Lingerie Probability

both of us are sitting here wearing Victoria's Secret Lingerie. Yeah. Well we had to get into character, right, So anyway, we alternately wanted to call this episode, Leonardo DiCaprio explained, because, as you may or may not know, this guy is seems to be obsessed with Victoria's Secret Lingerie models and

dates them quite a bit. Yeah, I was reading, in particular one of the articles we're looking I'm talking about this selection for Victoria's Secret Models or angels as they're called, and there was there was at least one who had dated Leonardo DiCaprio and therefore kind of on their their blacklist.

Because yeah, because it's a careful balancing act choosing exactly who is going to represent the product, because you have a product that is for women, that is, you know, for women, but it's also kind of for men, and then men offer off sometimes purchasing it, but also women are so you need that that model that is appealing to both but without seeming a threat to the like

that's their reasoning. You don't want want this model to be a threat to the female customers, so they steer away from models who have appeared in men's magazines or have any kind of even slight celebrity gossip kind of tinge, such as you know, dating Leonardo DiCaprio. I guess that's right, because I remember reading something about Kate Upton and the reason why she wasn't selected as a Victoria's Secret modeled.

I think because of the men's magazine. She was already everywhere in all these different magazines and and and also probably comes down to just complete image control to like these these are the women representing their product, and the more control they have over them as ultimately spokes people

for their product, the better. Right. Yeah. I was thinking about this in terms of potato chips, because you know, a potato chip is what we call would call a super normal stimulus, right, Yes, the kind of food that is not just like hey, that's food. It's like, hey, look I am full of fat and salt, and you want to crave me because I'm gaming the rewards of

some of your brain. And I was thinking about the machinery that's brought in for potato chips, that dollar piece of machinery that actually is calibrated to simulate chewing a chip, perfect sort of um acoustic pitch to a chip, And I was thinking, the same sort of thing is at work in the launch array arena. I mean, nothing is is put up for chance here. And we'll talk a bit more about that, and they may even bring in the chewing machine for the edible varieties, oh dear, yeah,

But but anyway, Yes, so we're talking about stimuli. Were so we're in we're inevitably talking about the reward system of our brain. If you've listen to the show long enough, then you've you've heard us go through the reward system of the brain and talk about dopamine many times. Uh, basically getting down to the just core genetic mission of any organism to breed and reproduce, to eat and power the body and uh and stuff. For so when you're engaging in in stuff of this nature, you're engaging the

dopamine pathways. And uh and and when you start tweaking it, when you start changing your expectations, your your repro reprogramming a very very complex reward system. Yeah, and that's why addiction happens right so very easily with different things in our lives, because, Uh, there's a couple of things that work really well on the reward system. Food, as we say, the potato chip, and sex. We're wired to want to

have sex to propagate our genes. Therefore, when we see that piece of lingerie and they act as a kind of potato chip of the mind. Yeah, And like the potato chip, it's constantly marketed at us constantly, but especially around Valentine's Day, because this is the idea that this is a season of of of love, or this is marketed that way towards this some season of love, a season of sex. And then here is the official garment of for play in romance, if you will. That's right

in Victoria's Secret. The Emporium of supernatural or super normal stimuli. Supernatural stimula would be pretty great, it would be need if they if they had ghost panties that would be a nice all guaranteed to be haunted. Uh, some of them maybe all right. In two thousand thirteen, Vicki's Secret breaked in six point six billy in dollars, And according to Forbes magazine, Valentine's Day itself is an eighteen point six billion dollar event, and Lingerie represents a pretty decent

piece of that pie. Yeah. I mean, and they're really hacking into us with this, with this holiday. So it makes sense that the figures would be that high because you're you're cracking into our relationships, into our sexual desires and saying, hey, it's Valentine's Day, we created it, but you've got to live with it. So here's the list of things you need to purchase. Here a list of experiences you need to have so that your life can it all be in keeping with what you see on TV.

