Fertile women and their scent

A Milex Omniflex wide seal silicone diaphragm

The New York Times
February 21, 2011
Science - findings

The Threatening Scent of Fertile Women
By JOHN TIERNEY

“The 21-year-old woman was carefully trained not to flirt with anyone who came into the laboratory over the course of several months. She kept eye contact and conversation to a minimum. She never used makeup or perfume, kept her hair in a simple ponytail, and always wore jeans and a plain T-shirt.

Each of the young men thought she was simply a fellow student at Florida State University participating in the experiment, which ostensibly consisted of her and the man assembling a puzzle of Lego blocks. But the real experiment came later, when each man rated her attractiveness. Previous research had shown that a woman at the fertile stage of her menstrual cycle seems more attractive, and that same effect was observed here — but only when this woman was rated by a man who wasn’t already involved with someone else.

The other guys, the ones in romantic relationships, rated her as significantly less attractive when she was at the peak stage of fertility, presumably because at some level they sensed she then posed the greatest threat to their long-term relationships. To avoid being enticed to stray, they apparently told themselves she wasn’t all that hot anyway.

This experiment was part of a new trend in evolutionary psychology to study “relationship maintenance.” Earlier research emphasized how evolution primed us to meet and mate: how men and women choose partners by looking for cues like facial symmetry, body shape, social status and resources.

But the evolutionary mating game wasn’t just about finding a symmetrical face in the savanna’s equivalent of a singles bar. Natural selection favored those who stayed together long enough to raise children: the men and women who could sustain a relationship by keeping their partners happy. They would have benefited from the virtue to remain faithful, or at least the wiliness to appear faithful while cheating discreetly.

It’s possible that some of the men in Florida were just trying to look virtuous by downgrading the woman’s attractiveness, the way a husband will instantly dismiss any woman pointed out by his wife. (That Victoria’s Secret model? Ugh! A skeleton with silicon.) But Jon Maner, a co-author of the study, says that’s unlikely because the men filled out their answers in private and didn’t expect the ratings to be seen by anyone except the researchers.

“It seems the men were truly trying to ward off any temptation they felt toward the ovulating woman,” said Dr. Maner, who did the work with Saul Miller, a fellow psychologist at Florida State. “They were trying to convince themselves that she was undesirable. I suspect some men really came to believe what they said. Others might still have felt the undercurrent of their forbidden desire, but I bet just voicing their lack of attraction helped them suppress it.”

It may seem hard to believe that men could distinguish a woman who’s at peak fertility simply by sitting next to her for a few minutes. Scientists long assumed that ovulation in humans was concealed from both sexes.

But recent studies have found large changes in cues and behavior when a woman is at this stage of peak fertility. Lap dancers get much higher tips (unless they’re taking birth-control pills that suppress ovulation, in which case their tips remain lower). The pitch of a woman’s voice rises. Men rate her body odor as more attractive and respond with higher levels of testosterone.

“The fascinating thing about this time is that it flies under the radar of consciousness,” says Martie Haselton, a psychologist at U.C.L.A. “Women and men are affected by ovulation, but we don’t have any idea that it is what is driving these substantial changes in our behavior. It makes it clear that we’re much more like other mammals than we thought.”

At this peak-fertility stage, women are more interested in going to parties and dance clubs, and they dress more attractively (as judged by both men and women). Some women’s attitudes toward their own partners also change, according to research by Dr. Haselton along with a U.C.L.A. colleague, Christina Larson, and Steven Gangestad of the University of New Mexico.

“Women who are in steady relationships with men who are not very sexually attractive — those who lack the human equivalent of the peacock’s tail — suddenly start to notice other men and flirt,” Dr. Haselton said. “They are also more critical of their steady partners and feel less ‘one’ with them on those few days before ovulation.” But that doesn’t mean they’re planning to walk out.

“These women don’t show any shifts in feelings of commitment,” Dr. Haselton said. “They don’t want to leave their steady partners. They just want to look around at other men and consider them as alternative sex partners.”

