Why showing off muscles may not help attract women

Why? Well, it appears most people like some things left to the imagination.

A study was published on Tuesday by England’s University of Kent that examined the pupils of their participants, so as to track an involuntary reaction, and found no difference in the reactions of heterosexual men who saw images of both clothed and naked chicks.

Also, in case you’re wondering, the research made a similar find when it comes to heterosexual women’s attraction to men, which they claim was unaltered by the display of muscles. However if you like dressing skimpy, be you female or male, don’t let us change your style just yet. (There's more on that at the end, I promise).

Researchers found that the reactions did change depending on whether participants saw pictures of men and women, but the amount of clothing did nothing to alter their responses. Furthermore, least arousing of all to the participants of both sexes were pictures where nudity was blurred out. Though one interesting find was that when naked pictures were on display, both men and women spent more time looking at the person's private parts. Guess we’re not too shocked by that.

Researcher Janice Attard-Johnson summed up the results of the study: “We found that changes in pupil size when viewing images of men and women corresponded with participants' self-reported sexual orientation,” she said. “This meant that in heterosexual men and women, dilation occurred during the viewing of opposite-sex people, but that these responses were comparable when participants viewed both naked and dressed targets.”

Now, as you’ve probably been thinking as you read this (I know I was), there are other ways of testing whether someone’s aroused or not. And the study’s summary does address that by acknowledging that past studies found naked pictures get stronger physiological responses, at least when it comes to your genitals.

A past experiment by the University of Leeds, also a prestigious UK school, found women revealing nearly 40 percent of their skin got twice as many men to walk up to them at nightclubs than women who were more covered up. Sounds like that’s info you can use whether you’re looking to be approached or not, ladies.

But since pupillary responses didn’t react similarly to, say, how your penis would, researchers believe it’s possible that changes in the size of your pupils occur “with lower levels of sexual arousal than is necessary for other physiological measures” (i.e. you need to be aroused more to achieve an erection than you do to have your pupil size changed).