That's right, and what you see on TV and what you see on the internet that none of that is like willing really stuff that they just paste up there. They don't just take a couple of pictures of you know, thin women that are gorgeous in a couple of pieces of material on their body there's a lot of thought put into that and h professions converging to see this product brought to market. Yeah, and according to a Fast Company article by Rebecca Greenfield, the company adore Me does

some really rigorous A B testing. Okay, a B testing. This is the general do you like a R B? Do you like this one or that one? And if you answer enough of these questions, then you you provide insight into your wants and desires. It's the kind of thing you see on Netflix. Uh As famously used A B testing. You see like two titles, which one do you prefer? Air B? You go through enough of that, then the system will have some sort of general idea about what you like. Yeah, and we're talking about the

collections of some really rigorous statistics taken here. Now, a lot of companies do this, and Google does this. Take We've done it, how soforths dot com has done it right. Whenever we change your homepage, we do a B testing. So right we click, we we look to see what people are clicking on the most. Now, adore Me the company. The way they do this is they shoot multiple versions of images to run on its website, so the distinctions

between the pictures might include different models. Again, the models being really important. Who you pick right wearing the same set of underwear in the exact same position or the same model in the same set in a different position for example. Then, like you know, any company that's A B testing, it tests the options to find out which one sell better. Now you think that something that might fetch the most dollars and clicks would be, say, a blonde woman languishing on a bed to say, a feather

at her side. Yeah, that's what comes to mind when you think of Victoria's secret catalog. Right there are rose, there's some sort of you know, sexy looking prop or whatever. But this is completely the um erroneous thinking of Apparently, according to their A B testing, blonds do not sell lingerie. Well, first of all, um, having a model pose on a couch instead of a bed is better, and props are distracting.

I'm not surprised by that one. And touching a the face or hair instead of say, putting your hand on your hip is much more lucrative in terms of seeing the sale of lingerie through. Well, you know, the couch bed thing definitely makes sense because you were you were selling a product that is different and exciting, right, like, this is not this is not every day underwear. You

don't wear your your lingerie to the gym. You wear it to fancy date night or Valentine's or something of that nature, right, so, or you know, to record a podcast. But aside, so that's from that, it's it's specialty where and so it would make more sensitive, be more appealing out of out of the bedroom text right, right, because the bed is wrote right like you would assume that there would be sex going on there, but the catch is a little bit more exotic. Maybe yeah, it means

like maybe the kids aren't home at all. No bonds, Uh, It kind of makes sense to me because they only represent like six of society, right, natural bonds, Right, and you're you're ultimately buying this to where yourself or for a special someone in your life to wear it, and so therefore they're likely not blonde, right, they're probably brunette. Right, So that would make sense that there's not a lot

of blonde lingerie models. Um, But through its researcher, Dormy has found that the right model really matters even more than price, so that this person could be blond, it just has to be a person who is accessible. And according to that Fast Company article, if customers see a lazy push up on a model they like, they'll buy it. Put the same thing on a model they don't, and even a ten dollar price cut won't compel them. That's how important it is that that model have some sort

of connection to the consumer. Yeah, and and again it's complex because you're you're trying to appeal to both the female and the male fan base. It's not just like you know, Maxim magazine or something where if that's still around, where where basically one type of model could do and there's no question about who you're appealing to. Of course, it would be really interesting to do this a b testing in Norway, right, We're like the population is blod Yeah,

how does it breakdown? I'm sure there's a there's a separate there's probably an office there, right, I'm sure that's on the there probably is, you know, or maybe it's just people in Norway, or they don't even do the lingerie. They're just like, we have sex all the time. We don't need to be routinized into it via some sort of symbolic garment. All right, The point of talking about all this A B testing is just to let you guys know that this that's a lot of money because

basically they're not just doing one underwear shot. They're doing maybe up to three different versions of that shot. And that's a lot of production and post production dollars to to put into their system, into a B test to figure out what's going to be most lucrative for them. All Right, on that note, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to discuss more about the science of law gae and yes, rats

wearing lingerites. Alright, we're back. We're getting We're gonna try to attempt to answer a million dollar question why lingerie even exists, which I think is going to be really obvious after this discussion of rats. Yeah, this is you know this, This this study is pretty uh, it's pretty wonderful. I mean, any study in which you have animals wearing clothing.

