Insensitive men? Squirt them

What if you could go straight through a battlefield to detonate a “love” bomb? It would be a “soft” bomb much like traipsing dandelions in the air to be inhaled by each and every soldier at war. It would contain the chemicals that would turn those angry and murderous spirits at war transforming men into emotionally sensitive creatures. I can imagine a lot of men reading this saying “what the...?@^&*, love bombs and dandelions in a battlefield?”

Well, this week I learned that scientists have been working on a concoction along those lines. While it is still far from the scale that we can equate with a “love bomb,” the scientists responsible thought we could start small — with a few men and not a bomb, but just a squirt from a nasal spray. Yes ladies, you can now squirt the insensitive man in your life and turn him into someone like, well, you.

Gentlemen, if you are alarmed or thankful about this news over this nasal spray that could turn you into well, an emotional jello relative to your “normal” selves, the scientists to thank or to blame are in the University of Bonn led by Dr. René Hurlemann. They published their study in the April 7, 2010 issue of the journal Neuroscience. Their study was entitled “Oxytocin Enhances Amygdala-Dependent, Socially Reinforced Learning and Emotional Empathy in Humans” and whether it reads like it to you or not gentlemen, this study concerns you and your touchy-feely possibilities.

For quite some time now, scientists have known that there is a chemical that both men and women naturally produce that enables us to bond with each other. Scientists have found it and called it oxytocin (let’s just nickname it “O”). It has been dubbed the “love molecule,” the “trust hormone” and now, with this experiment, it gained another nickname — the “cuddle spray.” Females get more O-surges since O is also the hormone that enables women to produce milk, and also the one that induces labor pains, dilating the cervix when giving birth. It is also responsible for the bonds between moms and their newborn. In rats and sheep, experiments have shown that when oxytocin is blocked, female mothers reject their offspring. When injected in virgin rats, they care for pups that are not their own. It seems to be the molecular key to mothering. Oxytocin is also present in both males and females in larger streams during the peak of lovemaking like some kind of emotional crazy glue.

There were 48 healthy men who participated in the experiment that would reveal the effect of the O-squirt (oxytocin squirt) on their expressed empathy. It was a double blind study which meant that neither the subjects nor the experimenters knew which half were given the O-squirt or the placebo. The subjects were showed images in the form of a crying child, a girl hugging her cat, and a grieving man. Then the subjects were asked to express how much they felt for the persons in the situations shown. The result was clear: the O effect was significant in that the men who got the O-squirt expressed more empathy than the ones who did not get squirted.

In a second experiment, men were tested in their learning where the feedback to the subjects’ answers was in the form of a facial expression. The men who got the O-squirt performed better making the scientists suspect that oxytocin really makes men more sensitive to emotional clues which are basically written in faces.

But ladies, before you troop to drugstores to get a lifetime-supply, you have to know that this is still in the experimental stage. This means that it would have to be verified a few more times and tested for safety before it could be out to serve the demands of your relationships that involve a human male. Besides, it has also been reported that the effect of the squirt only lasts for two hours. You need to corner your man again for the subsequent squirts and I think by that time, he would be seriously wondering why he has been taking a consistent fancy on chick-flick movies.

Patience, ladies. Besides, we have already waited 200,000 years since the first male Homo sapiens came home to the cave talking about his hunting exploits and never noticing how much his female partner have worked to keep the kids and cave-hold in tip-top shape as well as organize a cave-dwellers’ organization while he was on his adventure. We women shall wait in earnest for the right formula to make for a consistently sensitive man. Two hundred millennia is too long a wait for a mere squirt.

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