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.

In article <8ZD8k.70$0b.13@trndny04>, avenger@avengers.co.uk 
says...
>       Men can detect when a woman is 'on heat', says study
> 

Sounds like BS to me. If my wife did not tell me, I would not 
know!

On 26-Jun-2008, The_Endeavour  wrote:

> In article <8ZD8k.70$0b.13@trndny04>, avenger@avengers.co.uk
> says...
> >       Men can detect when a woman is 'on heat', says study
> >
>
> Sounds like BS to me. If my wife did not tell me, I would not
> know!

It's amazing how desperate "Avenger" is for abuse - he keeps
posting his insanity to scj because he knows it's yet another
group that is diusgusted by his lies & stupidity.

Susan