And I have a by the way, I have a list little gallery that I'll link to on the landing page for this episode at Sceptable in your Mind dot com, which which features a few different studies, some of which we've discussed in the past, some of which we have not been involved animals wearing some sort of a garment or clothing item. And this was inspired by dung beetles wearing hats, hats and little boots yeah, little booty glove. Yeah, they're on there twice. But in this case we're talking

about rats and uh and uh. And you'll have to see a picture of this too at the full feeling, because when when you look at the rat in this experiment, this is a two fourteen University of Montreal study, Um, it doesn't look like lingerie. It doesn't look like a rat wearing some sort of victorious secret kind of garment. Uh,

it looks like they're wearing a little vest. Because essentially, what you're trying to test here is, you know what happens when you have some of the female rats wearing a garment, wearing something that is not their own skin, and then what happens when you try to attach certain expectations to that garment. Yeah, so I guess you could say that this isn't exactly lingerie in the way we think about it, but for rats wearing a vest will

call it rat lingerie. I mean it gets down to the question is lingerie sexy in and of itself or is it sexy because of its relationship to sexual activity. Um so, what they did is they put these vest like garments on the rats and these are uh in the experiment, female rats war these wild deflowering male rat virgins. Okay, fowering, flowering.

So I'm trying to be gentle in this description. So when the when the scientists later gave the same male rats a chance to mate again, the rodents preferred sex with vest wearing rats because that's I mean, that's what they know, right. They have associated getting to have sex

with rats that are wearing vests. And the researchers follow this up with with brain analysis and confirmed that the rats are in fact learning to associate sex with closing with clothing textures in the same way that they can also associated with odors and other contextual clues. Yeah, after they are deflowered, they were then killed so that their brains could be split open and they could figure this out. I just want to add that. Um so, what does

this tell us? It tells us that if a rat can learn to associate sex with a variety of contextual clues, including the texture of clothing, so too can humans. If you think about it. I mean, if someone comes out and you know, baggy pants and a t it's not communicating a lot of like, hey, let's let's have sex. But if someone comes out in fire engine red lace, uh, lingerie, that's communicating an all together a different message. Well, you know, but then the baggy pants could just say, hey, I'm

really relaxed and I'm chill right now. That could also be the message here's my sexy baggy pants. But you know, that's that's one of the things to give in mind

about about lingerie too. As we discuss all this stuff. Um, Dr Christina to Sali a lecture and Marketing and Consumptions at the University of Leicester School of Management to do it a lot of time to researching lingerie and Dutch and as she really drives home the fact that you have numerous factors that are gonna influence any individual's personal

underwear choice. Um, even though the media tends to market, you know, one sort of western, tiny and uncomfortable standard, she still dives home that for most people, comfort is often as important as sexiness when it comes to the garment. Well, and that's the truth, because even if you're clad in some sort of fire engine red lingerie. If it is going up into your privates and causing discomfort, that there's

nothing sexy about that. Yeah. If you can't wear it comfortably at dinner, when you go out to dinner on Valentine's Day, then what's the point, right, right, might as well just go commando. Yeah. Actually, I'm not suggesting anybody do that. I say at some point I need to find out where that comes from, that term going commando. I've never heard anything about soldiers, particularly special forces teams,

making a point of not wearing underwear. That just seems like some foolery in the middle of the night, you know, and in the forest. And I don't know where I'm going with that. Oh, let's get that study back, okay, Bikini clad women and impatient men. Oh yes, this is a fun one. This is a two eight Belgian study published in the Journal of Consumer Research that found that the near sight of a bikini or lingerie model can

can take a serious toe on mail willpower. Now, this this ties into some of the experiments we've talked about in the past dealing with willpower. And we've talked about willpower as it's essentially like a like one of those life meters you see in a video game. It can get knocked down. There are things that can build it

