Lap dancers ‘on heat’ get big tips

Lap dancers who are taking the contraceptive Pill get fewer tips from the punters, apparently because men prefer more fertile women.

Geoffrey Miller and his team at the University of New Mexico compared the earnings of eighteen naturally cycling lap dancers, from clubs around the New Mexico area, with lap dancers who were taking the contraceptive pill, over a 2 month time span.

Lap dancing is the most intimate form of sex work that is legal in most American cities, and therefore probably as close as researchers can get to studying actual sexual activety.

In their study, the researchers found that during the non-fertile periods of the dancer’s menstrual cycles, both sets of dancers earned similar tips. But when naturally cycling lap dancers entered their fertile period, they earned significantly more in tips than their pill taking co-workers.

Dancers who weren’t on the pill made about $70 an hour from admiring men, during peak fertility, versus about $35 while menstruating and $50 in between. Whilst girls who took birth control averaged about $193 per shift, with a performance peak which was almost a third less than women who were not using the contraceptive. These normally cycling lap dancers earned an average of about $276 per shift (a gain of more than $80 per shift), the study showed.

Dr Miller said:

This is the first direct economic evidence for the existence of estrus in contemporary human females.

It was not made clear whether being at their most fertile made women dance any differently, otherwise ”signal” or ”leak” the fact that they were fertile; or whether men were somehow managing to detect the more fertile women; but the pill produces hormonal signals indicating early pregnancy, and this would not be an enticing target for a would-be suitor.

As a further criticism, this experiment used a rather small sample of dancers; but this aside, it does seem to show some very interesting preliminary evidence.

A complete copy of the paper can be downloaded from Dr Miller’s website:

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Posted by Jonathan in Psychology, Sociobiology

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 11:50 pm and is filed under Psychology, Sociobiology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Lap dancers ‘on heat’ get big tips”

1. saurabh says:
   

   This is dumb. First, the paper suffers from an incredible paucity of data - there are only 18 women sampled. With a sample size this small, it might merely be the case that the samples suffered from a large difference in the attractiveness of the participants, for example. Furthermore, the study makes no attempt to exclude a general bias in who decides to start taking the pill in the first place. We can presume there might be large differences in behavior merely on the basis of the social context surrounding pill-taking (e.g., if I am taking the pill it might merely mean that I have a boyfriend, and so am less interested when giving lap-dances.) A well-controlled study would have started with a group of women who had never taken the pill, but were willing to, and then randomly chosen a subset to start taking it.

   Finally, the main claim of the paper is not demonstrated by the data, viz., that there is an estrus cycle in women. What it can claim to show is that there is a difference in pill-taking and non-pill-taking women’s lap-dancing abilities (although given the scant statistics, it can’t even necessarily claim that. We’re also not presented with individual data, so it might merely be the case that the majority of these effects are due to one or two individuals who are high takers.) In order to demonstrate estrus, they would have to show a significant difference between peak and non-peak days in non-pill taking women that wasn’t the result of menstruation-related problems. This would be pretty hard to do, methinks, and at least from inspection the data doesn’t even bear out the idea that there IS a difference.

   All we can get out of this, MAYBE, is that the pill depresses libido. But that claim has been made before, and with much better evidence.

   November 6th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
2. Jonathan says:
   

   Some good points:

   All I can add is that I suspect that the small sample size would add a lot more to the variance of the results than might otherwise be expected; anecdotal evidence suggests that women who consider themselves to be ‘desirable’ are less reliable than average, which is given credence where the researchers note “Participants only logged on to the web site on about half of the days when they worked (27% of the 60 requested days).” Further, Lap dancers are probably not skilled accountants, and so the self-reported earnings might also be questionable, especially if any of them were trying to avoid paying taxes.

   Unfortunately, very little mention is made of the 14-page questionnaire that the dancers were given to complete. Possibly it asked whether the dancers were in a relationship or otherwise sexually active, although I suspect that since money would be the prime motivation for becoming a Lap dancer, the women would be incentivised to make themselves as attractive as possible, whilst a boyfriend effect would be minimal, and possibly even counteracted if the sample was random enough. I’d also hazard a guess that the median lap dancer would tend to rate as more attractive than a median member of the public.

   However, the problem with your suggestion for a well-controlled study is that the women selected may feel compelled to try to ‘help’ the researchers get the ‘correct’ result or otherwise act differently when they start taking the pill, which would bias the results in the opposite direction; and a double-blind trial wouldn’t really be possible either.

   So, I would class the experiment as pilot research that would be worth further investigation. The statistics do seem to show something, this might be an estrus cycle, but as you point out, the researchers can’t be sure they’ve eliminated every other possibility.

   November 9th, 2007 at 2:24 am

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