Or an alternate title could be–“Women are Like Other Animals.” I can’t put my finger on what exactly it is that troubles me about this study. I’m not sure if it is that this seems like a waste of time and research funding or if it is the constant obsession with trying to link all female behavior with biology, in particular hormones.
What do you think?
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What’s the problem? Hormone levels have sometimes subtle and sometimes blatant effects on behavior, male and female. Everyone who has lived with a woman of menstruating years or a man sliding into his 50s/60s knows this.
We’re not ticktock automata, we’re biological entities, largely if not entirely under the sway of the messy interactions amongst our sticky, sweaty, juicy bits. I don’t see it as a waste to ascertain the parameters of these interactions, or as “gender essentialism” to acknowledge that estrogen does stuff.
So would you agree that you dress “nicer” when your testosterone is up?
my immediate reaction is that 30 test subjects — all the same age & social demographic –does not an accurate reflection of nearly one half of the human population make.
Rachel:
That’s not a valid conclusion to draw from the data presented. What women tend to do when ovulating doesn’t tell us anything conclusive about what men tend to do in response to fluctuating testosterone levels. I have no doubt that testosterone levels do tend to have some effect on behavior in both men and women–I’m just not sure it involves clothing.
Brandon said, “….I’m just not sure it involves clothing.”
That’s part of the point.
Well, the article is irritating as hell. What we don’t know is exactly how many women were involved, exactly how many times they were photographed, and whether anything similar might be noted in guys. If the women came in “several times” how close are we getting to that peak of fertility?
The other thing that really jumped out at me: not sexier, the researcher says, more fashionable. Hmmm. Nothing subjective there. We’re making a distinction between an unembellished and an embellished tank top?
Rachel,
Of course testosterone affects behavior. Castration, anyone?
Men and women ARE different–men don’t happen to ovulate, and don’t happen to have the same type of hormonal variations. Men have their own sets of hormones, and variations, and they undoubtedly affect us.
# Rachel S. Writes:
October 10th, 2006 at 1:04 pm
That’s part of the point.
Can you elaborate? I suspect this one of those tone-of-voices-don’t-show-on-the-internet communication issues.
The tone should be sarcasm and frustration. LOL!! I think Kaethe elaborates very well on the problem with the operationalization of “fashionable.” Of course, the definition of fashionable is certainly culturally specific, and there are cultures where women and men pretty much wear the same thing all the time.
So would you agree that you dress “nicer” when your testosterone is up?
I don’t know; my hormone levels don’t vary in a way correlated 1:1 to an obvious biological clue, so I usually don’t know what they are in a way that would let me draw practical correlations. But it isn’t an inherently absurd hypothesis, and if some scientist measured a bunch of guys and found that we had some different social behavior (like dressing) at certain times of our testosterone cycle, I wouldn’t be shocked.
Not to mention that, from the perspective of evolutionary biology, it is rather unlikely that our first hominid ancestors had a variety of outfits to tempt their prospective mates.
I have no doubt that testosterone levels do tend to have some effect on behavior in both men and women–I’m just not sure it involves clothing.
What, fertile men don’t want to advertize their fertility by looking good?
Kaethe: Good points. One wonders how carefully blinded this study was. If the researcher or the evaluators had any clues at all about where the subjects were in their ovulatory cycle I’d toss the whole thing out as invalid.
Writes Robert:
“What’s the problem? Hormone levels have sometimes subtle and sometimes blatant effects on behavior, male and female. Everyone who has lived with a woman of menstruating years or a man sliding into his 50s/60s knows this. ”
I don’t know this. I DO know that all my life I’ve heard of PMS and so forth, but usually it just means that a woman between 12 and 50 is mad, and I have long ago chalked it up to bullshit. Men in their 50 and 60’s who are facing mortality and old age- well, chalk that up to hormones if you wish. Personally, I think is hormones’ effect on behavior may be as significant as the weather’s effect is. Significant? Maybe, sometimes, who cares.
This study is irrelevant BS. Ovulating women were called “hot” only 10% more than non-ovulating women. Besides this post, I’m putting this study into my mental rubbish bin.