back up. But when it's depleted, um, your your little character dies essentially, And things that can deplete it are resisting urges to other things being being basically having super normal stimuli thrown at you, be it a lingerie model on a Victorious Secret catalog or a piece of chocolate cake. Well, and I think a lot of it has to do with the short term versus the long term as well, which we've talked about quite a bit with addiction and rewards. Um. Now,

the study is called Bikini's instigate generalized impatience. I love that generalist, an intertemporal choice. And this is published in the Journal of Consumer Research the two thousand and addition, I believe it was June, and the authors look into what they call the bikini effect, which is, as you say, it's this kind of impulsive behavior as a result of

men exposed to lingerie or scantily clad women. Yeah, they discovered in the the in the study that heterosexual men who watched sexy videos or handled lingerie they sought immediate gratification even when they were making decisions about you know, it could be a decision about what so did a drink or candy to sample, or even like serious money decisions.

It just bites into their ability to control that. And and it ultimately is kind of zen because the researchers are arguing that this this bikini effect causes a shift in time preference, forcing the mail gazer to live in the moment. So there's no future, there's no past, there's only the here and now. And your genetic programming is just saying breed. But since you can't actually mate with a Victoria's Secret catalog, uh, you end up just and

you have tried, many have tried. Instead, you just gobbled down a donut or you you binge purchase something on Amazon and call it a day. Yeah, and that it's the present thing, right, the short term um Bram Vanderberg, who is one of the studies author says that after they touched Abram, men are more likely to be content

with a smaller immediate monetary reward. Nothing to say of the sugary sodas right as opposed to something that was healthy, like you know, some fruit, Yeah, I mean obviously sex cells if we don't even have to to underline that for our listeners. But this is one of those studies that provides a little more scientific weight to that reality.

But you know, the wind, you see a scantily clad character holding a product or in some way engaged in a particular bit of advertising, Like, that's what's going on there. It's it's it's hacking your brain. It's changing your ability to think about past and future. Yeah, and I did want to mention too that in this study, um, not all of the heterosexual identified men responded in the same way. In other words, some of them were highly responsive to

rewards while others were not as sensitive to it. And some of that may be in um, it may just be in whatever their personal experiences with rewards and gratification and maybe even addiction in those pathways in the brain. Yeah, it's it's by no means a one thought size fits all scenario. Yeah, it's not that sort of like and this happened that ioga and their eyeballs came out of their head. And no, it was a bit different for everyone,

but on the whole, they did see that. Um that then we're making choices that were not long term, you know, pragmatic choices Alright, we know what our lingerie choices are present today, but we're gonna look at a few other things that may be available. And one of the things which I don't think is a big surprise here is lingerie that could be printed on demand. Yeah, indeed, I mean three D printing and the ability to print objects. Even though it's it's very much uh still in it's

it's early days. Right now, we've talked again and again about the potential future here of your ability to pretend everything from specialized parts to just complete devices, even food. This is just going to completely change the way we

consume and acquire products. Well, and in terms of lingerie and bras in particular, I think that this is something that is kind of exciting because as everybody knows, or as Oprah has educated us, all, most women are wearing the wrong bracess scenes statistics out there like of women, Uh, I don't know if the percent is correct, but that's because the human breast tissue does not conform to like we have these neat little like cup A, B, C, D and so on and so forth. It doesn't really

conform to that. So you have this company called joy Fit that has an app that could allow you to take a panoramic video of your breast um when then you choose your bra preferences and features, and this information and your video are submitted to their cloud hub. I don't see any problems with this where your video will be processed, created into a profile, and then they create the shape of the bra based on your actual dimensions

and then three D printed. And this is still a kickstart venture, so the company is still raising money, but they plan to retail the braw for nine NAR. Well, you know, the potential security issues aside, it just sounds great because I mean because it actually it goes beyond laundry when you get into clothing itself, like like the

thick sizes of things that it's so off. You know, you you see clothing on television and without and you don't even think about the fact that every piece of clothing they're wearing has probably been customed at, like even if it's a T shirt. You know, in any kind of major production, everything's been thought out and planned and measured, and then you go when you try and buy a T shirt into the or gens or what have you, and the sizes are all wrong. Like I find that

just with me buying a T shirt. It's been like a ten twenty years struggle to find a cut of a T shirt that that fits comfortably on me and allows me to to reach things over my head without exposing my middrift. Now, imagine if on your chest, your breast tissue tripled quadrupled in size, and you then had to fit some sort of garment over that, right exactly. Yeah, I mean there's definitely engineering that goes on in bras.

