The Strip Club as Scientific Laboratory

avatar for inno123
inno123
<p>While this is kind of old I was surprized not to see it in the archive.</p>
<p>Have you ever felt in a club that this was all just some big scientific experiment that you were engaged in?&nbsp; Or that the women and you were being manipulated by hidden forces beyond either of your knowledge?</p>
<p>Ok, that may just be paranoia, but that doesn't mean it isn't the truth.</p>
<p>Human behavior, particularly sexual behavior and attraction is very hard to study.&nbsp; People either exaggerate or forget, and sample sizes are small.&nbsp; Many studies have people comparing pictures, which hardly compare to the full range of human interaction. In addition people change their behavior when they know that they are being measured.</p>
<p>What you really need is a large sample size of women and a large sample size of men.&nbsp; Then have all the women interact in person with all the men in the same environment.&nbsp; The women should all be trying as much as possible to be sexually desirable and the men should not be socially constrained from judging the women.&nbsp; But hold it, you say, that is exactly what a strip club is!</p>
<p>And that was also the conclusion of some psychologists from the University of New Mexico.&nbsp; In addition they realized that there was also a built-in way to measure how sexy the men found the women with out asking awkward questions or having to sit there with a clipboard taking notes.&nbsp; You just measure their tip income.</p>
<p>So what were these scientists trying to learn?&nbsp; If you have ever dealt with dogs or cats or livestock you know that for most mammals the females signal that they are fertile.&nbsp; This is called estrus.&nbsp; Humans dont.&nbsp; You can't walk down the street and notice the roughly one in ten adult women who are about to or just have released an egg. This was thought to be an advantage to humans to encourage men to care for and stay with women all the time.&nbsp; Also that it might result in more harmonious societies.&nbsp; If you have ever seen tomcats fight over a female in heat you might agree.</p>
<p>But what if women hadn't really lost the ability to signal their fertility to men but only that humans had lost the ability to consciously realize that we were doing it?&nbsp; So flyers and e-mails went off to Albuquerque area topless clubs recruiting women (paid $30 for completing the 60 day study).&nbsp; The women completed a basic health questionaire including method of birth control if any.&nbsp; They were also given a anonymous code for logging into a web site after every shift.&nbsp; The site would ask the number of hours worked, the tips recieved, and whether they had just started or ended their period that day.</p>
<p>The first interesting thing they learned was that the dancers who were on some form of hormonal birth cotrol, such as the pill, had lower tip incomes pretty much across the entire month.&nbsp; Now it is safe to say that every dancer comes to every shift trying everything at their disposal (moves, scent, grooming, cosmetics, clothes, vocal tone, banter) to be as sexy as possible.&nbsp; But the women who were also going through a normal monthly hormonal cycle and releasing an egg somehow were doing it better.&nbsp; One might have thought that maybe during their period the pill users might have had an advantage since their periods are generally shorter and milder in symptoms.&nbsp; But raging PMS be damned the non-pill users still earned more.&nbsp; However all of the women tended to earn less during those days.</p>
<p>It got even more interesting when they plotted the earnings of the non-pill using women across their cycle.&nbsp; On the days around when they would be fertile there was a big jump in tip income!</p>
<p>Now, this has to be completely subconscious.&nbsp; If you looked at a dancer and in any way realized 'you know, if I had unprotected sex with her she would be really likely to get pregnant' it wouldn't make you want to take her to the VIP room.&nbsp; Also if the dancers were thinking 'ooh I so have an egg ready for these guys' it would't put an extra something in their routine as a result.&nbsp; Yet somehow, underneath the surface that is exactly what is happening.&nbsp; In other studies that had interviewed strippers about their work none of them mentioned a middle of the month boost in their tips.&nbsp; So the women weren't noticing it even though they were likely taking in more money on those days month after months, year after year.</p>
<p>What is tantalizinly left unanswered however is exactly how women are broadcasting their daily fertility level.&nbsp; It most likely isn't clothes or the dance moves themselves.&nbsp; Laboratory studies have shows several subtle changes in scent, facial attractiveness, soft-tissue body symmetry, waist-to-hip ratio, and verbal creativity and fluency.&nbsp; Yet all are so subtle or subconscious that nobody ever looks at a woman and says 'yup, definitly ready to get knocked up today'.&nbsp; <br />
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So if a familiar dancer at a club has an extra hotness today it might actually be coming from her ovaries!&nbsp; <br />
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Link to full publication:<a href="http://www.unm.edu/~gfmiller/cycle_effec… />
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http://www.unm.edu/~gfmiller/cycle_effec…