Several things bother me about the study talked about in the article Rachel has linked to, some of which have been talked about and so I won’t repeat what other people have already said, but this occurred to me as soon as I read the piece: Assume, for the moment, that there is, in fact, a cause-effect relationship between menstrual hormonal changes in women and the different way these women dressed. How do we know, how do the people who did the study know, that what these women were trying to do was advertise their availability/fertility? How do we know it is not the case that the women dressed more fashionably because “approaching menstrual onset” (as it was put in the article) made them feel, for example, less attractive and so they were compensating for that fact? In other words, it seems to me that the study, at least as reported in the article, leaves out a whole range of psychological and emotional, not to mention social and cultural, factors that might be implicated in the relationship–again, assuming for the moment that their is one–between a woman’s period and the way she chooses to dress during that time of the month. It is the automatic assumption that this has to do with advertising fertility that is the biggest problem.
By way of counterexample, or at least making the discussion a little more complex: Some time ago–I don’t have the time to try to look this up right now–there was a study done (maybe in England) which showed that heterosexual men who suspected their partners of being unfaithful produced more sperm than did men who did not have such suspicions. The conclusion of the study, if I remember correctly, had something to do with this being evolution’s/nature’s way of at least trying to give the ostensibly cuckolded man a reproductive advantage over his rival(s). In other words, jealousy greatly increased the fertility of the men in the study.
Again, I am going to assume that the study itself is fine and that the connection between jealousy and sperm production is really there. The men in this study had an unconscious physiological response to an emotional experience, one which seems to me very obviously to attest to an evolutionary dynamic going on in men’s bodies. It is quite something else, however, to assert that woman, in response to a physiological process, have the kind of very specific socio-cultural response that is talked about in the article.
This sounds plausible based on my personal experience, actually. My sex drive fluctuates noticeably with my menstrual cycle, and I tend to get really horny around the time I’m ovulating. When single, this sometimes makes me more motivated to hit on people I’m attracted to, which means I sometimes make an effort to wear clothes that make me feel attractive when I know I’m going to be around those people.
Richard’s point about the dangers of reducing the complexity of people’s motivations is really good, though. It’s easy to come up with an evolutionary-psych “just so” story about virtually any behavior, but such stories are often simplistic and loaded with cultural assumptions.
I think it’s worth noting that people were only able to identify the ovulating women correctly in 60% of cases. Based on how they reported it, I’m sure this difference is statistically significant (i.e. that there’s a very small probability that it’s due to chance alone). However, the effect size is very small – people fared only 10% better than chance, which certainly isn’t enough to declare that this is a universal trend clearly visible in all women. If anything, this study shows that ovulation is one minor factor among the countless factors that may affect how a given woman chooses to present hersels.
In fact, it’s entirely possible that the majority of women in the study showed no difference in dress at all, but a minority of them did in fact ‘dress up’ while ovulating and thus affected the group averages enough to produce an overall significant effect. Although looking at group behavior in the aggregate is certainly a worthwhile endeavor, people have a really bad habit of overgeneralizing from it and ignoring the variability and range of behavior within the group in question, which leads to obnoxious conclusions like “allwomen dress sexy when they’re ovulating!” (along with all sorts of other dichotomized claims about “how men and women are”)
What trishka said; we’re looking at a third-hand report of a study that, supposedly, looked at how “fashionable” a group of 30 women dressed at different times in their ovulatory cycles.
Frankly, scientists can attribute practically everything to hormones if they conduct their study in the right way. I was reading an article the other day about a research institute conducting studies on the “male menstrual cycle.” I guarantee they will “prove” that men suffer from PMS.
I don’t think this is gender essentialist. I don’t want to go into evaluating the quality of the study (though I’ll point out that I read all of these accusations of small sample size right after I read the discussions on the Iraq excess deaths studies, which are full of “small sample size isn’t bad” arguments); still, I think the best thing to point out is that the study is linking the reproductive cycle (something that falls very much at the “biological” end of the scale of human traits) to a very complex, culturally mediated behavior (the choice of clothing normatively available to people in a culture, and the meanings associated with the alternatives).
I think the danger here is in losing the fact that the behavior is very much underspecified by the biology.
The methodology seems suspect. How did they determine precisely where the women were on their fertility cycles?
Like many similar studies, this seems to draw an obvious and trivial conclusion (humans, bound by biology, are most inclined to facilitate sex when it is most likely to lead to reproduction) and try to make it seem highly significant.
There’s likely no equivalent possible test for males, because they are capable of reproduction at any time, so ought to be (by these biological standards) always “on.”
Women ought to be inclined to facilitate sex at any time in their cycles, since humans (like other primates) use sex as a bonding and power mechanism. If it were most efficient simply to have sex during the tiny fertile window, women would have heat cycles and never want sex any other time.
