Seven Signs of Subliminal Ovulation

Other mammals signal that they're fertile in obvious ways, but human females seem to advertise in more subtle ways. In this episode, Molly and Cristen present seven (supposed) signs of subliminal ovulation.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff mom never told you?
From house Stop works dot Com. Well, and welcome to
the podcast. This is Molly and I'm Kristen. Kristen. Let's

(00:20):
start this podcast with strippers. Yes, the stripper guests. I've
been waiting for this. We're actually not going to talk
about strippers throughout the podcast, just we're gonna start with
a one study about strippers and exotic dancers that got
quite a bit of press a few years ago. Um.
It was about how women who were stripping made bigger
tips when they were ovulating. Yeah, there was a psychologist

(00:43):
named Jeffrey Miller from the University of New Mexico who
basically pulled strippers to find out where they were in
their menstrual cycles and essentially how fertile they were, you know,
whether or not they were ovulating, and then asked him
how much they were making off of tips. And they
found that dancers made about seventy bucks an hour during

(01:06):
their peak fertility a k a. When they are ovulating,
versus about thirty five dollars while men straining and fifty
bucks when you know, they're just hanging out in between. Yeah,
and it was he sort of made the suggestion that
if you're on the pill and you're a stripper, you're
really kind of hurting yourself financially. Because the women on
the pill had no sort of uh cycle like this.

(01:29):
You know, they never got as high at seventy. They
average thirty seven at all times, even during that sort
of period that you call it just sort of hanging
out when the other women were making fifty dollars. And
you know, the suggestion was made that because uh, hormonal
contraception basically fools your body into thinking that you're pregnant,
that men could somehow pick up on this. And no

(01:50):
one really wants to chip a pregnant stripper. I guess,
I mean, I guess there. We'll let the listeners answer
that one, Molly. But he was just saying that, you know,
something happens when women opulate that makes them more attractive
to the opposite sex. And uh, this is a theme
that's been picked up and exploited in a lot of

(02:11):
different uh studies about you know, what sort of hidden
signs of population do women send out? Because it's not
like we're monkeys that sort of lift up our our
hind ends when we're in heat. I mean, we're sort
of the only mammal that doesn't do that, doesn't advertise, hey,
baby making time, we have concealed fertility. There's no yeah,

(02:33):
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 um around the time we ovulate.
It's because Molly and I go over so many studies
every week about women's behavior and also a lot of
it's linked to hormones and our cycles and all of that.

(02:53):
And you know, light bulb just went off and Molly
said the other day saying, whoa, we have like all
of these all this research just about these crazy things
that we start doing when we ovulate. So let's talk
about it. And I think that with this discussion we
should stay right up front to take all of this
with a grain of salt. Yeah, I mean, you basically

(03:14):
have to buy into the fact that when a woman
is ovulating, she wants to get pregnant, which an old
evolution you know, old days, Yes, evolution would have wanted
us to produce as many children as possible. Uh, to
have great reproductive success to continue the species. And now
we don't really have that same need. Yeah, I mean
some people do. Some people want to get pregnant when
they're ovulating. Not everyone does. And here's another issue that

(03:37):
I want to throw out upfront with these studies as well.
This is all assuming that women are looking to attract
men exactly, Molly man I say it, it's all very heteronormative. Yeah,
we were. We were really disgusted yesterday because we were
we were trying to they were talking about some of
these things that we'll get into about how there's female

(03:58):
and female competition. You're ovulating because you know, you want
to get all your enemies out of the way and
get that man all to yourself, and so we don't
really know. And science has really explained that if you're
trying to attract a woman exactly how ovulation would affect that,
because when you get female to female company, Actually, should
you know if I wanted to attract a woman, should

(04:18):
I avoid going on a date when I'm ovulating because
I would feel like she was somehow my rival as well? Like, yeah,
science still has to work some details out here. So
this assumes that women are trying to catch men and
trying to get pregnant, and that they are sending out
subliminal signs to do so. Alright, So subliminal sign number one,
you dressed to impress. Yeah, and you guys are probably

