Yes, yes, I’m playing to completely unjustified sterotypes. Except that they are not completely unjustified. Could I have predicted that we’d have to listen to a rant about the evils of porn, the fact that lapdancers have post-traumatic stress, the fact that women still don’t get paid enough? Yes. Did I know that when my guest introduced herself as a prostitute and dominatrix there would be brows beetled in fury that one of “them” had managed to infiltrate? Yes. The Cat among the self-righteous pigeons did (just as predictably but with much greater humor) defend her right to be heard; those who seek as good feminists to silence her pulled the normal “she’s too traumatised to know she’s traumatised” nonsense. The whole discussion was old, tired, and without obvious point. (Except to appeal for more “grass roots feminism”. Grass. So last century.) The question of whether women might be paid less because they often choose, perfectly sensibly, to spend less time at work and more time doing other things, was raised, and rather rapidly dismissed. The question of whether we might, actually, be better at some things and worse at others than men was dealt with through the curve of normal distribution. At the mean, the sexes basically have the same capacities. It’s just that men are more scattered than women, so there are more male geniuses, and more male morons. But that doesn’t mean we’re fundamentally different. Our reproductive organs are different, our hormones are different, but our brains (apart from the map-reading bits) — no way.

Then today I went on-line at my new day job. I’ve been hanging around the Wellcome Trust so much lately that they’ve given me a desk. And what’s the lead story on their website this very day? New research shows that the appropriately named doublsex gene sculpts not just the body of males and females, but also the brain. It’s just in fruit flies so far. But mammals have the dsx gene too…

So what’s new, I hear you ask? The pub. This study wasn’t conducted down the King’s Head or at the local sports bar. It was in a FlyPub. and the males in question were Drosophila fruit flies. Another interesting finding: after getting drunk (by inhaling ethanol fumes in the FlyPub), male fruit flies started courting other males as well as females. In the paper, Hyun-Gwan Lee and colleagues put it like this: “A salient effect of ethanol is cognitive impairment, which may account for the disinhibited courtship of sexually aroused males under the influence of ethanol.”

Put less politely: getting drunk makes you stupid and randy, and that makes you more likely to try and get laid any way you can. (Leonard Cohen described it even less scientifically in his classic anthem to late-night desperation Closing Time). The study also suggests that the drunker flies get, the randier they get. You can see the lushes queuing up in the hope of getting some action in the right hand petri dish in this video.

The paper was published in (the wonderful, open access) Public Library of Science.