Articles by Author: Chase Amante

Women can sense a man’s interest levels from his odor. A girl who smells interest ‘wakes up’ out of autopilot – and must decide if she likes him back too.

Approach enough girls and it becomes pretty obvious that women can kind of tell when you genuinely want them versus when you’re just phoning it in.

You might wonder though, how do they tell? Is it the way you smile? Some subtle change in your behavior? A study by psychologists at Houston’s Rice University found women respond subconsciously to men’s “sexual sweat”:

Our results here show that the brain also recognizes the socioemotional information contained in the human sexual sweat. This is so despite the facts that subjects were verbally unaware of the nature of the olfactory stimuli and that the intensity and pleasantness differences had been statistically controlled for. Our findings provide olfactory evidence that the right orbitofrontal cortex and the right fusiform participate in the processing of chemosensory human socioemotional information. Moreover, they also offer neural support for the existence of affective communication through human sociochemosensory cues, a subject extensively studied in animal research but hitherto little known in humans.

Women do not consciously realize they’re responding to the scent of a man’s sweat (the study examined only women smelling men’s scents). It happens at a level below that of conscious awareness. But they nevertheless still do recognize it, and their brains respond in a different way to sexual sweat than they do to neutral sweat or other smells.

A reader doubts why women wait for men to approach them. Is it really because they judge men’s approaches? Or are they just too scared to approach first?

Commenting on my article on girls not wanting you to move slow, a reader took issue with my claim that women vet men based on their approaches.

In particular, he argued that a woman saying she was attracted to a man who made a confident approach was a face-saving lie. The truth, he claimed, was that women simply do not approach men “out of fear and ego.”

Throughout the animal kingdom, among mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, insects, and just about every class of animal there is, females await the male approach, and use it to evaluate the male as a prospective mate. They do this because male mate value is difficult to assess, and the male’s success at the courtship ritual – of which the approach is a vital element – is a powerful indicator of the male’s reproductive quality.

An attractive male approach excites the female, and begins the reproductive process. An unattractive male approach dampens the female’s interest, and shuts down reproduction.

But, could human females be an exception to this?

Might they, unlike the females of almost every other species, actually NOT use the male approach to assess, and instead simply not approach males themselves out of ego and fear?