Fertility study suggests men prefer ovulating women: Bunk science or evolutionary truth?

Want to be irresistible on the dance floor, ladies? Then kick up your heels when you're ovulating.

A new study, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, finds that men consider women to be more attractive dancers when they're in a more fertile phase of their cycle.

Yes, apparently ovulation can make you sexier.

Study researcher Bernhard Fink of the University of Göttingen in Germany tells LiveScience that his research suggests ovulation isn't invisible to humans.

"These changes are subtle, and women may not always be consciously aware of them. However, men seem to derive information on women's fertility status from these cues."

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The researchers asked 48 women to dance to an identical drum beat during both their late follicular phase (the fertile phase) and the mid-luteal phase (non-fertile phase). The women had their hair pulled back and wore form-fitting outfits. The 200 men, mostly graduate and undergraduate university students, were then shown videos of the women's dancing silhouettes.

Watch an example of the silhouettes dancing below:

Even though the men had no clue that fertility was being studied, they considered the fertile women more attractive than the non-fertile women. This trend extended to videos of the silhouettes walking.

"Oestrogen has effects on muscular control, skill performance, and on ligaments and tendons, so it's reasonable to conclude that it could affect body movement," Fink suggests.

The phase of each women's cycle was determined by counting the number of days since the last period. A criticism of the study -- the most recent in a slew of studies linking human behaviour to evolutionary science -- is that it did not measure hormone levels.

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Unsurprisingly, not everyone is impressed with the findings.

"Another day, another questionable study about how ovulation subtly affects the orangutan-quadrant of a human man's brain," Doug Barry dismisses the study on Jezebel.

"People pick up these 'scientific' explanations for human behaviour and use them when it's most convenient, then set them back down and go about the business of wearing clothes, driving cars and going to work, all the while forgetting that people have largely outgrown or suppressed most of the animalistic instincts that supposedly orchestrate our choice in a mate." he writes.

Fink's study took its cues from a small 2007 study in which exotic dancers were found to get better tips during the fertile phases of their cycle. Because the dancers got close to the men, scientists couldn't determine if the attraction was based on a visual cue, smell, movement, or another factor.

It should be noted that only 18 dancers were studied, all from the same club, for just two months. Jezebel writer Rachel Rabbit White takes issue, citing factors like weather and tourism as more significant tip income-affecters than menstrual cycles.

Watch the video below about what men wished women really knew about sex.