Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [70]
But that is only one weapon in the female arsenal. Beyond eye contact and smiling, what else can women do? Psychologist Monica Moore has spent thousands of hours watching women flirt with men and has cataloged fifty-two nonverbal signals that women use to draw men’s attention. Forthwith, a brief sample of her findings: primping, smiling, nodding, leaning forward, the lip lick, the hair flip, and the object caress. There is also the glance (darting or fixated). The giggle, the skirt hike, and the breast caress. The solitary dance. All the way up to more elaborate techniques, such as the presentation of the neck (a sign of submission in the animal kingdom) and the parade, which is probably self-explanatory. She even ranked them based on how they were used. “Smile at him broadly” was far and away the winner with “throw him a short, darting glance” and “dance alone to the music” tied for a distant second. For those who want the full arsenal, I recommend her article “Nonverbal Courtship Patterns in Women,” which appeared in the July 1985 issue of Ethology and Sociobiology. For those women who worry that they are not attractive enough to be successful in these circumstances, there is more good news. The number of signals you send counts for far more than how you look. According to Moore, the women who were approached the most often were not those who were the most attractive but those who signaled most frequently—women who sent out more than thirty-five signals an hour averaged more than four approaches an hour. There is no question that thirty-five times an hour is a lot of signal sending, particularly for the shy among us, but (in what is becoming a familiar refrain) Decoding Love has never promised that the mating dance was easy.
THE RELUCTANT MALE
Some women are probably reading this and wondering why this burden has been shifted onto them. According to all of our gender stereotypes, men are supposed to be the ones making the move, but it seems that little piece of conventional wisdom is completely wrong. Moore also determined that women’s nonverbal cues were responsible for initiating two-thirds of the encounters between men and women at a bar. Far from being Lotharios, most men are reluctant to initiate contact (so much so that researchers have dubbed them “reluctant males”). This should provide some solace to women who find themselves waiting endlessly for men to approach. Worse, much of the time, men also fail to pick up the signals that women send them. This helps explain why women have to send out so many signals before men respond. In fact, women are usually more aware of the signals they are sending than men are. For those women who read this with a certain amount of distaste for the whole idea of trying to attract male attention, Mae West sagely advises, “It is better to be looked over than overlooked.” By the way, the opposite logic does not hold true. Men reading this should not start indiscriminately signaling. That will backfire and make them appear less attractive.
It’s not much of a stretch to say that women should treat the entire episode as if dealing with a dim-witted child. How dim-witted? Researchers report that even when women initiated the encounter, men later assumed that they took the lead. The sad fact is that most men are more oblivious to nonverbal signals than women are, which isn’t to say that they don’t respond to them or even that they don’t send them. But they do have less conscious awareness of both signals