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Seeing beyond pink and blue to decode the mysteries of men and women.
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Announcer
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You from howstuffworks.com.
Molly Edmonds
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. This is Molly.
Cristen Conger
And I’m Cristen.
Molly Edmonds
Cristen, let’s start this podcast with strippers.
Cristen Conger
Yes! The stripper cast. I’ve been waiting for this.
Molly Edmonds
We’re actually not going to talk about strippers throughout the podcast, we’re just going to start with one study about strippers and exotic dancers that got quite a bit of press a few years ago. It was about how women who were stripping made bigger tips when they were ovulating.
Cristen Conger
Yeah, there was a psychologist named Jeffrey Miller from the University of New Mexico who basically polled strippers to find out where they were in their menstrual cycles, and essentially how fertile they were – whether or not they were ovulating – and then asked them how much money they were making off of tips. And they found that dancers made about $70 an hour during their peak fertility, a.k.a. when they were ovulating, versus about $35 while menstruating and $50 when they were just hanging out in between.
Molly Edmonds
And he made the suggestion that if you’re on the pill and you’re a stripper, you’re really hurting yourself financially. The women on the pill had no cycle like this. They never got as high as $70. They averaged $37 at all times, even during that period that you call hanging out when the other women were making $50. And the suggestion was made that because hormonal contraception fools your body into thinking that you’re pregnant, that men could somehow pick up on this. And no one really wants to tip a pregnant stripper, I guess.
Cristen Conger
We’ll let the listeners answer that one, Molly.
Molly Edmonds
But he was saying that something happens when women ovulate that makes them more attractive to the opposite sex. And this is a theme that’s been picked up and exploited in a lot of different studies about what sort of hidden signs of ovulation do women send out. Because it’s not like we’re monkeys that lift up our hind ends when we’re in heat. We’re the only mammal that doesn’t do that, doesn’t advertise, "Hey, it’s baby making time."
Cristen Conger
We have concealed fertility. There’s no outward sign. But the reason why we’re doing this episode on these subliminal messages, if you will, that women might send out around the time we ovulate is because Molly and I go over so many studies every week about women’s behavior. And a lot of it’s linked to hormones and our cycles. And a light bulb just went off in Molly’s head the other day saying, "Whoa. We have all of this research just about these crazy things that we start doing when we ovulate." So let’s talk about it. And I think with this discussion, we should say right up front to take all of this with a grain of salt.