Maybe Reverend Shaw Moore (John Lithgow) from the 1984 hit movie Footloose was onto something when he proclaimed that dancing led to sex! It’s also no surprise that nightclubs are dark places. These places can foster feelings of lust and sometimes we can actually go through the stages of foreplay, intercourse, climax and post-coital bliss just by making eye contact with someone on the other side of the dance floor.
There is tons of scientific evidence for this. Darwin thought that dance was part of the mate selection process and more recent research suggests that the way we dance might be influenced by our hormonal and genetic make up, such that we use dance to communicate the quality of our genes to potential mates.
Recent research also found that men with high levels of the sex hormone testosterone dance differently to men with low levels of testosterone and, most importantly, women prefer the dancing of high testosterone men. Now, if we couple this with the finding that the female sexual partners of high testosterone men report having more orgasms during sex than the sexual partners of low testosterone men we can see how dancing style is well worth looking at when we are looking for a mate.
What about women? When women are at the more fertile stage of their menstrual cycle they dance differently to when they are at the less fertile stage of their cycle. Research shows that men rate the dancing of women who are at the fertile stage of their cycle to be more attractive than the dancing of women who are at the less fertile stage of their menstrual cycle. So what’s so different about the dancing of fertile and less fertile women? It’s all in the hips. At the more fertile stage of their cycle women move their hips more when they are dancing compared with when they are at the less fertile stage.
So ladies, if you want to spice up your relationship . . . shake your tail feathers!