Science Verifies George Constanza’s Kink

We learned a lot about George Costanza’s sex life over the course of Seinfeld’s nine seasons: He hates opening condom wrappers, inexplicably turns into a genius during periods of abstinence and will become immediately aroused at the site of an old copy of Glamour magazine. 

But there’s one episode that really dove into the recesses of George’s sexual proclivities. And, though the show presented them as odd and unnatural, like with his bathroom theories, the scientific community has made a lot of people rethink one of George’s kinks.

Season Nine’s “The Blood” finds George attempting to combine food and sex, after his girlfriend’s vanilla-scented candle makes him ravenous for diner food. She’s okay with George Introducing some strawberries and chocolate sauce, but is clearly less thrilled with his decision to bring pastrami sandwiches into bed with them, despite his claim that there was a pastrami-based sex scene in 9½ Weeks.

For some reason, this woman still stays with the guy boasting about the erotic possibilities of salted deli meats, but she finally ends things with George when he tries to throw TV into the mix.

George tells Jerry that food and sex are his “two passions” so “it’s only natural to combine them.” Jerry is very dismissive of his friend’s desires. “Natural? Sex is between a man and a woman, not a man and a sandwich,” Jerry argues. 

But in addition to being extremely heteronormative, Jerry is flat-out wrong — from a scientific standpoint, at least. 

On social media, the UberFacts account recently posted that “food and sex activate the same parts of the brain.” As one article from Spoon University points out, food and sex are “physically connected in the limbic system of the brain, which controls emotional activity generally.” They also “walk a similar emotional line and bring out similar types of reactions.”

As an expert from the Department of Psychiatry at Oxford University once explained, it’s no accident that “food and sex are our primary sources of pleasure” because both are “critical for our survival, so having dedicated pleasure networks in the brain that tend to make us seek them out makes absolute sense.” 

And a number of people on the internet responded to the UberFacts post with photos and GIFs from Seinfeld, framing the information as a win for Costanza. After all, it makes total sense that George would endeavor to combine food and sex if that’s how our brains are wired. He wasn’t being a creepy weirdo, he was merely responding to a deep-seeded evolutionary instinct. 

Although, as far as we know, no scientific studies have defended the urge to sneak peeks at a portable television during sex without your partner’s knowledge.