Antibiotic 'Protects' Men From Sneaky Hot Women. Thanks, Scientists!

By Callie Beusman | May 2, 2013 | 5:25pm

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If you’re a rational human man with $13 or more to your name, you probably lie awake at night wondering how to keep tricksy, false harlots from getting their hands on your money. Case in point: you know who had boobs? According to at least one painting, the snake in the Garden of Eden probably might have. Well, men of the world, you can sleep easy now, because scientists have found that there’s an acne medication with a totally awesome and useful side effect: it prevents you from trusting “attractive” women more than “unattractive” women.

Here is an actual quote from the study, published on Scientific Reports, which is a platform owned by the prestigious multidisciplinary scientific publishing company, Nature Publishing Group:

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Males tend to cooperate with physically attractive females without careful evaluation of their trustworthiness, resulting in betrayal by the female.

I would say that it’s lazy of a team of professionals — whose entire profession is based in the proper use of empirical evidence — to treat an unqualified, baseless gender stereotype as fact, but the word “lazy” fails to encompass how regressive and offensive this sentence is. While I understand that this is the basic mechanism behind the “honey trap risk,” that doesn’t change the fact that it implies that women are manipulative and inherently untrustworthy.

Working from the assumption that men “tend to be” horny fools and women “tend to be” conniving, the team set up a situation to see if minocycline, an acne medication, could cause men to make less “risky” choices (the “risky” choice in question is trusting a woman with your money). Out of a group of nearly 100 men, half were given the medication for four days, while the remaining men were given a placebo. They were then asked to play a computerized one-on-one trust game with eight different women, based only on pictures of the female players. According to Discover,

In each round, the male player was given $13 and shown a picture of one of the female players. The male player would choose how much money he wanted to keep and how much he wanted to give to the female player. The amount given away was then tripled, and the female player would decide whether to split the money with the man or keep it all for herself.

Unbeknownst to the men, the women were instructed to keep the money every time. As if they had to be told that! Ha, ha, ha! (In actuality, of the 61 young women recruited for the experiment, and only 11 said that they would take the entire sum instead of splitting it.)

The researchers found that the men who had taken the placebo were more trusting of attractive women than of unattractive women: those placebo’ed dupes gave about 65 percent of their money to women they rated attractive, but only around 50 percent to those they deemed unattractive. The men on minocycline, on the other hand, gave the same amount — about 50 percent — to both women that they found sexually appealing and women they did not. Cured!

The team of scientists behind this experiment have concluded that minocycline is capable of clearing the brain of distractions, such as women to whom a man may be attracted, to improve focus and help foster rational financial decisions. Because a conventionally attractive woman’s primary financial role is that of a sneaky ornament.

According to Web MD, on top of enabling men to think clearly for once, minocycline also causes teeth discoloration. So, if your newfound imperviousness to womanly wiles doesn’t keep the evil seductresses away, that can always be your Plan B.

[Discover / Scientific Reports]

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