5 Physical Details That Reveal Highly Personal Information
As we mentioned here, with just a pair of eyeballs, a ruler and a negligent sense of propriety or fear, you can learn a whole mess of intimate details about any person at any given time. But why stop there? Here are five more shockingly personal things you can guess about anyone just by looking at them.
None of these are 100 percent, and you should not use any of them to make unfair assumptions about people. It is only in the name of entertainment that we point out that researchers have found ...
You Can Tell How Honest Someone Is by Their Cheekbones (Sometimes)
Let's say you've never seen Star Wars. If you saw a picture of this guy, without knowing any of the context, would you say he's a good guy, or a bad guy?
Clearly he has villain written all over his face. But why?
Likewise, in real life sometimes you meet people that you immediately distrust -- something about their faces just makes them look like shady characters. Maybe it's the way he's standing in a dark alley, bedecked in a trench coat with the collar pulled up while pointing a gun at your skull. Or it could just be something about his face you don't like.
It turns out scientists have figured out what that "something" is.
It's Carrot Top, isn't it? It's Carrot Top.
How? Tell Me!
The cheekbones. While male models with chiseled faces might be effective in selling you underwear, in real life guys with wide cheekbones strike people as untrustworthy. And apparently there's a reason: Research shows that on average they're actually less honest. According to experiments, anyway.
Scientists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland did a study and found that men with wider cheekbones not only cheated more at the game they were assigned to play, but also that when they screwed their fellow players over, those players were more likely to expect it. All they needed was a look at their faces.
"I'm almost certain a pair of twos and a seven doesn't beat a straight flush."
The researchers think it may be because wider cheekbones don't form until puberty and are an indication of how big a man is going to get. Larger men tend to be more aggressive and are less likely to feel like they have to obey society's rules -- it's easier to screw somebody over when you know you can kick his ass if he complains. Even in jobs where aggressiveness is rewarded, like professional sports, researchers found that, "broad-faced ... players spend more time in the penalty box."
Those researchers did not point out that Darth Vader was designed to have exaggerated cheekbones, but seriously, check it out:
And are we crazy, or did they also add them to the Jigsaw puppet from Saw as well:
And is it any wonder Christopher Lee made his career playing villains?
His next role? Governor of Texas.
Please keep in mind, the statistical difference is slight, and this is useful only for understanding why we feel weird about people with that face shape. Please don't immediately stab the next dude you see with wide cheekbones, or assume he's always lying. That probably makes you the bad guy.
Besides, at 7' 1" and 420 lbs., you'll just piss him off.
Want to Know How Much Sex a Guy Is Having? Look at His Baby Pictures
If '80s teen sex romp comedies have taught us anything, it's that losing your virginity is just about as important as whether or not you're alive at all. Statistically speaking, there's actually a pretty solid way to know if a guy is going to be a junior man slut or the 40-year-old virgin.
How? Tell Me!
By finding out how fat he was as a baby.
"In 10 years, I'll be ankle deep in bitches."
Scientists at Northwestern University in Illinois studied 770 men from birth until they were 22 years old. From that, they found that infants who gained weight the fastest had sex earlier, got laid more often and reported higher numbers of sex partners. Also, they were more athletic later in life.
20,000 women ... most dominant basketball player of all time ... huge fatass.
The reason, according to the researchers, might have to do with something called the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis, a triumvirate of glands that control a buttload of stuff, including sex hormone production. The same surge in weight gain that makes fatter babies between birth and 6 months of age also predicted a similar surge in sexual hormones years later, one that hits before their skinny baby buddies get theirs.
"Best back up because I'm about to drop a fuck on someone."
By hitting sexual maturity earlier, they get a big fat head start on the sex game, and if the numbers are any indication of anything, they're taking advantage of that early bird special.
If He Has a Bigger Penis, He Is More Likely to Be Gay
We have previously mentioned that finger length ratio and the direction of a person's hair swirl were good indicators of whether someone was more likely to be gay. The problem with those measurements is that they're pretty hard to get without posing as a manicurist-slash-barber. Plus, if you're getting that intimate with another man's fingers and scalp, you're probably already pretty certain of which way the pendulum swings.
"Titties might not be my thing."
The good news is that we've got another measurement that's a little easier to spot from distance, and is, statistically speaking, a decent indication of sexuality. The bad news is that, well, you'll see.
How? Tell Me!
It's dick size. Gay men usually have bigger dicks. So, this is probably one you'll have to try in the locker room.
"You know, it never occurred to me until I was staring at your bare penis, but ..."
This was a massive study, by the way. Between 1938 and 1963, the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction conducted the study on 5,122 men. First, the guys were put into two groups, straight and gay. Then the men measured their junk in five different ways. On all five counts, gay men reported larger penises than heterosexual men.