So this is very interesting. Um Now, what could maybe merge with this technology is better understanding the body in particular the torso to kind of get better fits in general. And in this we turn to the work of Kanzuki Nakamura of Kyoto Institute of Technology and Takio Kakawa of Osaka University, and they UH. In their study they identified body shape components critical for designing especially close fitting products, UH, such as lingerie stuff, where the contour and actual shape

of the body is is really important. It's you know, it's not just a baggy shirt. It's something that actually needs to to fit tightly with a specific body and UH. And so they kind of to a certain extent, they were kind of reinventing how we size uh these products. Um so that they were using laser meteorology to map control points at specific sites on the women's trunks, as they referred to in the study, and in doing so, uh open up the possibility to classify body shapes into

more classes. So it's not just uh, you know, size one, size two, size three, or whatever. It's it's all the various variations based on the different control points. Yeah, and they took five and sixty Japanese I'm an aged from nineteen to sixty three to get all of those data points to try to figure out uh, better classifications for

the torso. And of course the problem and ultimately where the potential answer of the printing comes in, is if you create more and more different sizes, that's more and more different sizes that would have to be produced and kept in stock somewhere, unless it's print on demand, and then it's this information is just all in the catalog.

Oh well that changes everything, right, because now you're at home and you're uploading your own dimensions and you can um automatically print your own wonder woman inspired bra, right, and it's gonna fit great. And I'm not saying I'm going to do that, but it might and if you were just say, if you're just a guy who wants to touch some lingerie, you no longer have to go to the store and uh and pretend that you're buying it for your girlfriend. That you can just you can

just print it out, just print them out all day. Well. And so a lot of this too, that we're talking about is heteronormative, right, I mean, we're talking about this is very much the assumption that that some male that wants to look at a female in lingerie, Hey, maybe a guy wants to have lingerie for himself, design it for himself. Indeed, I mean there's there's a lot of lingerie four men out there. Some of it is traditionally you know, female lingerie that is then co opted by

by the male wear, which is which is fine. And then there is there's male lingerie, which can also be you know, just as ridiculous as female lingerie, uh, if not more so in the sense that is not you know, bare and just not driven into our minds as much through through marketing. But I did some Google image searches before this episode, and there's some there's some pretty wacky

male lingerie out there. Speaking of have you seen the Saturday Night Live spoof of Justin Bieber and Calvin Klein underwear. It's pretty great, all right, Just leave it at that. UM. One thing we did want to mention before we close out today is something called fund to Wear. Now, we've talked a bit about technology and its ability to interact with us in ways that could change the landscape of uh, not just sexuality, but expressing that sexuality, and certainly funderwear

that's in this category. Yes, uh, fung aware this is um. This is underwhere that's made from fungus. It's actually growing. Oh, we have different notes. Now. As much as I like the idea of fungaware funderware, we're talking about wearable technology and lingerie coming together. They would allow people to to touch each other, across space and even get even time. We're talking about as some of the same things that we discussed in the Hotel of the Future of talking

about virtual sex and linked dreaming. We're talking about some of those elements finding their way into our laundery design. So that two lovers maybe on separate sides of the world, but if they're both wearing fun to wear, then they

can essentially be in the same room. And now this is it's worth not even we're not talking about just underwear, would say a vibration device in it, Like that's technology has been around for a while, and you know, I'm not saying it's not effective, but it's not particularly nuance.