(04:41):
and girls have probably seen this some version of this
research out there before, because it comes up a lot.
And the idea is that when we ovulate, we without
thinking about it, we'll just put on our sassios outfits.
We will dress the nine, we will dress the nines
like I will put on my accessories. I'm gonna put

(05:01):
on my hot heels. Might get your hair did. I
might get my hair did, or you know, at least
shower every day. And I really appreciate it when you
all in hopes. Well I wish wish is that I
was always ovulating for that reason, all in the hopes
of having my egg um fertilized. Yeah, shall we um?

(05:25):
And the newest study on this, I mean there have
been several different studies on it. The newest one came
out just this week that we're recording the podcast or
the University of Minnesota was asking a hundred women at
different stages of their menstrual cycles to choose what clothes
or accessories they would hypothetically buy, and they found that
those that were most fertile, those that were ovulating, would
go for a very tight sweater, slinky dresses, lower cut tops,

(05:48):
things that society deems as sexy. And the whole reason
that this study was being done is because businesses are
going to try to exploit that, because if there's something
that can be exploited, they'll make us buy more clothes.
They're going to try and exploit it. And they were saying,
you know, obviously all women are ovulating at different times,
but you would just periodically send out your sexiest outfits

(06:09):
and just hope that you hit the woman at the
right time in the month, because she's gonna go craze. Yeah,
she's gonna want She might look through a closet and
not feel like there's anything in there that is sending
out the right kind of signals, so of course she's
gonna run to the mall and splurge on some new
many something or other. Um. And the interesting thing about
this is the study was not published in some kind

(06:31):
of health journal. It was published in the Journal of
Consumer Research. But it's how much companies want our dollars.
By the way, women, it's that they're trying to track
when we ovulate. Okay, but they're not the only study.
There was also another one where they had women take
one picture when they were just hanging out as Christian
but it uh not fertile, basically in an aludeal phase.

(06:53):
And then they had women in their most fertile phase
take a picture and the same one was taking the
picture twice, and they had people pick like, in which
picture is the woman trying to look more attractive, and
both men and women were able to pick out the
fertile picture as the picture when she was trying to
look most attractive. And you know, if you're going into

(07:13):
a lab twice being told you're gonna be having a
picture taking, you're not told why, but I mean you
would think that both times when we would put a
little extra effort into it. But it turns out that
even even knowing you're having a picture taken in a laboratory,
the fertile one fertile picture. I wish we could see
these pictures so because surely it's not you know, one
day you walk in when you're in your luteal phase,

(07:34):
if you will um surely you're not going to just
walk in and like, you know, overalls and a T
shirt and then all of a sudden you're ovulating and
you come into a cocktail dress. I'm really curious to
know how, um, how subtle these changes were. Well, let
me give you some examples from the study. One. Uh one,
some of the fertility pictures were marked by outfits like
tops with lace trim, wearing skirts instead of pants. One

(07:58):
woman added a fringing next scarf, and several women show
simply shed more skin. And this is from a study
that was in the journal Hormones and Behavior two thousand six.
And uh as with all our studies, I'll put them
up on the blog when this podcast air so you
can check it out yourself. But you know, they even
tried to exempt out women who might have showed up
dressed differently because they had a job interview or they

(08:19):
had class that okay, I mean they even allowing that
there was something else going on in the women's lives
that they were dressing for. These judges were still able
to pick out the fertile outfits. And apparently this is
all moderated. These clothing choices are all moderated. By each
individual's socio sexuality. In other words, the amount of I guess,

(08:42):
kind of sexual mojo that you want to project when
you are out in public, and apparently it shifts throughout
the menstrual cycle, and again and again with all of
these studies. Their explanation is female to female rivalry. You
want to stand out from the crowd. But uh, it's
not just physical, you know, making ourselves look good on

