Between Action and Porn, Lab Mice Make a Surprising Choice
Good to know.
What’s better? Scintillating action or titillating pornography?
Both get our blood pumping and adrenaline coursing, but it’s a pretty tough call. So, scientists decided to let their go-to test subjects—lab mice—decide on this one for us.
Researchers at Keio University in Japan used a soundless iPod to show mice three separate videos: one of mice sniffing each other (soft-core), another of two mice fighting (action), and a third of two mice getting busy (XXX). They tallied how much time the mice spent looking at each video to answer this age-old mystery.
The verdict: the mice preferred action to porn.
Given the choice between watching the fighting video or watching the mouse-sex footage, the mice spent 40 percent of their time watching the fighting video and only 35 percent watching the porn.
The sniffing films didn’t fare too well. When given the choice between sniff and smut, the mice spent 41 percent of the time watching the sex videos and only 34 percent watching the videos of mice sniffing each other.
So, if you haven’t watched videos of mice sniffing each other, you’re not missing out on much.
In all, there’s a desire for porn, but action and violence still outperforms. This shows that mice are perhaps as inherently excited by violence as humans often are.
There is one variable that may have swayed the study—none of these 40 male mice had ever had sex before. Maybe they just don’t know what they’re missing.
