Meghan Provost at Queen's University has conducted a study testing correlations between women's fertility and the sexual signals that they give off by their walks. Surprisingly, women who were at the most fertile periods of their menstrual cycles had the least "sexy" walks (according to the male volunteers who rated them), with smaller hip movements and knees closer together.
This would seem to contradict recent research that suggests men are more attracted to ovulating women, but Provost says the results are compatible. According to her, the previous research tested signals that can only be perceived at close range, like pheromones and facial expressions, whereas a walk can be detected from a distance. The idea is that if a woman's going to send out her pheromones during ovulation, she wants to see the guy up close, because if everything goes right he might end up being her baby daddy. However, if he's only close enough to see her walk (which means she can't get a good look at him, and he might be "unappealing"), she'll give off the sexy vibe, but only when she's not ovulating. That way, if he "forces his attentions on her," she probably won't get pregnant.
Hold up. So women do the sexy walk in order to attract potential rapists, but make sure to do it when they're least fertile so that they can just be raped, instead of raped and impregnated? It's probably a good thing that Provost is "trying to put as big a question mark as [she] can around this hypothesis," because we're not really buying this one.
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uhh i'm sorry but where on earth did the rape conclusion come in? the article in no way said women were deliberalty walking less sexy at less fertile times to "make sure" that they wouldn't become preganant from a rape.
instead i believe the research was simply giving a possible historical/anthropoligical explanation for their modern conclusions.
sloppy and sensational interpretations, Torontoist.
where the hell did the rape conclusion come from? do youwork for FOX news or something. i guess that answers the unasked question of why you are not a scientist ....
The article says that the unappealing guys might "force their attentions" on a woman, and later clarifies this as "sexual assault":
"A sexy walk could attract less appealing males who might force their attentions on her, but it would happen at a time when she was least fertile [...] 'if a woman were to conceive through sexual assault ... it would have had a huge effect on a her.'"
again, you are deleting an essential word from that quote to support your own conclusions.
in the article it actually reads as:
In ancestral times, "if a woman were to conceive through sexual assault ... it would have had a huge effect on a her" and the resources she would have had for her offspring.
There is nothing at all in the article to support your claim that "women do the sexy walk in order to attract potential rapists, but make sure to do it when they're least fertile so that they can just be raped, instead of raped and impregnated?"
And you do know the article/research is talking about something not DONE but that subconsciously occurs, right?
Right, exactly. It's obviously not a conscious action, but the point is that apparently it was useful in ancestral times (although I can't imagine why it would be any more desirable to conceive from a rape nowadays). The walk would attract the guys, but in case they were undesirable, she wouldn't get pregnant in the event that they raped her. The thing is - why would it be an inherent biological advantage to attract these guys in the first place - why is the sexy walk even there? wouldn't women want to repel these guys entirely?
i dunno. read the actual scientific article as opposed to a friggin article in the Globe. i'm sure it would answer your questions a bit more. here's the link:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/3g8l78060073n873/
Originally, I thought the rape thing was a very bad joke. Now it appear you're genuinely confused.
She doesn't have a biological imperative to attract rapists, she has a biological imperative to attract men in general (which of course has nothing to do with her general happiness or life satisfaction, it has to do with reproducing and keeping the population going). A certain number of those men may be likely to force themselves on her. So her walk/phermones etc. are engineered to attract men, but have a built-in defence mechanism to try to allow her to choose which of those men father her children. Or so goes the theory we're discussing.
But the built-in defence mechanism doesn't work. Why doesn't she just stick to the pheromones?
I imagine many women at the fertile peak of their menstrual cycles are probably by that time feeling cranky, bloated, self-conscious, or perhaps all three. No wonder they're not walking "sexy."
My point was that it just seems sort of ridiculous that women would have this sexy walk to attrack men in general, with the built-in emergency contraceptive to make sure they don't get pregs when they rape them. It seems that the pheromones would be sufficiently effective in attracting men.
well said, edward.
rebecca p, you're completing missing the point. the biological imperative is to attract men; to decrease the chances of somebody not good, during the most fertile time some of the methods are "shut off"; thereby decreasing the chances of attracting somebody not good; the methods still "turned on" are the pheromones which are only good from a closer distance, allowing for a better decision on somebody good. i think that's as simple as we can make it.
maybe over time evolution may decrease the "sexy walk" if it is actually a hindrance.
rebecca p, at the end of the day, your last paragraph was a little reactionary in a way that no way reflected what the article was talking about.
I get that. My issue was that it would seem women are sufficiently equipped to attract men with the pheromones and whatever else, making the sexy walk unnecessary, considering that apparently it is sort of risky. i.e. wouldn't the potential risks of the sexy walk counter its apparent benefits - so why is it there.
I mean... respect, but I still don't agree. I think it was pretty clear that I was consciously oversimplifying the conclusion, but that did seem to be Provost's suggestion and I stick with my comments.
OK. I can't believe I'm getting dragged into this.
1). We're not talking about traits that were custom programmed by a designer like a piece of software, we're talking about physical attributes and instincts that developed through random mutation throughout millenia and then persisted in humans because some combination of them was effective in nurturing and muliplying human life. So nothing is very precise in this, and no one at any stage is making decisions about what to keep and what to get rid of.
2). I'm not sure why you're so sure it doesn't work. Is there some part of the study where they went back thousands of years in a time machine to observe how many children were or were not the product of sexaul assaults?
3). In order for the phermones to work, she needs to get up close and personal with the males. In order to do that, she needs to attract them to her. Presumably, when she's fertile, she wants to be dealing with a set of men she's had previous encounters with and so has no particular need to attract them from across the plain with her swinging hips, since she already knows them. When she's not fertile, she wants to call men in from all over so she can find out which ones are the good ones and which are the bad.
4). This is all, of course, wild speculation based on a news report of one study in a field that is known to be made up of a fair amount of educated guesswork to begin with.
alright cool.
well, all i can say is that maybe evolution will take care of it if it is actually a harmfull behaviour that results in a decrease in the propogation of the species.
who knows? maybe our cave-people ancestors walked even sexier!
umm, edward, most science is educated guesswork to some degree. human behaviour even more so ...
good points though.
Good point. In which case I would love to see what an episode of America's Next Top Model looked like back then.
Come on, you know you were thinking the same thing.
well, i am now! hehehe!
What I wanna know is if that palsied hobble that the hookers at Yonge & College do in those giant boots is supposed to be sexy.