(09:04):
the outside. We also tend to project a different vocal tone,
which is kind of funny because you know, I've got
all these weird voices that I do my life, and
I would I would like a study done on myself
of my ovulating voice, because I bet it's nuts. Well,
you know it's funny. You know. Sometimes you guys will
write in your listeners and say something like, oh, we

(09:25):
really like the way so and so sounds, and I
think it'd be a really interesting study. I don't want
to be part of it, but I think I know
where you're going. I like this, but I bet that
there's some researcher out there trying to get money to
study different ways podcasters voices sound based on their menstrual cycles.
Do it on NPR? Yeah, because um, there was a

(09:47):
study that came out from u c l A about
how women who are ovulating say uh sentences in a
more high pitched way that it is deemed more attractive
by males because they had these udents record just a
simple sentence, I think they said, I'm a U c
l A student, and the guys were able to pick
out which women sounded more attractive, and by and large

(10:10):
it was the ovulating ones. And the researchers attribute this
to hormone secretions in the larynx. That's just how much
these hormones affect us from top to bottom that even
you know, even when we're in our ludial or our
UH or in our follicular high fertility phase, these these

(10:31):
hormones are somehow not only determining how we dress, but
also how we speak. And you know what's interesting with
all these studies, as usually they have the women who
are on hormonal birth control, like the birth control pills
serve as the control group because those women are not
subject to the same rise and fall of hormones that
can lead to pregnancy. Because as I said at the beginning,

(10:51):
the pill essentially makes your body think that it's always
pregnant and so um women who are on birth control
don't exhibit these same same vocal cues and they don't
dress definitely through about the month. So it's really a
subject for another podcast about whether you know that the
pill is totally blocking us off from you know, potential
mate finding expeditions. I guess that, well, you know, starting

(11:14):
with this with the stripper, like we said, like they're
they're getting the same, they're getting thirty seven dollars versus
seventy dollars. They're not going out of their way to
dress differently. Their voices, yeah, stay flat across the way.
And in terms of facial attractiveness, again, the women on
birth control are the control group, because there was this

(11:35):
study that came from the University of Newcastle saying that
female facial attractiveness increases during your fertile face. In other words,
you get prettier when you ovulate. Subliminal sign number three
is that your face changes in really small ways. And
again this was another thing where they had the women
come into the lab at different parts of their cycle

(11:56):
and take pictures and they put a few examples in
the in the actual research. And I will say that
in one of the sets. I did think that the
woman who was opulating looked a little prettier. I didn't
agree with the with the one on the examples though,
But apparently to men, these subtle differences are somehow a
visible cue that, hey, that lady needs to get pregnant.

(12:18):
Let me go get her, let me go get her number,
and again like possibly ask her to dinner. Like crist
And said, you have to take it with a grain
of salt in this day and age, because we're not
all constantly going around thinking pregnant, pregnant, pregnant, exactly. And
and I was saying this to Molly before before we
started recording, that the funny thing about reading all of

(12:38):
this is, while yes, it's all like pregnancy, pregnancy, fertility,
I would argue that for you know, the demographic mind
and Molly's demographic who you know, maybe we don't really
want babies right now. And I would say that maybe,
you know, the men we are seeing probably don't want
babies right now. You know, we have a little more
liberty to to try to plan things a little bit more.
So it's kind of like the opposite. We're sort of

(13:00):
working against nature, if you will. Yeah, because I mean, Uh,
they were saying that these women's their faces become more symmetrical,
and symmetry is always prized as this, you know, standard
of beauty that attracts the other gender. And uh, your
face becomes somehow more symmetrical during ovulation. But not only
do women's faces seem to change a slight bit, the

