If you would please lie down here and start touching yourself. Mmmmh, yeah baby, thaaaat’s the stuff.

Being students at at one of the UK’s supposedly top educational institutions, we at Flipside wake up every morning with a smile on our faces knowing that we’re spending the day battling at the forefront of science, advancing the boundaries of human knowledge and being a part of making the world a better, more enlightened place.

That is, we used to, until we realized that the glorious process of institutionalized science is not a progress towards a greater understanding of life, the universe and everything as much as it is an excuse for scientists to live out their perversion in the name of progress.

One example is the study named ‘What makes buttocks beautiful? A review and classification of the determinants of gluteal beauty and the surgical techniques to achieve them’, in which the scientists do what the title indicates: staring at women’s buttocks in order to discern exactly what makes them beautiful. They studied a total of 1,320 photographs of nude women in order to ascertain this. Which is a total waste of time and resources, as women’s buttocks are not sentient, self-aware beings and thusly cannot evaluate the degree of their own beauty and therefore, according to the well established ‘One-Direction-principle’, it is evident that they are beautiful merely because they are unaware of the extent of their own aesthetic appeal.

All boundaries are conventions, and the extent to which any categorization we impose on an intrinsically un-organized world is meaningful will have to be judged on whether they actually reflect significant differences between categories and whether they are useful and can actually be utilized further our understanding of the over-arching phenomena in question. The division of men into ‘ass-people’ and ‘tits-people’ clearly fulfill these criteria, and after the ass-people had their own study published the tits-fans, not wanting to be outdone, proceeded to launch their own massive boob-watching study. Being slightly less selfish than the butt-scientists mentioned above, they decided to share their ass-watching session with almost 400 male subjects. Apparently the purpose was to see whether being hungry would influence what kind of breast shape and size men prefer, but who cares? Boobs.

There are of course those who aren’t satisfied with merely admiring aspects of female anatomy, in this study the subjects were put into an MRI-machine and asked to have their partner stimulate them. Or if they were single, masturbate. While most of the scientific community sat in despair saying to each other ‘why on earth didn’t we think of that?’, others got creative and realized that they could get away with doing the exact same study, the only difference being that subjects were experiencing orgasm in a PET-scanner instead. With a sensor up their butt, for good measure.

Suddenly postgraduate studies seem much more appealing.