our four to six years at Ohio University.

It explained everything.

When a girl acted crazy – and in a town with 20 bars within walking distance of campus it happens a lot – we knew that it was in a girl’s nature to act crazy. We had been warned. We accepted it.

When we did stupid things to try to get laid – did I mention that we had 20 bars within walking distance? – we accepted that we were slaves to our hormones. It didn’t excuse our behavior. But it helped us come to grips with things like pretending to like Dave Matthews Band.

I thought of the Lowell Hypothesis this week while reading a Washington Post feature entitled Sex and the Single Bird by French researcher Alexis Chaine. I’ll summarize the article and eventually make a point.

Every summer male songbirds called lark buntings fly north from Mexico and Texas to build nests in a national grassland outside of Denver. The males peacock out with new plumage, glossy feathers, Axe body spray – the works. It was always assumed that females chose the most aggressive birds with the most macho look – kind of like high school … and college … and that 50-year period between college and death. But Chaine’s research shows that these female songbirds actually change their preferences from year to year.

Now, if you’re one of those male lark buntings and you’re reading this in The Washington Post you’ve got to be like “What the fuck!?!” I fly all the way up to Denver – not San Diego or Chicago or some other superior locale – get myself in good shape, bust out a new wardrobe and practice my primal squawk, and for what? So that some hollow-boned avian floozy can decide that bright plumage is out and the ability to gather small twigs is in?

If I’m that male lark bunting I’m thinking, “Hey – all girl birds are crazy. And all guy birds just want to get laid.”

(Above: The female lark bunting. What dude lark bunting wouldn’t want a piece of that?)

Why do these lady birds screw with male birds?

Chaine writes:

For male lark buntings, reproductive success depends on whatever traits are in vogue among females that season. By staying flexible and seeking out partners with the physical qualities most needed at the moment, females ensure that more chicks successfully leave the nest. If the prairie is overrun by ground snakes, for example, mother birds might choose the most protective males – a quality that might be signaled by wing-patch size. If grasshoppers are scarce the next year, maybe they will look for partners with big beaks, which might make them good providers.

This makes me wonder. Nature is incredibly consistent. Most animals, for example, nurture their young without question – humans included. Is it possible that human women do the same thing as female lark buntings? Do human women choose their mates based on what types of advantages males can provide them in that season?

Ask yourself this. Have you ever known a pair of sisters or close friends who married the same type of man? I have. Ladies, have you ever noticed how you and your friends’ husbands or boyfriends are remarkably alike? I know women who have.

You probably laughed it all off as coincidence, but it’s entirely possible that, like the female lark bunting, you and your community of girlfriends/sisters have established, and continually reestablish, what traits are in vogue that season. What’s more, these traits evolve over time, so that the traits you and your girlfriends were looking for when you were 25 are different than those you seek when you’re 30. This would explain, among other things, women who try to change their men, marital affairs and the female drive to move furniture fortnightly.

Think about the female lark bunting next time you look at your man and go, “Who is this guy in my bed?” Maybe he was your 1998 male lark bunting – you were impressed by his ability to navigate the Internets and thought the fact that he owned a Saturn spoke well of his thrift. Now it’s 2008 and you have a whole new set of ground snakes and scarce grasshoppers in your life. You now run your own B2B site, but he still has an AOL e-mail account and drives the same shitty Saturn.

Perhaps it is hardwired into the female brain to change preferences based on present, ever-evolving personal situations. Maybe it is one of the ways – like the lark bunting – that we have ensured the survival of our species.

That doesn’t mean that people can’t have good relationships or that we are simply slaves to our hormones. It means that, when you pick a mate, you’re probably best off looking for someone who can fend off the ground snakes of today and hunt the grasshoppers of tomorrow.

What you want is depth. And if it helps at all, depth never smells like Axe body spray.

Every week I bookmark dozens of articles that I consider column-worthy. From those bookmarks I narrow my choices down to one topic. You have seen the end results in columns such as The War on Drugs is Being Fought in Your Toilet, Deloitte & Touche & Women, and Robots Cannot Love.

Obviously, I can’t use every article. And obviously I don’t want to waste the time I spend researching either. So this week I thought I’d share ten of the hundreds of stories that I have bookmarked since July that will never be featured as columns.

We’ll call it the First Ever Joe Donatelli Aborted Column Spectacular.

No, wait, the word aborted is kind of grim. It makes me think of military air strikes that were called off at the last moment. And that’s just sad. Poor little air strikes never had a chance.

We’ll call it the First Ever Joe Donatelli Cavalcade of Dead Baby Columns.

In an article entitled Binge Drinkers Prefer Beer, Bloomberg News reports that three quarters of binge drinkers prefer beer over other types of alcohol. I thought this made sense. It’s hard to binge on vodka. You’ll – what’s the word? – die.

