Or more fun, depending on your point of view. A study in the new journal Social Psychological and Personality Science found that male skateboarders took more risks when in the presence of an attractive woman. The study also found that the men had higher testosterone levels in the presence of the attractive woman, which, the authors theorize, may have led them to take more risks, presumably to impress her.
From the paper:
Sexual selection … favors males who engage in competitive behavior and costly displays to attract females. Although such displays can enhance reproductive success, they can also be detrimental in terms of survival.
In this case, “detrimental in terms of survival” means “might cause you to split your head open on an iron railing.” By the way, the authors didn’t ask whether skateboarders were gay or straight. Also, some of the skateboarders declined to give saliva samples to measure their testosterone, which seems kind of strange, no?
Anyway. You can go here to download a PDF of the paper.
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17 Responses to Beautiful Women Make Skateboarding More Dangerous
steiny - March 16, 2010 at 3:51 pm
Heterosexist research, what about gay men and gay women?
mmccllln - March 16, 2010 at 4:00 pm
Someone wasted the time to do this? Any guy who has ever done anything in the presence of an ‘attractive woman’ knows this. I’m laughing because someone actually thinks they’ve determined something and someone else actually thinks this is news.
cphaskett - March 16, 2010 at 4:13 pm
How about a study of why so many skateboarders are willing to try the same trick over and over and over and never seem to tire of failing?In terms of relevance for our profession, does this suggest that we should see more adventurous classroom technique from male professors at co-ed schools, and still more at UC-SB than at, say, BYU? Or can we disaggregate based on proclivity towards lucubration vs. tendency towards endless attempts to manipulate wood steel and plastic with one’s feet?
nacrandell - March 16, 2010 at 4:17 pm
Already knew this from reading Tom Sawyer and his walking Becky Thatcher’s picket fence.
dr_redrum - March 16, 2010 at 4:21 pm
I just read the PDF and I don’t see mention of any attempt to determine the sexual orientation of the male skateboarder subjects. How did they control for the gay-boarders in their sample?
akprof - March 16, 2010 at 5:02 pm
My husband’s response to this piece was “Well, of course” – he went on to relate a memory of diving into the shallow end of a aswimming pool when an attractive female walked by!
daisy96 - March 16, 2010 at 5:06 pm
On behalf of the women at BYU,”Hey!”.
22079340 - March 16, 2010 at 5:37 pm
I think we learned that from Paris and Helen….
22079340 - March 16, 2010 at 5:41 pm
Hey, Steiny, you can’t be the center of everything. Besides, it seems your are saying that gay men can’t be distracted by a beautiful woman, which could be perceiuved as a homophobic stereotype. Lighten up!
occidentalir - March 16, 2010 at 7:10 pm
“How about a study of why so many skateboarders are willing to try the same trick over and over and over and never seem to tire of failing?”And to bring this to a half-serious issue: how can we get students to have that same perseverance in their studies? Highest test scorers get to register for classes with the hottest profs as rated by RateMyProfessors.com?
tee_bee - March 16, 2010 at 9:35 pm
mmccllln: Do much science? It’s obvious the earth is flat, and that the sun orbits our planet, which is the center of the universe. Astronomy is bunk!
jegraves - March 16, 2010 at 9:57 pm
I still have the scars from a skateboard crash while in 6th grade (1966)to support this. Yup, showing off for an attractive young lady. BTW – the tricks in the YouTube video above are SICK! Good music too. Still love Alvin Lee. Many great memories generated from this article. Thanks Thomas.
mbelvadi - March 17, 2010 at 6:47 am
cphaskett, how do you think those Olympic atheletes master those triple and quad jumps in figure skating? Trying over and over sounds to me like “practice” and “perseverence”. The young men in the video look as much like serious athletes to me as the guys in Vancouver doing those snowboarding tricks. Aside from the fact that they need to be wearing helmets, we should applaud their skills and encourage their dedication. If skateboarding isn’t a summer Olympic event, it ought to be.
janschwartz - March 17, 2010 at 8:29 am
It’s a beautiful woman’s fault that men are stupid? Huh…
12052592 - March 17, 2010 at 9:24 am
Good clean fun. Boarders, punks, and hippies UNITE!
susca - March 17, 2010 at 1:16 pm
Nice headline. Do these women force these men onto the skateboards? Kind of reminiscent of “short skirts cause rape.”
minnesotan - March 17, 2010 at 6:46 pm
Whether this post proves that beautiful women make skateboarding more dangerous, I don’t know. I think it does prove that ugly women can’t take a joke.