Nice work if you can get it

AAAS: Something in the Way She Moves

In a particularly stimulating study, researchers have found that lap dancers—women who work in strip joints and, for cash, gyrate in the laps of seated men—earn more when they are in the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle. The finding suggests that women subtly signal when they are most fertile, although just how they do it is not clear.

You've got to hand it to those sociobiologists: they get research grants to die for. I mean, how did they pull that one off? Getting paid to study lap dancers—and all in the name of 'science'. I am humbled by their ingenuity.

Although the above study seems hardly worthy of comment, I should point out that, when I were a lad, young women gyrating in the laps of seated men was not considered to be a particularly subtle form of communication. Has anyone considered the alternative (and, to me, more likely) hypothesis that, when these women are at their most fertile, they feel more frisky and put more effort into their dancing, thereby reaping more spondulix from their discerning clientèle?

Interestingly, the woman who wrote the above piece has the unlikely name of Constance Holden—or Constant Holding, as I'm sure her friends must call her. I thought they discouraged that sort of thing in lap dancing bars. Or so I'm told.

True story: Carolyn tried lap dancing once. She didn't find it at all easy. The reindeer kept trying to lead. Next holiday, she's off to Gdańsk to try her hand at pole dancing.