(13:24):
way women perceive men also changes, or at least the
kind of men that were attracted to. And this happens
whether or not you have a partner, right, And I
think you might have touched on this in our Adultery
podcast talking about how even if a woman is married
or has a boyfriend or girlfriend, they still feel attracted
to different people. And you might, if you're in a relationships,

(13:45):
start seeing at the times when you feel more attractive
to a person can be tracked to your ovulation, because
science would say that it can. Yeah, because supposedly when
you ovulate, you are more social in general, You're you
tend to want to go out more and be around
more people. You also get more flirtatious, and you also
get more flirtatious specifically with very masculine looking men. Yes,

(14:08):
masculinity apparently is the key attraction factor And what was
interesting about these sets of studies about mate preference in
opulation that we were looking at is that it's only
in the short term exactly. These are not long term threats,
which is how they're explained that these women can be
married and still attracted to the idea of a fling
with this guy who looks really masculine, got the square jowl,

(14:30):
because that's what do we what do we mean when
we say masculine. It's like then, according to the pictures
in the study, it was, you know, a softer jawline
versus the more angular, stronger jawline. And I think there
was a difference with lips. I mean, we you know,
in certain behaviors. It was the way they conducted some
of these studies is they would have the men pretend
they were competing to win a dinner date. So they

(14:51):
would do things like asked the men to you know,
convince the woman that they should take him on the date.
And they it was, you know, they make factors out
of whether he trashed the other guy, whether he was
very confident in himself, or whether he was more just
like self deprecating, and you know, they took all these
factors and kind of assigned them to variables, and that's
sort of how they got this idea of what masculinity was.

(15:14):
But you know, sort of confusing and some of these
things we've talked about over the course of the podcast,
christ and about how women are looking for the guy
who will actually stay there and raise the children. You
would think that they would want that sort of long
term person, but they were actually more attracted to to
guys who in the short term could give them the
genes they needed him to have the best possible baby,

(15:34):
and they were less concerned about who would be there
to actually help them raise it. I guess that's a
whole another study entirely. And while all of this is
going on, apparently with you know, with women maybe having
a little bit more of a wandering eye in our
follicular phase of our menstrual cycle. Uh, men react to
this subliminately as well by mate guarding or they've noticed

(15:56):
that couples will tend to fight a little bit more,
men become a little bit more jealous, and you know,
watch I mean well, I mean because it makes sense,
you know, if all of a sudden, for a couple
of days, like your your lady friends seems to be
talking to other dudes. Um, but there does seem to
be you know, the male innate response to this, and again, Molly,
I mean, I got to come back to it again

(16:18):
and again. Like with all of these studies, it makes
the assumption that women and men are you know, want
to get together as opposed to women and women or
men and men. And also you know that it's all
driven by this need to reproduce. But you know, you know,
we're already up to I think some subliminal sign number
five or six of of all these things. We found
of ways that women exhibit these things and how men

(16:40):
somehow pick up on them, and it is really interesting
to see that, you know, for people who do fit
into that that um, male female chase or ways that
we do pick up on each other's bodies. One study
that we're not even talking about because there were so
many studies about this behavior was how you know, men
could sniff the women that were opulating and the women

(17:01):
who were ovulating smelled better to them. Yeah, they would
just they had women where um and it was kind
of the reverse of another study that we've talked about before,
but they actually had women wear undershirts I guess without
like any additional Deodora in her perfume, and then had
men smell them, and the women who had been opulating
while wearing these shirts smelled better to the guys. So

(17:21):
it's on so many we talked about site, We talked
about sound of voices, scent, it's everything, and um, while
women do tend to be more flirtatious, there is also
a flip side of this behavior where um, women become
a little more self protective at the same time, right,
And this is a phenomenon I became uh familiar with

(17:42):
when I was looking at one of our listener sites.
Diana Fleishman, she's written in before because she does research
on this um about ways women protect themselves from sexual
assault when they are most furtl Because you know, if
you're walking, if you have to, like, for example, take
out the trash at night, you probably don't think, oh, gosh,
i'm ovulating. I shouldn't go outside because if I get raped,

