The Threatening Scent of Fertile Women

By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: February 21, 2011

The 21-year-old woman was carefully trained not to flirt with anyone who came into the laboratory over the course of several months. She kept eye contact and conversation to a minimum. She never used makeup or perfume, kept her hair in a simple ponytail, and always wore jeans and a plain T-shirt.


Each of the young men thought she was simply a fellow student at Florida State University participating in the experiment, which ostensibly consisted of her and the man assembling a puzzle of Lego blocks. But the real experiment came later, when each man rated her attractiveness. Previous research had shown that a woman at the fertile stage of her menstrual cycle seems more attractive, and that same effect was observed here — but only when this woman was rated by a man who wasn’t already involved with someone else.

The other guys, the ones in romantic relationships, rated her as significantly less attractive when she was at the peak stage of fertility, presumably because at some level they sensed she then posed the greatest threat to their long-term relationships. To avoid being enticed to stray, they apparently told themselves she wasn’t all that hot anyway.

This experiment was part of a new trend in evolutionary psychology to study “relationship maintenance.” Earlier research emphasized how evolution primed us to meet and mate: how men and women choose partners by looking for cues like facial symmetry, body shape, social status and resources.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/science/22tier.html

"The other guys, the ones in romantic relationships, rated her as significantly less attractive when she was at the peak stage of fertility, presumably because at some level they sensed she then posed the greatest threat to their long-term relationships. To avoid being enticed to stray, they apparently told themselves she wasn’t all that hot anyway."

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This attitude still assumes that women are somehow in competition with one another, and men have to fight some natural tendency to be promiscuous. why couldn't it be that the men find the women less attractive because they prefer the women they are with thereby making a fertile women less appealing because they have less interest?

I always used to be able to tell if a man was taken (and I mean in his own mind, not just in a relationship). On introduction, the ones who were still looking had a quick query in their eyes that I read as "Is it you?" They looked that way at every woman they met. It was very fast, but it was never in the eyes of men who were genuinely paired.

Committed men don't have to tell themselves anything. Because they aren't asking the question.

"why couldn't it be that the men find the women less attractive because they prefer the women they are with thereby making a fertile women less appealing because they have less interest? "

You're scenario might be true if men could consciously recognize women were in the fertile portion of their menstrual cycle. However, such a sensory detection of pheromones is subconscious and instinctual in nature. Even the conscious doesn't directly realize it after instinctively detecting such scents. Therefore preference, interest and the choice of monogamy are completely off the table as reasons of rating attractiveness.

I think another thing this study shows is the subconscious/instinctual predisposition for humans to be monogamous. Notice how subjects with mates rated females less attractive when fertile.

Using made up numbers and a 1-10 scale:

Men in relationship, woman is not in fertile part of cycle: Woman is a 7
Men in relationship, woman is in fertile part of cycle: Woman is a 5.

This study isn't a one-time question. As her fertility went up, she was rated as less attractive by men in a relationship. It's an odd result, since "unattached" men had the opposite response as she went through her cycle.

So they came up with a hypothesis, that this is something humans evolved. And since we evolved it, we can't use cultural mores to explain it. And pair-bonding for life did not arise until after human culture did.

All Ma Nature cares for is that enough Tab A's go into enough Slot B's to ensure product C(ontinuation of the species).

Political Correctness, gender equality, the burkha, sequestration, the excessive value assigned to a worthless piece of skin - These are all coping mechanisms, just a few of the innumerable tools we use to assemble societies around us.

"This attitude" as you call it, is simple acknowledgement that YES we do have to fight a "natural tendency" toward "animal behaviour".

It is I think true that our ability to consciously-unconsciously "choose" our sexual cues does make us unique in the animal kingdom, though I understand the dolphins can give us a run for our money when it comes to conscious sexual misbehaviour. However, we make a huge mistake when we try to deny the existence of "animal" sexual mechanisms in our makeup.

Stripped of all the social layering the flat bald truth is that men find huge sexual appeal in the androgyny of girls on the cusp of menarch and conversely women are attracted to a degree of aged ruggedness which signals an ability to survive and presumeably support a family.

And it's a behavioural pattern which persisted right through increasingly complex societies until the advent of Suffrage. And even today remains more or less the norm at the poorer end of the socioecconomic spectrum and the law barely suffices to stave off the greatest excesses.

And however we cut it, we ALL still appeal to that mechanism when we allow or make other "indicators" stand in for the two cues of ripe youth and proven provider. For women this has traditionally simply been looking as young as possible, and for men demonstrating one way or another that you have enough of it, to piss it up against the wall.

You might also take note of the emergent tendency for "forbidden meat" to do its damnedest to masquerade as "being of merchantable age" when given the slightest leave to do so. It's not so much Cosmo and Cleo and Teen Dream pushing an unacceptable meme, as those publications irresponsibly catering to innumerable sets of ripening gonads screaming that they want in on the game.

Well before women and children were allowed separate legal protection as human beings in their own right, they were given protection in another sense as assets/chattels/possessions of their husband or fathers depending on age and marital status. Looked at from a perspective of property rights, (specifically inheritance) the past treatment of women and children is entirely reasonable. Unacceptable by modern Western standards, but logical when you do consider women and children to be property. Even more so when you stack a desire for paternal surety up against a natural cuckoldry rate which has been measured by gentic assay to be between 25 and 30 percent.

It's there. Under all the social veneers, we're animals - fight it, fuck it, feed it or feed on it. Everything else (even shelter) is built around catering to those four imperatives. Civilisation is about doing that catering in as fair a manner as is possible.

K&R.