That's right, guys. Length, circumference, the whole sha-wang. When erect, a gay man's penis is an average of 1/3 of an inch longer than a straight guy's. It's also chubbier. Perhaps even more interestingly, massive gay junk seems to be skewing the overall average penis length up to 6 inches, while the average straight man's is actually just a fraction shorter than that.
And let's not even get on the subject of balls.
The only thing is, no one was actually taking a tape measure to the test subjects' boners (they were measuring themselves), so we don't know if the numbers were 100 percent accurate. But current researchers say that there is no reason to believe gay guys would exaggerate their numbers more than straight guys. So while the numbers might be inflated overall, the discrepancy is almost certainly still legitimate.
You Can Find Out What Sports You'll Be Good at With a Few Body Measurements
Obviously, you can look at a big fat guy and tell that he's going to have a biological advantage at sumo wrestling, or at a dangerously underweight preteen girl and know that you probably shouldn't challenge her to a friendly round of uneven bars. But it's not so easy when it comes to regular sports, like swimming or running or lacrossing. Except, that is, if you know what to look for.
Their giant, hat-looking hair?
How? Tell Me!
The position of your belly button can help determine whether you will be better at running or swimming. No word on how it affects lacrossing, but we're pretty sure lacrosse was invented for Tommy Hilfiger ads in the '90s, so the point is moot now.
"Oh yeah, man. I lacrosse like a motherfucker."
The first thing most of us notice about a navel is whether it's normal (an innie) or tragically deformed (an outie). Beyond that, who cares? What are we, I Dream of Jeannie censors? It turns out the direction of the belly button matters a whole lot less than its location on the belly. Because that dirty, bacteria-generating chasm we call the navel is actually the body's center of gravity.
"Does 'beer' count as a sport?"
This is important, because a higher center of gravity gives you a competitive edge in running, while a lower one helps when it comes to swimming. According to one researcher, "Locomotion is essentially a continual process of falling forward, and mass that falls from a higher altitude, falls faster." So when we see West African runners mop up the international track floor, it's not a sketchy, racially charged theory that's helping them succeed. What we're seeing is a hidden height advantage provided by belly buttons that are 1.18 inches higher than those of their white competitors.
And when we notice that there aren't as many elite black swimmers, it's because that lower center of gravity gives whites longer torsos, which means they can generate a larger wave, which makes them faster in the water. As for Asians, they have the same belly button proportions as whites, but they're also shorter, so they enter the pool with a distinct height disadvantage.
Plus, those hats have wicked drag.
You Can Find Out How Virile a Man Is by Measuring His, Uh ...
If you could know ahead of time whether or not your potential husband was a one-man stud farm or loaded up with a bunch of jizz duds, would you want to know? What if we told you the way to find out involved measuring a little patch of male anatomy best left to the crotch of his drawers?
Think about this, ladies. The man who will father your future children could be sitting beside you right now. All you have to do is strip him naked, squat down, lift up his scrotum and ask him to spread his legs. Wait, maybe it would just be easier if he does a naked handstand and you grab his ankles and -- wait, maybe we should explain what we're talking about.
"It's not working. Lay down and spread 'em!"
How? Tell Me!
Measure his taint. The shorter the junk, the weaker the spunk. If the perineum is longer, his sperm is stronger. You should get that sewn onto a pillow.
We know this because researchers have gotten down on their knees and run their tape measures where the sun don't shine. Real researchers, men and women with years of education under their belts, had to make their way to the dark side of the ball sack, lift the junk out of the way, place a tape measure at the dude's asshole and start counting. Twice. Once from the underside of the scrotum to the anus, and once from the top of the penis stem to the anus.
"And I'd do it again, too."
So what is a normal taint length? About 2.04 inches, or a lady-thumb long. Any measurement below this and your splooge might end up "in the subfertile range." Or, in medical terms, men who have a shorter taint have "lower sperm counts, poorer quality sperm, lower sperm concentrations and lower motility." The reason for the connection might have to do with prenatal exposure to a class of chemicals called phthalates, which have been shown to affect testosterone exposure. So the guys with shorter grundles got a whiff of some bad stuff in utero, and their man parts will pay for it for the rest of their lives.
And they are extremely common.
All in all, this could actually end up being good news. We guess it just depends on how your weekend is shaping up, really.
Read more of Yosomono at his headquarters at the GaijinAss Web page or follow him on Twitter @GaijinAss.
And see what science has to say about you in 5 Scientific Reasons You're a Bad Employee and 7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable.
And stop by LinkSTORM to for penis-measuring tools.
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