Women's sexuality is often seen as being complex and shrouded in mystery, whereas men's role as sexual beings is typically thought of as being more straightforward. However, it turns out that there are certain things men instinctively know about a woman's sexuality - without it having to be spelled out for them.
Indeed, according to a study carried out by Arnaud Wisman, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Kent, a man can - in theory - tell when a woman is aroused from the smell of her sweat.
The study - which was published in February by the Archives of Sexual Behavior - saw male participants rate women's scents. The scents were obtained as a result of the female participants being swabbed from a range of states of arousal - from 'completely turned on' to 'not at all in the mood'. And the men were asked to rate the aromas in order to determine the sexiest scent.
If you want to learn more about sexuality from the perspective of a bunch of fictional high school students, you need to watch Netflix's hit series The Sex Education Show:In two very similar exercises, 17 heterosexual female students were asked to work up a sweat by cycling for three minutes. Following that, the female participants watched 20 minutes of the 2004 erotic movie, 9 Songs, and then their sweat was swabbed for testing. The women were then swabbed after watching a totally unsexy documentary about bridge-building.
In a similar exercise, seven females watched a dance scene from the famously seductive blockbuster Magic Mike, in addition to their viewing of 9 Songs. They also read a passage from Fifty Shades of Grey and looked at 20 sexually explicit pictures.
The women were then made to watch more of the bridge-building documentary, watch unseductive footage of men and women dancing, read a story about knitting and look at 20 photos of tropical birds.
And that's where the 91 male participants came in. They were asked throughout each exercise which aroma they liked most. Ultimately, researchers came to the conclusion that men were most attracted to the women who were most aroused.
“This research suggests that these signals released along with corresponding visual and auditory expressions of sexual interest can produce a stronger overall signal that increases sexual motivation,” Wisman writes, per The New York Post, in his paper, titled Sexual Chemosignals: Evidence That Men Process Olfactory Signals of Women’s Sexual Arousal.
He continues: “Sexual interest may entail more than meets the eye and we hope that the current findings encourage further research to examine the role of sexual olfactory signals in human communication.”
