Girls, We Men Know :o)

Men can detect when a woman is 'on heat', says study

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 06/02/2008


The textbook wisdom that oestrus ("on heat") has become hidden in
women over thousands of years of evolution is questioned today by scientists
who argue that a range of research suggests that men can indeed detect when
women are at the peak of fertility.

a.. Lap dancers help fertility scientists
The bottoms of some female monkeys become swollen and red when they
are on heat. When domestic cats enter their fertile phase they become the
feline equivalent of Madonna to local males. And does in oestrus give off a
scent that bucks can use to work out that they are fertile.

But one dictionary definition of oestrus, which dates back around 400
million years in the animal world, says that it is 'the periodic state of
excitement in the female of most mammals, excluding humans, that immediately
precedes ovulation and during which the female is most receptive to mating."
Today Profs Randy Thornhill and Steven Gangestad of the University of
New Mexico, Alburquerque, conclude: "For several decades, scholars of human
sexuality have almost uniformly assumed that women evolutionarily lost
oestrus . . . we argue, this long-standing assumption is wrong."

They argue that when fertile in their cycles, women are particularly
sexually attracted to a variety of male features - scent, rugged looks,
gravelly voice - that likely are (or, ancestrally, were) indicators of
genetic quality, and more likely to have a fling.

Men, they add in an article in the Proceedings of the Royal Society:
Biological Sciences, "are particularly attracted to some features of
fertile-phase women."

To put it another way, says Prof Gangestad, "males are adapted to
detect when and which females are fertile. But females are not adapted to
*tell* males that information; males simply use "byproducts" (side-effects)
of what female physiology does to create a fertile state to extract that
information (and, across the vertebrates, males are generally very good at
doing so)."

As if to underline this, they say that women report that their
partners are more possessive - "engage in greater amounts of proprietary or
related behaviours (e.g. vigilance of partners' whereabouts)" when they are
fertile, suggesting that men can pick up on these subtle cues.

Martie Haselton at the University of California, Los Angeles, found
that women were judged to dress more attractively during their fertile
periods, although the correlation was slight. Other studies show women
become more confident during oestrus, and their faces and scent become more
attractive to men.

And a study of lap dancers provided the strongest evidence yet for the
controversial idea that men can pick up when women are fertile and most
likely to become pregnant. When naturally cycling lap dancers entered their
fertile period they earned significantly more in tips than their co-workers
who were on the pill, according to the research published last year by Dr
Geoffrey Miller, also at the University of New Mexico.

The cues that men use to detect oestrus remain mysterious. "We don't
know the mechanism of attraction," comments Prof Thornhill. "Are the men
detecting the scent of oestrus? Or does the women's behaviour change?"

But they argue that the discovery of women's oestrus "has penetrating
and potentially revolutionary implications for a proper conceptualisation of
human mating. The field can look forward to new, exciting avenues of
research on human mating that will surely follow."

"The evidence that women's behaviour (for example the type of men they
find attractive) changes systematically over the menstrual cycle is
overwhelming and very compelling," comments Dr Ben Jones of Aberdeen
University, who today in the journal Biology Letters reports that men show
stronger preferences for recordings of feminine (versus masculine) women's
voices that appeared attracted to the men than for those that appeared
disinterested.
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