Humans are believed to be the only creatures that produce tears because of emotions like sadness and joy. But researchers at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science may have found another function for tears: they reduce men's testosterone.
Link -via io9 | Photo by Flickr user RishiB used under Creative Commons license
We found that merely sniffing negative-emotion–related odorless tears obtained from women donors, induced reductions in sexual appeal attributed by men to pictures of women’s faces. Moreover, after sniffing such tears, men experienced reduced self-rated sexual arousal, reduced physiological measures of arousal, and reduced levels of testosterone. Finally, functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that sniffing women's tears selectively reduced activity in brain-substrates of sexual arousal in men.
Link -via io9 | Photo by Flickr user RishiB used under Creative Commons license
I guess this is also why women there are forced to wear Burqas there, to disable their weapons of male destruction.