The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: December 14, 2008

Official News page 9


REAL LIFE NEWS: CORNY CHAT-UP LINES SOMETIMES WORK

by Hazed

Men: are you puzzled by the fact that your corny chat-up lines sometimes work on women, but at other times leave them cold? Well now scientists have an explanation. It's probably just bad timing.

Apparently, women are much more receptive to being chatted up by a stranger when they are at the most fertile point in their cycles - in other words, when there's a chance they can get pregnant, that's when they'll respond to your lines.

Researchers recruited handsome young men to experimentally hit on women on a street corner to determine whether fertility affects receptivity. On sunny summer days, the hunky men approached the first young women they saw on a street corner and delivered a standard pick-up line:

"Hello. My name's Antoine. I just wanted to say that I think you're really pretty. I have to go to work this afternoon, and I was wondering if you would give me your phone number. I'll phone you later and we can have a drink together someplace."

Not all that corny, really!

If the woman said yes, "Antoine" replied, "See you soon," and left. If she rejected his advances, his standard response was, "Too bad. It's not my day. Have a nice afternoon."

Then, to find out how fertile the woman was, and to let Antoine off the hook, a female researcher approached her less than a minute after Antoine had left, and explained that it had been an experiment. The women were asked to fill out a short survey covering age, contraception use, days since the last period and so on.

Presumably enough of the women filled in the survey, despite their disappointment at not getting a date with the hunky Antoine, to provide meaningful data! What emerged was that amongst those women not taking the pill, those in their fertile phase accepted 21.7% of advances, but those in the midst of their periods just 7.8%. There was no such difference with women on the pill, who were half as likely to accept as non-pill-taking-women overall.

Well, I assume the researchers considered the fact that bloating, cramps and other side-effects of periods do rather put you off... well, anything, really!

Still, the study does seem to show that women are most receptive to advances when they are likely to get pregnant.


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