It is known as the happiness chemical, but could serotonin also influence sexual preference? It certainly seems to in mice.
Serotonin is normally associated with mood – particularly feelings of well-being. But when Yi Rao of Peking University in Beijing, China, and his colleagues genetically engineered female mice so that they could no longer make or respond to serotonin, it appeared to affect their sexuality.
Although they would still mate with males if no other females were present, given the choice, the rodents preferred sniffing and mounting females.
This is the first time that sexual preference has been reversed in female mammals without the use of sex hormones. Serotonin can modulate olfaction, but the team ruled this out. Instead, it seems the chemical has a more central role in controlling sexual preference.
I’m wondering if its effecting sexual preferences, or just getting rid of sexual inhibitions. I’ll also note I see a LOT of homosexual mouse behavior, both in males and females in my line of work. Could all be a dominance issue, which is hardly analogous to the human behavior.
This would have been much more interesting if they had Floxed the gene and knocked it out with a promoter, so that they could observe the INDIVIDUAL mouse then induce the knockout with a promoter and see what changes happen in each animal.
h/t Mrs. Weer’d
I wonder how this relates to other things I’ve noticed. I’ve met a surprisingly(for me) large number of lesbians, and nearly EVERY European girl I’ve met who I have information for has been bisexual. I also wonder whether serotonin deficiency effects men the same way.(Studies have found that homosexual and bisexual individuals tend more to depression, even in places where it’s normalized or encouraged.)
Other interesting trivia on human sexuality: studies have found that individuals who are attracted to women, regardless of whether the individual is male or female, are more visually stimulated than individuals who are attracted to men.(this is why most porn has women in it.) Also, artistically speaking, the “ideal” face isn’t neutral. If you put it on a scale from 0(fully masculine) to 100(fully feminine), it actually lands around the 60-70 mark, meaning that both men and women agree, women are more visually appealing.
Paradoxically, however, unless the number of lesbians women vastly outnumbers the quantity of gay men, and assuming the worldwide population ratio of women to men is roughly 50/50, more people are sexually attracted to men than to women. Given a 20% rate of non-heterosexuality, I estimate 50% of individuals are attracted to women (about 80% of the male population, 20% of the female population), while 60% are attracted to men(20% of the male population, 99% of the female population)*
The fact that women actually outnumber men skews this even further.
So while women are better looking than men, men are, apparently, sexier than women.(or based on the two lesbians I know whose ex-girlfriends turned them straight, men make better emotional partners than women. Quoth one, “I decided I have enough trouble dealing with my own crazy without getting ANOTHER girl involved.”)
*Based on personal experience, though I have met several gay men, I have never met any bisexual ones, while all but 1 of the lesbians I’ve met have actually been bisexual. And I was mostly just too polite to ask the 1. I actually use “lesbian” and “bisexual woman” interchangeably because of this.