2011-01-19
Explanation
This comic shows a woman using scientific knowledge as a strategy to avoid having sex. She tells her partner: "I'm not sure we should have sex tonight. Men find women most attractive when they're most fertile, and I don't want to risk pregnancy. So I guess the question is this: do you find me at all attractive?" The man is left stammering, caught in a no-win trap.
The humor comes from the weaponization of endocrinology research. Studies have indeed suggested that men may find women slightly more attractive during the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle. The woman constructs a logical trap: if the man says he finds her attractive, he is implying she is at peak fertility, which means pregnancy risk, which means they should not have sex. If he says he does not find her attractive, well, that is obviously also bad. The caption "Endocrinologists can get out of sex any time" drives home the joke -- that knowledge of hormonal science provides a convenient and logically airtight excuse to avoid intimacy whenever desired.