Sis-con shirts

In celebration of Ender’s remarks on the evolution of anime bloggers’ writing styles, particularly the part about “there are some things that are reliable standbys, like … Stripey’s penchant for…. sis-con?” , I’ve attached an article from the Economist which gives a scientific basis for Nemu’s penchant for using her Nii-san’s old shirts as pajamas. Junichi acquiesces to Nemu’s continuation of this practice and asks, “You wash the shirts [before using them as pajamas], right?” “Yeah… but they still smell like you, Nii-san,” comes the embarrassed reply. No need to thank me, Stripey ole pal. :)

Archived copy of above-mentioned Hontou ni taihen desu entries.

Friday, November 28, 2003. Da Capo ep 10-14: Nemu is sooooooooo sweeeet!. She buys new shirts for her Onii-san when they are worn out and she wears those worn out shirts as her pyjamas (Ep 14). She’s got some pretty coy reasons doing so too….. something about worn out shirts being comfy and the shirts having the scent of her Onii-san…….aarrrgggghhhh so…so… incestuous? You know if you got the hots for him, you should stop calling him Onii-san and draw the line somewhere. You are giving a whole generation of young Japanese boys (mostly anyway) funny ideas about their cute sisters. *Shudder* Bro/Sis-con aside, Nemu’s fragrance of girlish charm permeates the series, brought out by her jealous moments, thoughtful moments, sensitive moments etc etc. All those “let’s pretend to be lovers, Yoriko-san no tameni” in ep 11 also kept me riveted. I was ready to smash my LCD screen (with a head butt) if our Onii-san had kissed his ‘imouto’. Well, turns out, it was not meant to be but I reckon the day is not far off. I need to start watching Da Capo on someone else’s computer. posted by Stripey at 12:59 AM

Monday, December 01, 2003. Da Capo Ep 15-20: My head is a bloody mess and my LCD screen is wrecked too… They went beyond the kiss… Although they didn’t play out the scenes after Nemu hugged her Onii-san and said “I want to be loved as a woman” But I can imagine them all… (All the cleaning/laundry/cooking scenes that follows immediately after… ahhhh, how a man shows love.) [snip] Takayuki can learn a thing or two from Jyunichi (Mr Onii-san himself). Both Sakura and Nemu are so totally devoted to their Onii-san and their fierce determination to have him really shows. I really like the jealous/cat-fighting Nemu and Sakura. It only go to show that they are only human, making it so much easier to empathise with them.

However, this time round, Jyunichi and Nemu feels more wrong than Karen/Miina/Maiku (Onegai Twins). Yeah you may not be related by blood like Maiku-tachi but Nemu is still effectively your sister in every other sense of the word. I can’t imagine what Dad is going to say….. posted by Stripey at 1:27 PM

Archive copy of the above-mentioned article:

The Economist 2005-07-09 | Science and technology > Human behaviour
The smell of power: Odour and mating preferences

What’s a girl to do when faced with the choice between a powerful action man who has great DNA but is likely to love her and leave her, and a carpet-and-slippers kind of bloke who will hang around and bring up the kids but may not be Mr Right in the genes department? Well, ideally, she should fool the latter into bringing up the former’s children. And a piece of evidence that this is exactly what happens emerged this week from a research group led by Jan Havlicek of Charles University, Prague.

Dr Havlicek and his colleagues were interested in discovering whether women are attracted by the smell of dominant men. A preference for the scent of dominants has been found in the females of other species, and scent is known to be important in attraction between the human sexes in other contexts, such as avoiding inbreeding. The attractiveness of body odour is also correlated with the attractiveness of the body it came from, even when presented separately from that body. But whether the odour of power—or, at least, of powerfulness—is attractive to women had not been established.

Deciding who is and is not a dominant male is the first question, of course. To do this, the researchers turned to one of the world’s most widely used experimental animals, the hard-up male student. Their subjects were asked to rate such things as their tendency to correct others, to want to control conversations, and to surpass others’ accomplishments, in a questionnaire designed to assess their dominance. In their paper in Biology Letters the researchers laconically observe that dominance in this questionnaire “corresponds to the scale ‘Narcissism’ in the widely used California psychological inventory”.

After baring their all in this manner, the volunteers had to wear cotton pads under their armpits for 24 hours to collect the sweat therefrom, and also had to lay off curries, beer, cigarettes and similar delights of student life that might affect the smell of their sweat. Surprisingly, given these constraints, the researchers managed to persuade 48 men to volunteer.

Compared with this, the female volunteers had it easy. They had to smell the pads and rate them for “intensity”, “sexiness” and “masculinity”. Okay, perhaps not that easy. They also had to vouchsafe whether they were single or in an on-going relationship with a man, and to submit to a saliva test that would show the phase of their menstrual cycle.

The upshot of the trial was that women did, indeed, find the odour of dominants sexier than that of wimps—but only in special circumstances. These circumstances were first that the woman was already in a relationship and second that she was in the most fertile phase of her cycle. In other words, dominant males’ scent was only more attractive at the point where a woman could both conceive and cuckold her mate. Which, given previous studies that show dominant men are indeed more likely than others to leave a woman holding the baby, makes perfect sense.

[Link to the academic paper.]

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