JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Is your sex life nonexistent? Maybe you’re wearing polyester pants. Dr. Ahmed Shafik of Egypt conducted an experiment on the effects of polyester on sexual activity. He took 75 laboratory rats and made them wear pants for a year. Some wore slacks in natural fibers such as cotton or wool; the rest wore synthetic materials like polyester or poly-cotton blends. The result: the rats in polyester or poly-cotton blends had significantly less sex than the rats wearing cotton or wool pants. Dr. Shafik believes that this is because polyester sets up electrostatic fields in and around the genitals. I suspect the lab rats didn’t want to risk setting themselves on fire. Also, how often did they change? Maybe rats don’t want to bonk rats whose slacks are so last season. Or the rats in polyester also happened to be the most boring, least attractive, and never picked up the check.

What I really want to know is, were the rats’ pants drawstring or zippered? Button-fly or velcro like stripper pants? Because if Dr. Shafik trained 75 rats to put pants on and take them off, there could be a Nobel Prize there. Incidentally, Dr. Shafik was nominated for a Nobel Prize. His studies are self-funded, so no one can complain about how science grants are handed out.

Here’s an excerpt from Mary Roach’s new book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. Her previous books include Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers, and Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. While researching Bonk, she convinced her husband to have sex inside an MRI machine. That’s commitment.