Abstract
The ability to assess various sexuality-related characteristics as well as sexual interest of a women in mating context solely from women's gait (i.e. while observing women from a long distance, before investing energy to get into direct contact with a woman) could bring evolutionary benefits in terms of increased fitness to members of both sexes. However, this presumption was not scientifically tested.In the first part, 56 women filled in The Sexual Desire Inventory (Spector et al., 1996) and The revised Sociosexual Orientation Inventory (Penke et al., 2008).
Then 56 standardized videotapes of women's gait were recorded under the two experimental conditions: 1) woman was asked to imagine she walks alone on the sand beach; 2) to imagine walking on the same beach accompanied by a very attractive men. Women were walking 50 metres on the straight ground, with no heels, they were recorded from their back.
In the second part, randomized videotapes (15 s) were rated by 50 observers (25 men and 25 women), who were asked to assess: a) the level of woman's sexual desire on 7 point scale; b) the level of woman's ability to enjoy dyadic sexual activities on 7point scale. The concordance between self-rated dyadic sexual desire (Sexual Desire Inventory, subscale of dyadic desire, Spector et al., 1996) and self-rated promiscuous tendencies (The revised Sociosexual Orientation Inventory Total Score, Penke et al., 2008) of women and sexual desire/sexual enjoyment rated by observers was tested by bivariate correlation.Our results show that men as well as women are able to detect the level of dyadic sexual desire and promiscuous tendencies from woman's gait, which can be implicated in inter-sexual and intra-sexual competition in mating.