Study: Sexy news anchors making men stupid

Once, when I was working elsewhere, I had an editor who, despite being fairly intelligent, thought Megyn Kelly could do no wrong. Curious, I thought, that a left-leaning moderate would be so taken by some crazy conservative chick with too much airtime and not enough facts.

Now there are answers; research shows that he's far from alone. A new study concludes that men simply can't concentrate when sexy anchors tell them the news.

And here's the rub: it's not the women themselves but their outfits that are driving men wild to the point of stupidity. The researchers took one woman and had her record two separate newscasts. In one, she wore "a shapeless and loose-fitting dark blue jacket and skirt" with no lipstick or necklace, while in the other she donned "a tight-fitting dark blue jacket and skirt that accented her waist-to-hip ratio," complete with "bright red lipstick and a necklace." Men were then randomly selected to watch only one of these newscasts.

And you can imagine how it went from there. But in case the picture of the semi-attractive woman above has rendered any male readers incapable of critical reasoning, I'll paraphrase: men who watched the frumpy version of the woman recalled “significantly more information" than the other dudes.

It gets more interesting when you compare this with women watching the same newscasts. Ladies watching the sexualized version remembered more than ladies shown the other one.

So what's the lesson here? Go read a fucking newspaper.