Disco clothing, female sexual motivation, and relationship status: is she dressed to impress?

Journal of Sex Research, Feb, 2004 by Karl Grammer, LeeAnn Renninger, Bettina Fischer

It appears that it is not only males who respond to short-term mating opportunities, but females as well. The timing of women's interest in and fantasy about non-partner men as well as the timing of their actual EPC behavior is evidence that women have a psychological adaptation that assesses circumstances and motivates them when EPC can be best realized (at fertile cycle times; Thornhill & Gangestad, 2003).

Such findings take us a step further in our understanding of the mechanisms that underlie female sexual motivation and sexual strategy. An important next step would be to see how partnership status, hormone levels, and sexual motivation interact with female sexual signaling in actual courtship contexts. We know that females have a hormonally mediated mechanism that influences mate attraction. From self-report and genetic testing, we also know that extra-pair copulation is common. What we don't know, however, is how female mating strategies in general are manifested in real-life settings.

FEMALE CLOTHING AS A SEXUAL SIGNAL

We hypothesized that one potential source for female sexual-strategy signaling in courtship contexts is clothing. Research on impression formation has long demonstrated that people tend to draw inferences about the personal characteristics of others based upon outward appearance (for a review see Jackson, 1992). Stable judgments about a person's character and capabilities are often made within a 100-millisecond glance (Goffman, 1959; Locher, Unger, Sociedade, & Wahl, 1993).

In courtship settings, clothing (or body parts emphasized through a specific lack of clothing) receives preferential attention in person-perception assessments. Santin (1995) investigated the relationship between a target's clothing and an observer's glancing. Analysis of eye movements found that areas of bare-skin display attracted preferential male attention. When looking at a female target, males' eye contact focused first on the head and shoulder area. From there, if a target had bare shoulders, males directed eye contact to all other areas of bare-skin display before moving on to clothing-covered areas. This suggests that skin display is tallied and given preferential attention before any other areas of the body are assessed.

In Santin's study, female targets who were wearing tight clothing and displaying more skin were rated by males as sexier than females wearing less-revealing clothing. Abbey (1987) and Hill (1984) also manipulated skin display and clothing tightness on female models to see what affect this had on male's ratings of attractiveness. Female models who accentuated their bodies were found to be more attractive as sexual partners. However, accentuating her body decreased a female's attractiveness as a marital partner (Hill, Nocks, & Gardener, 1987). This double standard makes sense when viewed from an evolutionary perspective. In a long-term relationship, males will value signals of sexual restraint in a partner. Thus, males use a female's clothing as an indicator for whether the female is following a long- or short-term sexual strategy.