(18:02):
I'll get pregnant. But apparently subconsciously we do that we know, oh, man,
this is this is the time I need to guard
myself from my beloved for the best firm donor I
can find, and I don't want to put myself in
any danger at this risky time. And so other researchers
have done studies that show that women will adapt more

(18:24):
so called non risky behaviors like staying in and studying,
or maybe sticking with groups of people instead of going
out alone. Like women tend even though they are being
so flirtatious and sending out all these signals, they don't
do things like invite a strange man into their home
just for the sake of being pregnant. That we still have,
thank God, some ability to discern good versus bad choices.

(18:47):
And so they've done a few studies where they show
that women, uh, you know, if they're going out to
a club like christ And said, they'll stay with a group,
where if they're going to bar, they'll go with a group,
and they won't walk at night alone or go jogging
in the park at night. So it's it's really interesting
how women do protect themselves despite the fact that studies
have found that were more mobile, that we are out there,

(19:08):
you know, mingling and wearing this clothing and do dads,
that we still are a protective of ourselves. And I
think and I feel like this this study is a
nice balance to all of these you know other things
where it's like, oh, were you know, our eggs dropping
our filopian tubes and now we're just going boggers and
buying things and wearing freely dresses all of the mew,

(19:31):
when did I start wearing lipstick? I don't know, you know,
it's it's nice to know that we are like practicing
some you know, some self protective behaviors as well, and
that maybe we do have a little bit of control
over this whole um apparent pregnancy drive and not to
and and I should also say we're not Molly. And
I'm not saying you're trying to disparage the quest for

(19:54):
having a child at all. It's just this constant theme
in all of these these studies that at the end
of the day, the only driver is reproducing um. And
let's talk about how women walk, yes, because this is
another interesting sort of self protective thing that we do.
And this was unexpected, you would think with you know,

(20:14):
when we put on our fancy duds, our fancy duds
and we go out because we want to be social
and for some reason we just have an itch to
talk to some masculine faced men. You think that we
might shake it a little bit, you might amp our
sontera maybe, you know, give him something to look at
while we walk away. But they actually have done a study,

(20:37):
uh two thousand eight in the Archives of Sexual Behavior,
where they turned the lights out and just did like
h light points on the women's bodies that the men
could just watch how the lights moved, and uh, the
men found the least sexy walks, you know, just the straightforward,
not not hippie walks the most attractive. Yeah, and that

(20:58):
corresponded to the women and who were ovulating. So while
we are doing ourselves up, apparently we're just all about business.
You know, we're not thinking about having some catwalks, saunter
whatever through the party or the bar down the street.
We are, um, we're walking a little bit differently. We're walking.
I mean, we we have done things to garner sexual attraction, attention,

(21:22):
but we don't want the unwanted sexual attention. Again, it's
a protective thing where we can modulate who is going
to pay attention to us. And finally, while all this
is going on, just to throw one more subliminal behavior
into the mix, apparently we are so busy getting ourselves
done up walking in a very straightforward manner that we

(21:46):
don't even have time to eat. We eat much less
when we were opulating. Yeah less. Yeah, a lot of times,
you know when women will talk about gaining a little
bit of weight of feeling bloated around their period and
it's awful. But the good news is girls, when you ovulate,
you just gonna drop that weight right off, so don't

(22:06):
worry about it. Yeah, And this work comes from Daniel Fuessler,
who is our old friend from the foot Size podcast.
He looked at all these other studies that you know,
the researchers had reported that the women were eating less,
but didn't make the connection as to why they might
be doing that. And he thinks that if you go
back to our hunter gatherer times, which all this does,

(22:28):
back when we were hunting from mates and gathering babies,
um that because food was a scarce commodity back then,
if you only had this very small window to get
pregnant and continue the species, you would have somehow your
body would have adapted so that you had more attention
to getting pregnant then, more than the attention that would

