Human oestrus.
For several decades, scholars of human sexuality have almost uniformly assumed that women evolutionarily lost oestrus--a phase of female sexuality occurring near ovulation and distinct from other phases of the ovarian cycle in terms of female sexual motivations and attractivity. In fact, we argue, this long-standing assumption is wrong. We review evidence that women's fertile-phase sexuality differs in a variety of ways from their sexuality during infertile phases of their cycles. In particular, when fertile in their cycles, women are particularly sexually attracted to a variety of features that likely are (or, ancestrally, were) indicators of genetic quality. As women's fertile-phase sexuality shares with other vertebrate females' fertile-phase sexuality a variety of functional and physiological features, we propose that the term oestrus appropriately applies to this phase in women. We discuss the function of women's non-fertile or extended sexuality and, based on empirical findings, suggest ways that fertile-phase sexuality in women has been shaped to partly function in the context of extra-pair mating. Men are particularly attracted to some features of fertile-phase women, but probably based on by-products of physiological changes males have been selected to detect, not because women signal their cycle-based fertility status.
Gangestad
Steven W
SW
Department of Psychology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA. sgangest@unm.edu
Thornhill
Randy
R
D002755:Choice Behavior; D005260:Female; D005298:Fertility; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D008597:Menstrual Cycle / Q000502:physiology*; D012725:Sexual Behavior / Q000502:physiology*