12 comments

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avatar for sinclair
sinclair
14 years ago
Interesting article. I think birth control does alot to fuck up the natural chemical balances.
avatar for inno123
inno123
14 years ago
True sinclair, I have heard women say how going off the pill suddenly had them feeling incredibly horny.&nbsp; The funny thing is that, horny or not a dancer is going to be doing everything she knows how to do to get your money.&nbsp; And dancers are certainly&nbsp;pros at faking sexual desire. So it is either something she doesn't know she is doing&nbsp;or just can't be faked.&nbsp;
avatar for winorhino
winorhino
14 years ago
I read the publication. Self reporting bias in the data, and I am too weak in my stats knowledge to know if the F test the researches used was correct for that data, but very interesting.<br />
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Also, Sinclair, that's the point of birth control, &quot;to fuck up the natural chemical balance&quot; so that&nbsp;it stop menses.
avatar for inno123
inno123
14 years ago
@winorhino:&nbsp; Self-reporting was unavoidable.&nbsp; Could you imagine any dancers participating if it meant having a&nbsp; researcher check their money at the end of each shift&nbsp; and then physically verify if they were menstruating or not?&nbsp; I know strippers are used to strange requests, but 'I need to swab your vagina for signs of blood' is over the top.<br />
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Besides, you would have to imagine some reason why women not on hormonal birth control would exaggerate their income more than&nbsp;others, and that they would exaggerate more while they would ovulating!
avatar for georgmicrodong
georgmicrodong
14 years ago
&quot;Ooh look, we found out there's some attraction between human beings that nobody can consciously detect!&quot; No shit, Sherlock, it's called pheromones...<br />
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Where the fuck have these guys been for the last 25 years?<br type="_moz" />
avatar for inno123
inno123
14 years ago
@georgmicrodong.&nbsp; Despite marketing claims of&nbsp;cologne and perfume&nbsp;manufacturers I do not think that there has been a single controled, peer-reviewed paper that has shown pheremones actually causing men or women to change behavior (like tipping more).&nbsp; There is plenty of evidence in other species but in terms of humans changing otherwise voluntary&nbsp;behavior, nada.&nbsp; Maybe it is pheremones, maybe something else.&nbsp; If they could conclusively prove it was pheremones, and which ones, it would be a breakthrough.
avatar for georgmicrodong
georgmicrodong
14 years ago
<a target="_blank" href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob… />
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You need to be a member to read the actual articles.<br />
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They <b>claim</b> to be peer reviewed anyway.&nbsp; And while the article is primarily about male pheromones affecting females, the likelihood that the reverse isn't true as well seems so vanishingly small to me that I'm inclined not to consider it.&nbsp;&nbsp; Especially since anecdotal evidence suggests that it is indeed true in the reverse.&nbsp; I live in a house with three women.&nbsp; When Aunt Flo is visiting, all at the same time, I want to leave the house.&nbsp; It's not a conscious decision, I just get the urge to leave.<br />
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Seriously, when my eldest daughter reached menarche, it took her about 7-8 months to regularize and sync up with her mother.&nbsp; When my youngest daughter started, it only took her about 5 months to sync up with the other two.&nbsp; Now that my wife has pretty much stopped, the other two are parting ways as well, I think because they don't spend as much time with each other as they did with Mom.<br type="_moz" />
avatar for inno123
inno123
14 years ago
@gerogmicrodong:<br />
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Menstrual synchronization is a well known phenomenon, and the role of pheremones in it is well known.&nbsp; But this is about changing a conscious behavior, specifically sexual desire.
avatar for georgmicrodong
georgmicrodong
14 years ago
Calling &quot;sexual desire&quot; a conscious decision is a bit of a stretch.&nbsp; You made a conscious decision about what girls are attractive to you?&nbsp; Which ones you go after is certainly a choice, but not which ones you actually desire.<br type="_moz" />
avatar for inno123
inno123
14 years ago
@georgemicrodong:<br />
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So you buy lapdances unconsciously?
avatar for georgmicrodong
georgmicrodong
14 years ago
Buying lap dances falls in the &quot;which ones one goes after&quot; category, i.e. the part one consciously chooses.&nbsp; Which ones make one <b>want</b> to buy lap dances from them hasn't obviously been a conscious decision.<br type="_moz" />
avatar for ztrzi2000
ztrzi2000
14 years ago
This was a brilliant, fascinating article! Thank you very much for posting it here.
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