(22:49):
have been necessary to you know, go hunt or gather
berries it was just a way to keep you mindful
that this is a pregnancy time, not a sit by,
sit by a fire and eat dinner time. There's no
timber romantic. And they've done similar studies in female baboons, monkeys, dogs, pigs, scouts, sheep,

(23:10):
dear uh. Suffice to say it happens in animals too.
When animals, female animals go into heat, they tend to
eat less. And they've done studies trying to figure out
kind of the biochemical reason why this is happening, and
they found that a certain molecule in our gut that
tells our body that it's had enough to eat. Basically,

(23:32):
it signals us that, um, you know, we're satisfied, we
don't need to eat anymore. When estrogen concentrations go up,
the amount of this satisfaction molecule, if you will, drops,
and even it still does that, even though now we
live in a time of plenty where you know, it's
not like you've got to worry about going out and
hunting your own food. So he's saying, this is a
pretty strong instinct that the body has to make you

(23:55):
focus on getting pregnant. So that's a lot of subliminals
signs that it's baby making time. Yeah, and if we
want to know, uh listeners thoughts on this, because like
we've said, I mean, it's kind of take it all
with a grain of salt. But the most amazing thing
that you just might not believe is the amount of

(24:15):
research that's been done. Because we're just talking tossing out
different examples, but a lot of these examples are comprised
of multiple studies from multiple researchers at different institutions. People
are very interested in how women act when we opulate,
like really interested. So you might as well get in
on that that goodness of abundance of writing about it

(24:36):
if you're a researcher and you need to grant apparently
like opulating women is the way to go. Already giving
you that one idea about podcast voices, Yeah, so until
he needs us, all right, let's hear ma'am. I've got
one here from Liz. She writes, this is about the
penis sized podcasts. She's very controversial podcast. Well, this was

(25:00):
one of the funniest emails I think we got. She writes,
I worked in an ice skating rink for the last
two years and part of my job was handing out
rental skates for the public skate sessions. Every session, the
higher size men's skate sized swellman up would always run
out much sooner than the other sizes, even though I
could tell that the renter was only a nine or
a ten. These men who rented too big sizes were
always the ones with pretty girls on their arms, and

(25:21):
they were obviously trying to impress their dates by ordering
large sizes. I have heard that you know what they
say about men with big feet jokes? So many times
I could scream, but then these men would spend the
whole night falling on their butts and looking like idiots.
Every session I would have to wrap at least one
ankle just because Mr Macha Man was ashamed to meet
his shoe size in front of a girl. What do
you think is a better date skating with your man

(25:43):
or sitting on a bench and applying icy hot to
his ankle? So a question for the ages, a real
problem for men who try to exaggerate. Um, well, I've
got one. Here is sort of along the same lines.
This is in response to our Condoms podcast. Uh and
this is coming from Tracy, and she says, since I
don't tolerate hormonal birth control well, and I'm also allergic

(26:05):
to sperm acide. Condoms are pretty much the only option
for my husband and myself. I did notice that while
you mentioned sheef skin or animal membrane condoms, you left
out a very important piece of information. Animal membrane condoms
only protect against pregnancy. They don't protect against most STDs,
including h I V. I think it's important for people
to be aware of that if they choose animal membrane condoms,

(26:28):
and they should do so only if their partner is
monogamous and has been recently tested for STDs. So thank
you Tracy for the little public health announcement, and if
you have anything you'd like to share with us, feel
free to shoot us an email. It's moms Stuff at
how stuff works dot com. Also right on our Facebook.
That's a great place to not only get our feedback,
but also engage other listeners as well. And Molly and

(26:51):
I love reading what you guys have to say on
our Facebook accounts, so find us on their stuff. Mom
never told you. You can also follow us on Twitter
and the last We also have a blog that you
can read, and it's on how stuff Works dot com
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(27:14):
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