Acta Psychologica Sinica

Abstract

Ancestral women would have suffered higher costs if they were raped or sexually coerced during the fertile phase of their reproductive cycle. Accordingly, selection pressures should have made women more sensitive to cues of male sexual coerciveness near ovulation. Normally ovulating women watched videotaped interviews of men trying to attract another woman and then rated each man’s probable sexual coerciveness. Women nearing ovulation rated men as more coercive relative to women in the non-fertile phase. Moreover, fertile women’s judgments of men’s coerciveness were better predicted by an aggregate of women’s responses than were judgments of non-fertile women, suggesting that women are more attuned to salient cues of potential coerciveness during the fertile phase of the cycle, and thus, may be less error-prone. Because these findings are unlikely to be explained by general-purpose learning mechanisms, they suggest that women may possess specially designed perceptual counter-strategies that guard against male sexual coercion.

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