The Book of Tells (Peter Collett)[unlocked]

SEXUAL TELLS
• SCANNING. People map out their social environment by
scanning it visually. Monika Moore, who has made an
extensive study of courtship strategies, has identified
what she calls 'the room encompassing glance', where
the head and eyes move together, rather like radar,
tracing an arc through the room, and then returning to
their original position. 7 The purpose of scanning is to
perform an initial survey and not necessarily to focus on
a specific person or group of people. That comes later.
• PROMENADING. Instead of casting their eyes around,
people sometimes check out the room by walking
around. The advantage of promenading is that it enables
individuals to be noticed by other people, and to
examine them at close quarters. In this way, promenading
is rather similar to the Spanish and South American
paseo, when young men and women stroll back and
forth, watching each other and being seen.
With hundreds of young people milling around and
checking each other out, the spectacle in a nightclub is
very similar to a 'lek'. 8 Leks are the 'singles bars' of the
animal world - patches of ground where males and
females congregate so that the males can display to the
females, and the females can decide which male to mate
with. Lekking occurs in a wide range of species, including
bats, antelopes, frogs, Canada geese and the greater
prairie chicken. In all these species there is pronounced
'sexual dimorphism' - in other words, the males look very
different from the females, and males who display at a
higher rate usually manage to mate with most of the
females. This, of course, is often what happens in a human
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