This is aimed at using such similar technology to replicate actual human touch with the garment via a smartphone app and across vast distances, as you've already said, which is what I think makes the standout from the technology of just having a vibrating underwear here yea now again, in the same way that there would seem to be some security issues about sending video of your your breasts to a lingerie company online, I do have to wonder does this mean that someone could hack it and like touch

everyone's fun to wear at once, that's a question. I mean, there's there's all these sorts of security issues. People see videos of your breasts that you've uploaded, and they hack into your underwear, and none of this is maybe so strange to think about if you live in Japan, because their technolog energy and underwear have been I don't know, I guess you could say thought about quite a bit. Yeah. Indeed, in particular, one of the the breakthrough is that we're

looking at was it was the so called frozen underwear. No, not frozen underwear, but cold not cold like that's not really much of a breakthrough. We've had that let it go. Yes, yes, the Disney Frozen movie. Yeah, I do not remember a scene from the movie in which the two sisters touch underwear. But that is the idea behind this technology. Yeah. It's marketed as like the little Sister and the Big sister bra and if you presumably chest thump each other, then

that activates the bras to light up. Okay, nothing creepy about that, No, well not, I mean, not overtly. But it's a you know, it's a similar, similar technology we're talking about. Let's let's let's make wearable technology and our lingerie become one so that they creates an interactive experience. Let's encourage sisters to bump their breasts just like a chest bump. Right, it's it's no more. But you can't.

But here's the thing. You could just chest bump each other, but you couldn't tell whether or not the brawls were lighting up unless there was a shirt that was off right, Well, maybe the light truly bright. We don't know. I mean, it could be a thing where they chest bump and it's just it's like the sun has it like an atomic detonation within their sweaters or something. Just keep going

with that, alright. So, but I'm not completely surprised because Japan has been known for a lot of different um appetites, I guess you could say, and uh, especially with their vending machines and I don't even know if I can say it the selling of what used to be underwear that was worn. Yeah, yeah, this is this is fascinating. We started researching this, like I briefly went down the rabbit hole on on Japanese vending machines and the and

the the idea of used underwear and vending machines. It's worth noting just right off the bat that if you go to Japan and you're to ask the average person on the street about this, they're probably not gonna know what you're talking about. Like, it's not it's one of these things that has been elevated to almost like a legend status in the West about Japan. But it's not reading accouncil like someone's saying like, oh, you know, they

have them on every street corner. You can just like as if it's the most normal thing in the world in Japan to go up and buy used to panties out of a vending machine. But it's it's not. It might be available in a red light district. Yeah, if you're in a skeeezy section of town, in a skeeezy store, then yes, there might be a machine that is that that sells used or supposedly like quotation mark used underpants.

And then we're talking about vending machines as well. Don't think about I'm not talking about like a fancy, super high tech vending machine like our coffee machine here at work. I'm talking about you know, those little things outside of outside of grocery stores with a little little balls and them that have like toys, that kind of thing. You know, you put a quarter, you put your gen in, and

you swivel it around and it mechanically knocks out a container. Now, I want to point out that that the underwear that is now inventing machines today is not used. They just make it look they market it as though it's used. Yeah, it's that's really down. Yeah, However, the market for used underwear in Japan has jumped to online of course, and so it's still something that's circulated and bought. Indeed, and in the future in Japan and elsewhere, you know, we

could see a possibility of printable dirty underwear. And that's that's really where I'm helping your technique. Why not, I mean you could you could get the molling kills on their right that contain um whatever bacteria it is that's contributing to a certain cent profile. Why not. Indeed? All right, if you're still with us, UM, thank you for joining us on our ride down Laing Lane and looking at what is driving the actual sales of it. The probability

of sex here is what we're talking about. UM. If you want to find out more about us, you can indeed go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where you'll find all of our podcast episodes, other Valentine's Days Day episodes that we've put out this year, or the ones in the past. We did a fabulous one before about the slugs mating that was an early assault on Valentine's Day and the Valentine's Day Industrial Complex.

You'll find all of our blog post, all of our videos, social media links, you name it stuff to blow your Mind dot com And in the meantime, if you have any thoughts on Laingerie on our rats in Lingerie Um, you can send those thoughts to us via email at below the mind at how stuff works dot com. For more on MISS and thousands of other topics, visit howstuff works dot com.