Virgin Rats Prefer Sexy Lingerie

pdogg · December 16, 2014

Victoria’s Secret may have a new market.

Virgin male rats were allowed to have sex with female rats wearing special rodent “lingerie” for a study. When given a chance to do the deed again, they preferred the females clad in the bra-like jackets, according to Live Science.

The rodent Romeos learn that “each time my partner wears lingerie (a jacket), I’m going to have sex,” said study co-author Gonzalo R. Quintana Zunino at Concordia University in Montreal.

According to the findings, male animals can learn to link clothing with sex. In previous studies, the researchers trained rats to associate an odor with having sex — and the males preferred a romp with females with that scent.

In the new study, 12 male rats mated with females wearing the foxy jackets. The males were then put in a chamber with two females — one wearing a jacket and one “au naturel.”

The males made more attempts to mount the females and even, ahem, finished more quickly with the females wearing the jackets.

In a bid to discover how rats’ brains were affected, researchers sacrificed the rodents and injected a dye into their brains to determine the activity of the c-fos gene in the pleasure centers of their brains.

Males that mated with the clothed females showed more c-fos activity than did males that mated with unclothed females, according to preliminary results.

The study was presented last month at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in Washington.

Filed under Rodents, Science