Science Says These Are the Sexiest Dance Moves
Anyone who has watched So You Think You Can Dance or Dancing With the Stars knows that dance can be an incredibly sensual display of self-expression. And now, a new scientific study shows there are actually movements we all look for in a female dancer, even if we don’t know it.
The study, published this week in Scientific Reports, sought to quantify how men and women judge female dancers. The researchers in the U.K. used 3D motion-capture to record 39 female college students dancing to a drumbeat. They animated those dance movements as featureless avatars, thus assuring that conventional beauty ideals did not factor into their ratings. Then, 57 men and 143 women were asked to rate 15-second clips of five of the avatars, without music, on a scale of 1 (bad) to 7 (good).
As a result, here is the highest-rated dancer in the group:
And the lowest-rated dancer:
The researchers did a series of calculations to determine more precisely what makes one dancer rate better than another. They measured the movements of each dancer’s hips, elbows, and spine for this comparison. That’s how they concluded that female dancers who rated higher have “greater hip swing,” “more asymmetric thigh movements,” and “moderate asymmetric arm movements.”
Why might those be the most attractive moves? For one, hip swinging is thought to be a more feminine movement.
“Typically feminine traits tend to enhance rated attractiveness and may help viewers identify fecund females,” the study states.
If the purpose of dancing well is to show off your mating value, then the perfect amount of asymmetrical movements signals that you have excellent motor control (too much is also bad, as it could be a sign of a neurological disorder).
What about the kind of dancing we do among friends, when we have no interest in finding a “mate”? This study only says that “heterosexual female raters might be assessing the dancers in terms of their potential as competitors.” Hopefully, people can also be a little bit more nuanced than that, on and off the dance floor.
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