According to David Givens, an anthropologist, and Timothy Perper, a biologist, who spent several hundred hours in American cocktail lounges watching men and women flirt, American singles-bar courtship has several stages, each with distinctive escalation points. I shall divide them into five. The first is the "attention getting" phase. Young men and women do this somewhat differently. As soon as they enter the bar, both males and females typically establish a territory—a seat, a place to lean, a position near the jukebox or dance floor. Once settled, they begin to attract attention to themselves.
Tactics vary. Men tend to pitch and roll their shoulders, stretch, exaggerate their body movements. Instead of using the wrist to stir a drink, men often employ the entire arm, as if stirring mud. The normally smooth motion necessary to light a cigarette becomes a whole-body gesture, ending with an elaborate shaking from the elbow to extinguish the match.
Then there is the swagger with which young men often move to and fro. Male baboons on the grasslands of East Africa also swagger when they foresee a potential sexual encounter. A male gorilla walks back and forth stiffly as he watches a female out of the corner of his eye. The parading gait is known to primatologists as bird-dogging. Males of many species also preen. Human males pat their hair, adjust their clothes, tug their chins, or perform other self-clasping or grooming movements that diffuse nervous energy and keep the body moving.
Young women begin the attention-getting phase with many of the same maneuvers that men use—smiling, gazing, shifting, swaying, preening, stretching, moving in their territory to draw attention to themselves. Often they incorporate a battery of feminine moves as well. They twist their curls, tilt their heads, look up coyly, giggle, raise their brows, flick their tongues, lick their upper lips, blush, and hide their faces in order to signal, "I am here."
Some women also have a characteristic walk when courting; they arch their backs, thrust out their bosoms, sway their hips, and strut. No wonder many women wear high-heeled shoes. This bizarre Western custom, invented by Catherine de Medici in the 1500s, unnaturally arches the back, tilts the buttocks, and thrusts the chest out into a female come-hither pose. The clomping noise of their spiky heels draws attention too.
Keeping Time
Body synchrony is the final and most intriguing component of the pickup. As potential lovers become comfortable, they pivot or swivel until their shoulders become aligned, their bodies face-to-face. This rotation toward each other may start before they begin to talk or hours into conversation, but after a while the man and woman begin to move in tandem. Only briefly at first. When he crosses his legs, she crosses hers; as he leans left, she leans left; when he smoothes his hair, she smoothes hers. They move in perfect rhythm as they gaze deeply into each other's eyes.
Called interactional synchrony, this human mirroring begins in infancy. By the second day of life, a newborn has begun to synchronize its body movements with the rhythmic patterns of the human voice. And it is now well established that people in many other cultures get into rhythm when they feel comfortable together. Our need to keep each other's time reflects a rhythmic mimicry common to many animals. Chimps sometimes sway from side to side as they stare into one another's eyes just prior to copulation. Cats circle. Red deer prance. Howler monkeys court with rhythmic tongue movements. Stickleback fish do a zigzag jig. From bears to beetles, courting couples perform rhythmic rituals to express their amorous intentions.
Wooing Messages
Human courtship has other similarities to courtship in "lower" animals. Normally people woo each other slowly. Caution during courtship is also characteristic of spiders. The male wolf spider, for example, must enter the long, darker entrance of a female's compound in order to court and copulate. This he does slowly. If he is overeager, she devours him.
Men and women who are too aggressive at the beginning of the courting process also suffer unpleasant consequences. If you come too close, touch too soon, or talk too much, you will probably be repelled. Like wooing among wolf spiders, baboons, and other creatures, the human pickup runs on message. At every juncture in the ritual each partner must respond correctly, otherwise the courtship fails.
The Dinner Date
Probably no ritual is more common to Western would-be lovers than the "dinner date." If the man is courting, he pays—and a woman instinctively knows her partner is wooing her. In fact, there is no more widespread courtship ploy than offering food in hopes of gaining sexual favors. Around the world men give women presents prior to lovemaking. A fish, a piece of meat, sweets, and beer are among the delicacies men have invented as offerings.
This ploy is not exclusive to men. Black-tipped hang flies often catch aphids, daddy longlegs, or houseflies on the forest floor. When a male has felled a particularly juicy prey, he exudes secretions from an abdominal scent gland that catch the breeze, announcing a successful hunting expedition. Often a passing female hang fly stops to enjoy the meal—but not without copulating while she eats.
"Courtship feeding," as this custom is called, probably predates the dinosaurs, because it has an important reproductive function. By providing food to females, males show their abilities as hunters, providers, worthy procreative partners.
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