Do Shakira’s hips lie? I’m confused.
A Friday Funny (though this could also fall under the category of a Friday Cry-y): Women sway their hips the most when they’re least fertile, according to Queen’s University study.
Scientists at Queen’s are apparently blowing the minds of current zoology, claiming that women, contrary to a popular belief, make themselves less, not more, attractive when they’re “fertile.”
The study got 40 women (my goodness! 40 whole women!!) to wear clothes with special markers on them so that computers could track their movements, and then asked the women to walk up and down in a 6-metre area.
I keep on trying to come up with a clever critique of this study, but honestly I’m speechless. How and who came up with the idea for this study? Why is the degree of swayiness of my hips considered important? What is humanity supposed to do with this breakthrough information? And when are they gonna do a study on the boys, so I know when my man is most virile? Vomit!!
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seven comments
Thanks a lot Thea - now I've got "Hips don't lie" stuck in my head.
Posted by Stacey May
November 9, 2007, 1:30 PM
Thank you, Pseudo-Science!
Posted by Anna
November 9, 2007, 3:53 PM
Oh fer heavens sake, 40 is a perfectly respectable number for an experimental social science study. That's 20 per cell. If you're going to scoff at that, you could probably save a bit of money for yourself by using all those top journals sitting on your shelf as toilet paper. Statistics, blah blah, you don't have to test the whole population in order to make generalizations.
But regardless of the stats, was the *finding* for this study useless? I don't know, maybe. It's science, you never quite know what will be important till you know how it works, and you don't know how it works until you've found out the important things. This finding is, if nothing else, pretty novel. Maybe it'll fit into a bigger pattern, maybe not.Shameless! :)
Posted by Alex
November 11, 2007, 6:19 PM
Having taken a university class whose sole content dealt with reading and critically interpreting research findings, I can tell you that NO study, regardless of the number of subjects, is intended to be generalized any further than the exact study participants under the exact conditions in which the study was carried out. Rather, the purpose of a research study is to build a body of knowledge regarding a specific phenomenon, which can then be used to generate hypotheses for future study. This is what they call "science."
I was unable to locate this study on the journal's website; however, I am willing to go out on a limb and say it sounds like pure crap to me. I am actually wondering if this was not some grad student's pathetic attempts to watch young womens' butts as they walked about in his lab.
Seriously, it sounds to me like this study, which concludes by saying that "women's walking pattern[s] may be a protective mechanism for the woman to avoid unwanted attention at the time of peak fertility" (quoted from the CBC news link given in the original blog entry) is the sort of study that will be used to support the so-called biological basis for rape (i.e., that men are biologically predetermined to be rapists and that they just can't help themselves).
Posted by John
November 12, 2007, 2:48 AM
When they're *least* fertile? I swear I read otherwise somewhere else.
Posted by Sexy Sadie
January 3, 2008, 5:56 PM
A sample size of 40 is not necessarily small. The statistical significance depends on the sample size and the resulting difference between the two groups. Thus, it is unwarranted to criticize the size of the study without further information. I assume that the Queens' researchers are trained in experimental methods and that if this study was peer-reviewed, only studies with statistically significant results would be published.
It is possible that there are other methodological problems that were overlooked, but until you can point these out specifically, you're just rejecting the study based on not liking the result.
It doesn't matter who came up with the idea of the study, whether my hip swayiness is important, or what the immediate applications of the study are. A lot of scientific, mathematical, or philosophical knowledge didn't have immediate applications at the time it was generated, but was found to be useful later on when we had the technology to apply the theory. One of my pet peeves is this "Who cares?" attitude, which is often used by a member of the majority to reject the concerns of the minority.
As a geek chic, I don't know why this post was categorized "Geek Chic", because it seems anti-geek to me.
Posted by Restructure!
March 16, 2008, 11:27 AM
Restructure - you make some good points here, and as someone with almost no background in hard science I admit I don't know what makes a reasonable sample size for an experiment, so thanks for pointing that out.
I think a lot of feminists are sometimes wary of scientific studies because historically it has often been women's bodies that science has been (mis)used to regulate and control. I completely agree with you that to dismiss a study because it has no obvious purpose at present is maybe a bit of an anti-intellectual (and anti-geek) move - but I think Thea's point (and I hope I'm not putting words in her mouth) is not that no one cares but that, potentially, if wielded carelessly, this kind of information can have dangerous results, as John pointed out in his comment.
Posted by Anna
March 31, 2008, 6:27 PM
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