Via Why Men Won’t Dance
If what I have written is all true, then surely men would love dancing, as it is an opportunity to show off to the ladies, and attract mates. No. In any population of men, half the men will be above average at dancing, half will be below average. There is nothing to be gained from advertising to the world that one is below average. Half of all men will shy away from dancing, therefore. Men who are only slightly better than average will risk dancing badly on a bad day, and might not have practised or learned enough of the current cultural dance forms, and so will also be very reluctant to dance. If all the below average men danced not at all, then the worst of the above average would be the worst dancers on the dance floor. It is only the very good dancers who will benefit from dancing. They will enjoy dancing, because they have evolved to get a kick out of dancing well. Men will have inherited from their male ancestors a terror of dancing badly.
…and this…
Recent studies have shown that women are very sensitive to the smell of men. Sub-consciously, it seems, women can tell a good-quality man from a low-quality one, and their decisions are influenced by smells. One such decision is how highly they rate the attractiveness of a photograph of a man, while smelling the smell either of a healthy attractive man, or an unhealthy unattractive one. Thornhill and Gangestad (1999) showed that women prefer the smell of handsome faces and symmetrical male bodies (but not when on the pill), and that the effect of women’s smell on men is much lower. Women were most smell fussy at fertile peak of their menstrual cycle (2). When a woman goes out dancing, she will judge the men, subconsciously at least, by smelling them. Since men don’t rate by smell much, they can live without the opportunity to smell all the women. Most modern women at a dance hide their smell with perfume anyway.
However, in order to use this skill, the women would have to get a good smell of all the men in their tribe. This is not always possible or convenient, nor easy to do politely. Also, the smell of old sweat is often bad, and not so informative. Ideally, a woman would get to smell all the men under the same conditions, and would get to smell fresh sweat on all those men.
One way a woman might get to smell fresh sweat on all the local men, would be to play vigorous sports with them. While this would be less dangerous than fighting them all, it would have its hazards, and most men can run rings round most women, and so this is unlikely to work very well. Since the purpose of discerning which men are good and which bad is to decide which men to have sex with, getting the men sweaty by copulating with them is a very bad idea. By the time he’s broken sweat, it might well be too late. Dancing offers a woman not just an ideal opportunity to smell fresh sweat on all the men of her tribe, it probably offers her the only opportunity for this.
The supposed reason for under-arm hair is for increasing the ability for others to smell one’s sweat. It is interesting to notice that a movement common to almost all partner dances is for the man to turn the women under his raised arm. In passing, the woman’s nose wafts past the man’s armpit every time.