Jesus Christ. I’ll call the reaction here as I see it: a mountain of people who, confronted with research results they don’t like, are applying standards to it that are, at their convenience, either too low (as in “I’m not going to bother to read the article that’s linked carefully at all”), too high (“I’m going to apply standards of evidence to this that I don’t apply to studies whose results I agree with”), or worse, both (“What happens when a strawman tries to jump an impossibly high bar of evidence?”).
Richard Jeffrey Newman Writes:
Where do you find that claim actually attributed to them in this article? The closest I can find is the final sentence, but that alludes to a different study. Perhaps they do in fact believe that, but notice that this article is not emphasizing such a claim, and also, that their study as described is designed to establish not what the women “were trying to do,” but rather, whether they produce any cues to their fertility cycle, and whether such clues have an influence on other people.
b Writes:
Please read the article.
mythago Writes:
You too, please.
mythago Writes:
Strawman. It is clear from reading the article linked that they are not claiming otherwise. They are claiming that despite all that, there still are behavioral differences in women, and that other people do react differently to them.
Again, I’m not endorsing the study or its results. I’m just playing what-if, and my take on it is that if the results are indeed true, the appropriate answer is “so what?”
I wrote:
To make this point clearer, here’s what I mean: I think that if you’re troubled by the conclusion of the study, you’re drawing some sort of conclusion from it that you shouldn’t, and you need to acquire a more nuanced way of thinking about the relationship between human biology and culture.
I mean, I don’t think the idea that in the female fertility cycle may set up a mental landscape favorable to choosing reproductive behavior is all that terrible (or surprising, for that matter). Let’s put it this way: the claim that people murder others because they drink alcohol and the claim that it is impossible for alcohol to affect people’s thoughts are both absurd. The present case is perfectly analogous: both the idea that women are robots driven to reproduce on a certain time of the month by their hormones, and the idea that the chemical substances that people’s bodies generate can have no influence on their thoughts and decisions, are both absurd. In one case you’re leaving agency and culture out of the equation; in the other case, you’re leaving out the body.
So I don’t need one of those expensive ovulation detector sets from the pharmacy after all! I don’t even need the thermometer! I can just observe my clothing choices (choosing between ‘old rag’ and ‘slightly less old old rag’).
Bewdy!
SJ xx
I’m just playing what-if
Here’s another what-if: What if we decide that a single study ought to be judged on what it actually says, and what its results actually are, rather than jumping to a conclusion we like (“Gawrsh! Women do really get horny when they ovulate!”) based on a newspaper report?
Nobody made your exaggerated claim that hormones do nothing. What people are scoffing at is the jump from a news report of a single study to proof positive that females are slaves to their ovulation.
Perhaps some of you science folks have a different opinion, but I found it rather odd that the study (which was small) eliminated non-partnered women because ‘previous studies have found stronger ovulatory effects’–what, they were afraid that the effect would be too small to notice?
Yeah, what if we do it? Because I don’t see a lot of that going on in this thread. I see people raising objections that can be shot down by anybody with basic reading skills who reads the newspaper report. And given that the people making the objections certainly have at least elementary reading skills, what do you want me to conclude?
A jump that was made by who and where, when, cited by who in this thread? You’re reacting to a strawman.
Um, what makes you think I’m “one of those science folks”?
Sure, the study likely has flaws, as does most every study ever released. That doesn’t address my point: even if its conclusion is right, so what? You’ll need some heavy duty extra premises to go from the study’s conclusion to whatever people here seem to dread that conclusion would imply; and I think that shooting down those extra premises would be a better investment of time and effort than half-assed, clearly wrong objections to the study, that can be shot down by simply reading it accurately.
Um, what makes you think I’m “one of those science folks”?
Um, what makes you think that by addressing all readers of the thread and noting that I don’t even play a scientist on TV, I was implying that you, personally, had to be a scientist?
Because I don’t see a lot of that going on in this thread.
Of course not. It’s no fun to be a contrarian if you have to admit that there is more than one point of view present.
I found it rather odd that the study (which was small) eliminated non-partnered women because ‘previous studies have found stronger ovulatory effects’–what, they were afraid that the effect would be too small to notice?
Probably. The effect was subtle but statistically significant. Married people don’t try as hard to attract members of the opposite sex, so including them may have dampened the effect. This is perfectly legitimate, as long as you don’t try to draw a demographically broad conclusion from a demographically narrow sample. The only people I see doing that here are the ones who are objecting to the study.