This fits the “good genes” evolutionary explanation for adultery: a quick fling with a good-looking guy can produce a child with better genes, who will therefore have a better chance of passing along the mother’s genes. But this sort of infidelity is risky if the woman’s unsexy long-term partner finds out and leaves her alone to raise the child. So it makes sense for her to limit her risks by being unfaithful only at those times she’s fertile.

By that same evolutionary logic, it makes sense for her partner to be most worried when she’s fertile, and that’s just what occurred in the relationships tracked by Dr. Haselton and Dr. Gangestad. The unsexy men became especially jealous and engaged in more “mate-guarding” during the stage of high fertility — perhaps because they sense the subtle physical cues, or maybe just because they could see the overt flirting.

One safe way for both men and women to stay in a relationship is to avoid even looking at tempting alternatives, and there seem to be subtle mental mechanisms to stop the wandering eye, as Dr. Maner and colleagues at Florida State found in an experiment testing people’s “attentional adhesion.”

The men and women in the experiment, after being primed with quick flashes of words like “lust” and “kiss,” were shown a series of photographs and other images. The single men and women in the study couldn’t help staring at photographs of good-looking people of the opposite sex — their gaze would linger on these hot prospects even when they were supposed to be looking at a new image popping up elsewhere on the screen.

But the people who were already in relationships reacted differently. They looked away more quickly from the attractive faces. The subliminal priming with words related to sex apparently activated some unconscious protective mechanism: Tempt me not! I see nothing! I see nothing!

This is good news for fans of fidelity, but there’s one caveat from a subsequent study by Dr. Maner along with C. Nathan DeWall of the University of Kentucky and others. This time, the researchers subtly made it difficult to pay attention to the attractive faces. Both men and women responded by trying harder to look at the forbidden fruit. Afterward, they expressed less satisfaction with their partners and more interest in infidelity.

The lesson here seems to be that too much “mate-guarding” can get in the way of “relationship maintenance.”

“We shouldn’t want our partner to be looking at lots of other people, because that’s bad for the relationship,” Dr. Maner said. “At the same time, preventing them from looking doesn’t help either, and can backfire.” Left to their own devices, conscious or unconscious, they might just manage to restrain themselves.”

Personal comment: It is fascinating research, but something the sex trade has known empirically for years. Which is why knowledgeable girls in the trade are fitted with copper IUDs – or some few of us use cervical barriers - rather than take hormones so we are protected while continuing to ovulate. Being fertile is much better for business. In the research described above the fertile woman made no attempt to engage her male subject in eye contact or in any physical way that could have been construed to indicate she was available. When I’m fertile as I am now (I'm CD12) I look forward to flirting in the hope that I may find a surprise lover and I occasionally I do.

Intimate counseling: It was yesterday that I was counseling the parents of a St Lucy’s ballet (and AST) student about their daughter being Bi and the fact that she needs to show more interest in men if she is going to successfully compete in the insular world of classical ballet. Not that a talented Lesbian can’t compete, but, as with Gay males, there is often not the chemistry between a dancer and her partner that there is with a Het couple when sexual tension between the two is present. The mother went to discuss this over coffee with the daughter while the father stayed with me to discuss how I thought they should proceed. As soon as his wife was out of the room he came on to me saying he could smell my fertile scent. I was amazed since I had a Penetrator inserted at the time. It was a delightful surprise to me that his sense of smell was that keen and that he wanted sex with me. He is a very big name in the entertainment industry and supposedly is happily married. It took very little effort on his part to convince me and once he found I was willing it was quick, rough and marvelously satisfying for us both.

Unplugged: They are staying in a pool bungalow at the casino so from the various background checks I already knew he was free of STIs. He never asked or seemed to care whether I was clean he just didn’t want to wear a condom, which was fine with me. However, he was interested in my being protected and even though I had an Oves cap screwed down tight on my ripe cervix I said nothing about it. When he slipped his hand under my pareo to grope me he found I was wearing only a plug. He wanted to know why I was wearing a vaginal plug and I told him it was to make it more difficult for student’s randy fathers to seduce me. He got a good chuckle out of that as I was showing him how to break the seal by pulling down and forward on the removal loop. After which I let him unplug me. As I put my dripping Penetrator in a Ziploc bag and dropped it into my dancebag I had a pretty good idea what he was after because I had heard that in the fetish clubs of LA he was into vaginal rubber. So when he asked what I would use for protection I said I would use a diaphragm. It was pure lust on my part and I longed to feel him thrusting inside me.

