Ovulating strippers make bigger tips

[RichardPrins]

Ovulating strippers make bigger tips

Strippers looking to shake their moneymakers most profitably may need only swing to the beat of their menstrual cycles. In a revealing study, University of New Mexico researchers (three altruistic guys) recruited 18 subjects (scantily clad women dancers) to log their work shifts, earnings and menstrual cycles (phone numbers, too?) on a Web site for two months, or about 5,300 lap dances. The naked truth: participants scored $335 per five-hour shift during ovulation compared with $260 per shift during the luteal phase after ovulation and $185 while menstruating. The participants' scientifically gyrating pelvises provided the first direct evidence for human estrus—the equivalent of a baboon's bright red rump—the group reported in Evolution & Human Behavior. (Evol. Hum. Behav.)

Hidden charms
Lap dancers earn more when they are most fertile

“BECAUSE academics may be unfamiliar with the gentlemen's club sub-culture, some background may be helpful to understand why this is an ideal setting for understanding real-world attractiveness effects of human female oestrus.”

No doubt readers of The Economist are equally unfamiliar with this sub-culture, but for Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico, who penned the words above in a paper just published in Evolution and Human Behaviour, such clubs are a field site as revealing of human biology as the Serengeti is of the biology of lions and antelopes. Dr Miller is an evolutionary psychologist—and the author of the theory that the large brains of humans evolved to attract the opposite sex in much the same way that a peacock's tail does. His latest foray, into the flesh-pots of Albuquerque, is intended to investigate an orthodoxy of human mating theory. This is that in people, oestrus—the outward signs of ovulation—has been lost, so that men cannot tell when women are fertile.

This theory is based on the idea that in evolutionary terms it benefits women to disguise when they are fertile so that their menfolk will stick around all the time. Otherwise, the theory goes, a man might go hunting for alternative mating opportunities at moments when he knew that his partner was infertile and thus that her infidelity could not result in children.

However, this should result in an evolutionary arms race between the sexes, as men evolve ever-heightened sensitivity to signs of female fertility. Dr Miller thought lap-dancing clubs a good place to study this arms race, because male detection of female fertility cues would probably translate into an easily quantifiable signal, namely dollars earned. He therefore recruited some of the girls into his experiment, with a view to comparing the earnings of those on the Pill (whose fertility was thus suppressed) with those not on the Pill.

The results support the idea that if evolution has favoured concealed ovulation in women, it has also favoured ovulation-detection in men. The average earnings per shift of women who were ovulating was $335. During menstruation (when they were infertile) that dropped to $185—about what women on the Pill made throughout the month. The lessons are clear. A woman is sexier when she is most fertile. And if she wishes to earn a good living as a dancer, she should stay off the Pill.

[auroraaustralis]

The lessons are clear. A woman is sexier when she is most fertile. And if she wishes to earn a good living as a dancer, she should stay off the Pill.

So too if she wants to get a big, (hearted!?) partner!
aoz

[Amvordian]

The participants' scientifically gyrating pelvises provided the first direct evidence for human estrus

To be quite honest, I think I'll shoot myself if people starting deriving conclusions from stuff like this.

Surely there's been some proper research done on this somewhere?

[Aaron SF]

The lessons are clear. A woman is sexier when she is most fertile. And if she wishes to earn a good living as a dancer, she should stay off the Pill.

So too if she wants to get a big, (hearted!?) partner!
aoz

Uh huh... this if friggin hillarious. But I always thought it was kind of weird that we're one of the fiew mammals with no estrus/rut attraction cycles yet women do have cycles of fertility. That never made any sense.

The next question is what ARE the cues women are giving off? Possibly women are just more sexually aware (i.e. horny) while fertile, which would translate easily into a more genuine lap dance I think.

Now if only this information was usefull to me in some way, but I just can't think of anyway to exploit this for my own agenda.

[DMK]

There are some changes during ovulation that are more observable. For example:

- Women trend towards more revealing clothing during this time
- There is a phase shift in their mate preferences, trending towards more masculine physical features
- They are vastly more likely to cheat on you during this time.

[mwn]

If they talked about this kind of stuff in high schools, Americans kids would be much more interested in science.

[skepticalhomer]

There could be something that we are not aware of. The Human is not the most gifted of animals when it comes to smell , for instance , and I suspect that some kind aggregation pheromone is at work .

[HoJack]

I'm off to repeat the experiment in order to gather further evidence in support or refutation of this theory and thereby increase the body of scientific knowledge available to mankind. No need to thank me, just doing my bit.

[sprite]

I doubt if the males are picking up on anything more than the females' greater horniness. Females are not really passive creatures waiting to have their fertility detected by males!!!! It is far more likely the females being more proactively sexual.

There are sanitary towels (Always?) here in the UK that have, or had, little messages on the wrappers. One was about feeling more sexy around ovulation.

Though women can feel sexy at any time I would be very surprised if women did not feel more so when fertile. As women have very few and far between opportunities to become pregnant, the hormonal push around ovulation must, I think, still play a part.

Think of all those women who throw caution to the wind and get pregnant when caught up in the moment! Perhaps it is the peri-ovulatory hormonal moment. I read that 50% of pregnancies are still not planned.
I would suggest to the guys out there that when a woman comes on strong she may well be fertile so USE CONTRACEPTION or be prepared for the consequences.

[politas]

The participants' scientifically gyrating pelvises provided the first direct evidence for human estrus

To be quite honest, I think I'll shoot myself if people starting deriving conclusions from stuff like this.

Surely there's been some proper research done on this somewhere?

Are you saying this is not "proper" research? Could you perhaps explain for the dense ones in the audience like myself who don't immediately spot the glaring procedural errors in this study?

[RichardPrins]

Geoffrey Miller and his paper.

[Factory101]

OK - I'm gonna do some research on this and get back to you later...

[Lee-Anne]

As someone else mentioned there are other correlations with ovulation, women are more likely to cheat, wear revealing clothes, etc.

I know that for one week each mth I am a lot more confident, both in my appearance and in my professional ability (odd I know), I have always suspected that this concurred with ovulation but I have ever tested my hypothesis.

I don't think the correlation between tips and ovulation proves that males can detect ovulation, to me it seems more likely that women experience a change (hormones) that leads them to feel more confident and that this change makes them better strippers. It seems logical from an evolutionary standpoint that women would be more sexually aggressive when ovulating. Was there an independent rater to determine quality of the dancers ?

[foxfire]

Geoffrey Miller and his paper.

The 10/13-19/07 issue of "New Scientist" has a letter on this subject that I found interesting (WORD!). I can only add that frequency may vary when one ages into the "hot flash" zone.

[Ono No Komachi]

The participants' scientifically gyrating pelvises provided the first direct evidence for human estrus

To be quite honest, I think I'll shoot myself if people starting deriving conclusions from stuff like this.

Surely there's been some proper research done on this somewhere?

Are you saying this is not "proper" research? Could you perhaps explain for the dense ones in the audience like myself who don't immediately spot the glaring procedural errors in this study?

I'll help you there. And yes, I read the entire paper. Sorry, no pictures.

There was no direct observation of the either dancers or the customers and there was no laboratory confirmation of the women's hormonal state. The data was gathered through anonymous self reports. How reliable those were, nobody knows.

The conclusions drawn do not follow from the evidence. The authors assume the men are responding to the women's fecundity itself, not some difference in behaviour exhibited by the women because of their hormonal state. There is nothing in their actual data that would truly enable them to differentiate between these two effects.

Since I own a pair of currently working ovaries, I actually lean toward the second explanation. Lap dancers probably put on a better show when their heart (or something else) is in the job, so they make more money.