Another beer-related story that I found on FOXnews.com brought my long-awaited dream of a merger between Keystone Ice and Gold’s Gym one step closer to reality. Spanish researchers have found that Beer After Exercise May Be Better Than Water. Don’t laugh at this. Spanish-funded research is the reason America was discovered. When the Spanish research something, you can bet that it will eventually establish a constitutional rule of law based on individual rights, carry the world economically and produce the only movies worth watching. Jogging and drinking will put a man on Mars by 2050. Trust me.

Sometimes I see articles that work well in combination together. Here are two fun ones. A story on the Voice of America web site says that Older Americans Are Staying Sexually Active. The story claims that 26 percent of people between the ages of 75 and 85 are having sex. Then I found a USA Today blog that says A Seventh of Elderly Americans Suffer From Dementia. Now I have to wonder, what percentage of that 26 percent that is claiming to have sex is also suffering from dementia? It’s not sex if you’re walking around the Benetton with no pants on, grandpa. It may be a fucking good time. It may be something we should all do at least once in our lives. But it’s not sex.

Here’s a story that comes out at least once every six months. In an article entitled Film Smoking Sways Teens, Study Shows, The Hollywood Reporter reports on a new study that claims to link smoking on film and teenage tobacco use. No way. If this was true, film would influence other social behaviors as well. As a child I watched American Ninja at least a dozen times, and at no point did I ever wait silently in a ceiling rafter only to descend upon my enemy, slit his throat, throw a smoke bomb and disappear into a cool mountain mist in further search of the man who murdered my sensei. Did I want to? Yes. Did I act on this impulse? No.

(Above: Private Joe Armstrong kicked ass so I didn’t have to.)

Sometimes I grab a story just for the headline. I can’t resist any article with a title like Pac-Man Finds Next Level Of Fear Research. The Nobel Prize for Totally Fucked Up Research goes to the Wellcome Trust centre for neuroimaging at the University College London, which modified a version of Pac-Man to deliver electric shocks to people to see how they react to danger.

Two questions:

1. Do you think the Wellcome Trust centre is located in London’s historic Thannk Yoou District?

2. Why Pac-Man?

Pac-Man is one of the only nonviolent video games that people love. If the Wellcome Trust centre wanted to instill fear in people – and I think it’s hilarious that anything called the Wellcome Trust centre wants to instill fear in people – it should have forced players to spend more than five minutes playing E.T. on the Atari 2600. I would claw a man’s skin inside out and build a ladder with his blood-wet bones to get the hell away from playing E.T. on the Atari 2600. If you played this game, you know exactly what I am talking about.

Here are two more stories that belong together. In a story called A First For The FCC: Fining Fake News, prwatch.org reports that the Federal Communications Commission is fining broadcasters that air video news releases without disclosing that they’re not actually news. Meanwhile FEMA held a ‘News Conference’ during the recent wildfires in California in which FEMA staffers posed as real reporters. So … will the FCC be fining FEMA? Also, can someone please tend to the lump of grey matter that now rests in front of my laptop? I was just thinking about how these are the same people who are responsible for the fact that I have to pay $12 a month to hear Howard Stern and my head exploded. Please put whatever is left of my brain back on top of my neck. Thank you.

I love this story – Pentagon Confirms It Sought to Build a Gay Bomb. It’s true. It was tested once, on Feb. 5, 2006 in Pittsburgh, Pa., on the day the Steelers won Super Bowl XL. It was a complete success.

And finally, according Great Britain’s Telegraph, Italy’s Biggest Business Is The Mafia. Some countries should just be forced to start over. Here are five signs your country has failed completely and needs to file for the U.N. equivalent of Chapter 11:

1. You were on the losing side of more than three wars in the last 100 years.
2. You have failed to mass-produce a decent automobile.
3. You can’t break double digit medals at the Summer Olympics.
4. There are more people of your nation’s descent in New York City than in your capital.
5. The Bill Gates of your country started his career by leaning against a street corner lamppost flipping a coin.

That last one could go on for a whole column. Let’s have some fun with this. Send me your qualifications for when a country should be forced to start over. If I use them, I will give you credit in the column. Best entry wins a special prize to be determined. If we can come up with about 20 I’ll write a whole column about it.

If you don’t, you will have killed a dead baby.

To read Joe’s previous column The Best Holiday click here.

It says so right here. Thanks to Mr. Thomas for sending in the article, which details how humans and robots will begin having sex within five years and marrying within 50 years.

So many questions:

Is it cheating if it’s with a robot? How is that different than a woman’s “marital aid?”

Can two robots marry legally?

Can a man marry a male robot that looks exactly like him? Is that gay?

What will become of prostitutes?

Will the Roomba get jealous?

Who will build the first rape-able Hitler robot?

My head is going to explode.