Ovulation and attraction or what lap dancers can tell us about being a hottie...

A recent study of lap dancers by evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller and his assistant reveals how important a woman's fertility cycle is to how attractive she appears. It is safe to assume that a lap dancer is always going to try to appear as sexy and attractive as possible because doing so has a major effect on the tips she will receive. What Miller’s study found was that the amount of tips women received varied widely. And the variation wasn’t random. It was tied directly to the fertility cycle of the women. A menstruating lap dancer made on average $35 an hour, and a woman who was neither ovulating nor menstruating averaged $50. During their fertile periods, though, lap dancers were like Bathsheba on ecstasy, averaging a whopping $70 an hour, double the menstruating women. The researchers have speculated that men were responding to a variety of subtle cues, such as body odor and waist-to-hip ratio, but regardless of the cause, it is stunning evidence of the power of ovulation.
Most of the women reading this blog or my book Decoding Love are not lap dancers, but researchers have found that fertility has a number of similar effects on women in general. For example, men looked at pictures of the same women when they were ovulating and when they were not ovulating and rated them as more attractive during their ovulation. As with Miller’s study, researchers are not entirely sure why this is the case. They think that men are responding to subtle cues related to things like lip color, pupil dilation, and skin tone. A woman’s fertility cycle also appears to alter her behavior. For example, researchers have found that women dress more provocatively and wear more jewelry during ovulation. Another study revealed that ovulating women send out more signals to attract men than their non-ovulating counterparts. Ovulation even appears to influence a woman’s voice. In a recent study, men and women listened to recordings of women’s voices at different periods in their fertility cycles, and researchers found that women at their peak fertility were judged to have the most attractive voices. So, it turns out that women who want to get pregnant are not the only ones who should keep track of their ovulation cycle. Any woman who wants to meet a man should do the same and, at the very least, try to schedule dates during her days of peak fertility. One other piece of advice if you are a lap dancer or just trying to meet someone—being on the pill comes with a cost. According to the study, lap dancers on the pill averaged only $37 an hour (hardly different from menstruating women), while women not on the pill averaged $53. With a difference that stark, you can be sure that the pill has a similar effect on the appeal of women in general.