Your Pupils Don't Lie About Your Sexuality, Says New Research [Sex]

In the past, the traditional method of studying sexual orientation via arousal has allowed for a lot of loopholes and prevented a clear conclusion from being drawn. Asking subjects point-blank about their arousal level obviously allowed for lying, and showing people sexual images and monitoring the blood flow to their genitals was flawed as well—not only can certain people suppress their genital arousal, but the lab environment may have affected their sexual inhibitions and the invasiveness has stopped certain individuals from participating at all.

Ritch Savin-Williams, developmental psychologist at Cornell University, has just conducted the first major experiment that links pupil dilation to sexuality, and says that the results show that eyes indicate a foolproof, subconscious sexual response. Savin-Willaism and his colleague selected 165 men and 160 women—gay, straight or bisexual—and showed them images of men masturbating, women masturbating, and neutral landscape scenes while monitoring their pupil dilation. They also showed videos of members of the opposite sex simultaneously and took note where the subject's focus primarily was.

Lo and behold, bisexual men and women responded to the images of both men and women, heterosexual men responded to the images of women, and heterosexual women (as has been proven in past studies) responded to images of both women and men. Savin-Williams theorizes that this is an evolved biological defense mechanism that automatically triggers to protect women from forced sex: producing lubrication due to any sexual stimulus protects her from further injury.

While the study can assess overall trends in sexuality, it probably isn't a basis for determining the sexuality of individuals.

The Eyes Have It: Pupil Dilation Indicates Sexuality [My Health News Daily]

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Research Suggests that You Are Not a Boring Adult Until You Turn 30 [Aging]

New and assuredly thorough research from Melbourne's Brotherhood of St. Laurence charity suggests that a lot of people are starting to consider those anxious moments before their 30th birthdays the threshold to adulthood, rather than those ecstatic moments before their 21st birthdays.

A survey of people born in a Melbourne suburb back in 1990 found that only 38 percent of respondents felt they had reached full, bill-paying, tire-changing, no-longer-eating-Lucky-Charms-for-dinner adulthood. 21 percent were pretty insistent that they were not adults, that is, until they looked down at their balled up fists and whispered mournfully, "Whose hands are these?" An indecisive 49 percent couldn't say for sure whether or not they considered themselves mature adults, and so promptly went back to rediscovering old Nintendo 64 games from their youth. 72 percent of the 140 people in the survey, regardless of what they thought about their entry or non-entry into adulthood, were still living at home.

All this reliable data has prompted researchers to proclaim that 30 is the new 21, that people are maturing at a slower rate either because they are living longer or just don't give a fuck about trying to be financially independent. Which brings up an important point — financial independence isn't the only yardstick of maturity, nor is a sampling of suburbanites in an industrialized "Western" country any way to determine that young adults are maturing at slower rates. A kid who grows up in the Sudan, ice-fishing around the Arctic circle or pickpocketing in the streets of London with a band of orphaned hooligans, for instance, might see some shit that would age a person pretty quickly, so this research seems like it has little credence beyond certain cultures.

When it comes to maturing 30 is the new 21 [Daily Mail]

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