Women dance most attractively when fertile

Women seeking to impress men on the dance floor might want to consider strutting their stuff when most fertile. Men shown videos of women dancing and walking were most attracted to their moves when the women were close to ovulation.

Bernhard Fink, at the University of G?ttingen, Germany, and colleagues filmed 48 female students aged between 19 and 33 while they walked towards and away from a camera or danced to the drum track of a Robbie Williams song. The women walked and danced once during the most fertile part of their reproductive cycle and again during a non-fertile time. The videos were transformed so that only the outline of each woman's body was visible. This was in order to remove all visual cues other than movement.

The researchers showed the video clips to 200 male students, who were asked to rate the women's attractiveness on a seven-point scale. They gave women at their most fertile an average rating of 2.88 in the dancing clips and 3.31 in clips showing them walking. This compared with ratings of 2.72 and 2.98 respectively for clips recorded at non-fertile times.

Money earner

In 2007 researchers at the University of New Mexico showed that lap dancers earned more in tips when close to ovulation, though they did not study the reasons for changes to the men's largesse (Evolution and Human Behavior, DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2007.06.002).

Fink speculates that increased attractiveness around ovulation is the result of physiological changes that are mainly related to an increase in oestrogen levels. "Oestrogen has effects on muscular control, skill performance, and on ligaments and tendons, so it's reasonable to conclude that it could affect body movement," he says.

Whether changes to movement have evolved specifically to signal fertility or are just a by-product of physiological changes associated with fertility remains to be seen, Fink adds, but he favours the latter.

"Both men and women have the ability to judge the phase a woman is at in her cycle, and that can provide valuable information," says Gayle Brewer, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, UK.

"For men it allows them to identify potential mates in their fertile phase and to guard existing partners to prevent cuckoldry, while for women it can allow them to identify the most attractive female competition."

Journal reference: Personality and Individual Differences, DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2012.06.005

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