The Omniflex as an aphrodisiac: I knew he wanted to watch me insert my diaphragm (Men are such voyeurs!) and you should have seen the smile on his face when I said I would let him watch! I had a spare Milex Omniflex – like the one pictured at the top of this entry - in my dancebag for just that sort of situation. I like to insert a Milex wide seal when a man is watching because for those who are somewhat familiar with diaphragms most guys in the U.S have only seen All-Flex diaphragms. A Milex looks different being made of translucent very light pink silicone and has a 1 cm lip around the inside of the rim to provide a wider surface to seal against the vaginal walls for a stronger vacuum in the dome. The two notches in the lip are a guide for where the user should place her fingers when compressing the rim for insertion. In the case of the Omniflex it doesn’t really matter at which points on the rim it is compressed. However, for the arcing spring rim it is crucial that the rim be compressed at those two points because the arcing rim has two elbow hinges for compression into an arc and for the hinges to fold correctly and not be damaged the rim MUST be compressed at those two locations.

A quickie: It was going to be a very quick encounter because we weren’t sure how long his wife would be gone, so I didn’t bother to check the dome for pinholes, tears, thin spots or cracks since I’d done that before I slipped it into my dancebag. I just added a bit of Semécide+, the O9 spermicide, in the dome before insertion. He was cautious, wanting to feel my cervix under the dome after I had the Omniflex properly positioned and pumped down to get the residual air out of the folds and increase the vacuum so I pushed down to force my ripe cervix closer to the entrance to my vagina where he could feel it under the protective silicone membrane. By that time we were both aroused. I gasped in delight as he inserted two fingers inside me and I felt the pressure of his fingertip as he probed the soft dilated opening of my fertile cervix through the rubber dome. I quickly unbuckled his slacks. They dropped to the floor and he stepped out of them so we wouldn’t stain them because I was very juicy with natural lube even though my FCM was trapped behind my cervical barriers. I eased his bone hard erection out of his Speedo cup and was delighted to find that he was in great shape for a man in his 50s with strong slim legs and a hard flat belly and his glans was already weeping pre-ejaculate.

Getting laid: He picked me up and laid me on the conference room table. I put my calves on has shoulders and crossed my ankles behind his head where I could move my sweaty feet shod in Gaynor pointes so he could take advantage of the scent of damp fabric and estrogenic sweat. I spread my labia with the fingers of one hand while guiding his tip with the other. When he was in position he put his hands on my hips, tightened his grip and shoved his tip inside me. With one long magnificent thrust he pinned me to the table filling me with his manhood the tip of which was pushed hard against the tip of my ripe cervix. He was a nearly perfect fit and it was marvelous being filled with a powerful male’s erection knowing he was going to fill me with hundreds of millions of sperm any one of which if it reached my egg could have me carrying his child… if I let it go that far. We both knew we didn’t have much time so he was very considerate to first concentrate on my G-spot giving me my pleasure before finishing himself with shuddering gasps as he squirted semen against the silicone membrane protecting my cervix. It would have been wonderful to have been able to have an afterglow snuggle with him but there wasn’t time.

He stayed buried inside me for a minute or two until he became flaccid and then withdrew. I had baby wipes ready for both of us to clean up a bit and I Kegeled his load into a Puffs tissue dropped it in the trash and stepped into a post-coital thong, one with an absorbent pad to collect the discharge that continued draining even after Kegeling most of his semen out of me. He had his clothes on and our breathing was back to normal and the sexual flush was off our faces before his wife returned with their daughter. The women had decided that the daughter would follow where her sexuality took her and that she would concentrate on her academics and have ballet as a serious interest, but not as a career path which I think was what the daughter wanted all along. It was the mom, who in her teens had wanted to be a dancer, who was pushing her daughter toward a career in dance for which the daughter does not have the drive, the ‘I’ll succeed whatever the cost’ the ‘I’ll die if I can’t be a dancer’ mentality it takes to become a dancer . It was a wise and courageous choice because you can’t change a person’s sexuality