How a person walks—their gait or what is more formally and more broadly called biological motion[1]—tells a great deal about how they are and who they are. Gait indicates biological characteristics such as gender and physical identity. A Korean study measured the significant differences between the way adult men and women walk. Females are on the average shorter than men and this is reflected in their height and leg length and usually walk slower than males due to shorter stride length. Females walked with their pelvis tilted more anteriorly with more up and down oblique motion. Their hip joints are more flexed–adducted-internally rotated while their knee joints assume more valgus angles (Cho, Park, & Kwon, 2004).
It has long been known that people can identify their friends at a distance just by their walking pattern (Cutting & Kozlowski, 1977). Gait reflects a person’s emotional state (Michalak et al., 2009; Pollick et al., 2002). Gait indicates energy level and state of health (Cesari et al., 2005). Humans are actually quite good at categorizing whether or not a specific, but small movement pattern is biologically or psychologically based as well as detecting gender or mood (Johansson, 1973, 1976). How we got these abilities is unclear, but they certainly do have survival value for getting along with others. The ability to distinguish biological from non-biological motion appears at a very young age meaning the ability is biologically-predetermined (Fox & McDaniel, 1982). Some researchers speculate that biological motion perception part is a key aspect of the theory of mind; the ability to imagine what another person might be thinking and feeling (Frith & Frith, 1999). On the other hand, the ability may come about by simple observation and learning (Fox & McDaniel, 1982; Bertenthal & Pinto, 1994; Thompson & Parasuraman, 2012).
A person’s body movements are a constellation of factors and, when viewed holistically, may indicate several things about his or her identity: gender, sexual orientation, female orgasmic potential, sexual desirability/availability, and sexual aspects of their exercise and dance.
Gender
Male and female gait differ in their respective joint kinematic and kinetic patterns (Al-Makhalas et al., 2023; Rowe, Beauchamp, & Wilson, 2021). People use body motion to identify another person’s gender and other social categories such as age and health condition. This is important to facilitate social relationships. People may also alter their gaits to disguise or highlight their inherent social status, emotional state, or sexual orientation (Lick, Johnson, & Gill, 2013).
Sexual Orientation
People can accurately judge the sexual orientation of others, but the cues they use have remained elusive. A series of experiments having subjects judge computer-generation animations for perceived sexual orientation. The body shapes and motions were manipulated by the researchers. Gender-stereotyped figures (e.g., a body moving with shoulder swagger or hourglass figure moving with hip sway) were mainly judged as heterosexual. Atypical gender figures were judged as being homosexual. Body shape more strongly affected the perceptions of female judges’ perceptions while motion affected the judgements of both male and female judges (Johnson et al., 2007).
Female Orgasmic Potential
A woman’s ability to achieve orgasm (or not) is indicated in her walk. The gait patterns of a group of young Belgian women—half of whom were orgasmic—were observed by trained sexologists. These observers were able to pick out the women with the most orgasmic potentiality by focusing a gait that was fluid, energetic, sensual, and free and loose (Nicholas et al., 2008).
Female and Male Displays of Sexual Desirability and Availability
Walking is a basic human movement, and gait kinematics is one of the cues for female attractiveness (Guéguen, 2015; Fink, et al., 2021). Women may draw attention to themselves by emphasizing some aspect of their bodily femininity, but female body motion embodies multiple factors such as pelvic obliquity, arm swing, and torso rotation (Bruening et al., 2015) and sex-specific body features such as the shape and size of the bosom and buttocks, height, and weight (Tanabe & Yamamoto, 2022).
Heterosexual men are attracted to the movements of women’s bodies. One of the primary visual attractants is a woman’s waist-to-hip ratio (WHRs) while in biological motion (Doyle, 2009).
Women exhibit a behavior pattern of being sexually active and what they find sexually attractive through their menstrual cycles. One study of women’s walking found that their gait was slower near ovulation and their gait was subjectively rated as sexier. The evolutionary interpretation of this is that women unconsciously desire reproduction during ovulation and so engage in behaviors which reinforce their attractiveness (Guéguen, 2012).
As for men, the theory is that both men and women can accurately assess a specific male’s physical strength from facial and body cues. Women tend to assess male attractiveness based on facial attractiveness, masculinity signs, and dominance behaviors which all relate to male physical strength. A positive relationship also has been reported between physical strength and attractiveness of men’s dance movements (Fink et al., 2016).
Sexual Aspects of Dance and Exercise
Dance is a series of body movements composed of purposeful, intentional, rhythmical, and culturally patterned sequences that are part of the courtship practices of many cultures (Kurath, 1960; Kaeppler, 1978; Hanna, 1987). Dance is produced by sexually selected mechanisms designed to display beauty, health, strength, and sexual attractiveness. Recent research supports this hypothesis, as there is evidence that dance movements, particularly those of men, correlate with characteristics relevant to mate selection. A portion of past research delving into body movement has focused on dance movements mainly because dance shows more individual variation than just walking or running and because it is part of mating behavior (Hanna, 1987, 2010). Dance movements seem to provide information about physical strength, especially in men, and women prefer the dances of men who are physically stronger (Fink et al., 2015).
Finally, female body movements may be related to actual orgasm. While orgasms primarily occur during sexual activity they have been documented as spontaneously occurring in women during physical exercise. A study of 530 women who completed an anonymous, Internet-based survey found that the most common exercises reported to induce orgasm were abdominal exercises, climbing and lifting weights. Sexual thoughts or fantasy images were only occasionally reported (Herbenick & Fortenberry, 2011).
Closing Thoughts
Body movement gives us a great deal of information about other people and body language is definitely an obscure area of study that deserves wider and deeper attention. Age, gender, health, physical ability, sexual availability and orgasmic potential. These are important areas in human relations especially when one is younger and in the market for a mate or just wants to read people’s bodies better regardless of one’s age. One factor—that of personality—was left out of this discussion because I wanted to focus on biological motion and gender and sexuality. The phenomenon of movement and personality will be addressed though in the near future… as soon as I can get around to it.
Paul Shane, Ph.D., LMT
Director, Academic Content
References
Al-Makhalas, A., Abualait, T., Ahsan, M., Abdulaziz, S., & Al Muslem, W. (2023). A gender based comparison and correlation of spatiotemporal gait parameters and posture stability. Acta Biomedica 94(2), e2023057, doi: 10.23750/abm.v94i2.13602
Bertenthal, B. & Pinto, J. (1994). Global processing of biological motions. Psychological Science 5(4), p. 221–225.
Bruening, D., Frimenko, R., Goodyear, C., Bowden, D., & Fullenkamp, A. (2015). Sex differences in whole body gait kinematics at preferred speeds. Gait Posture 41(2), p. 540-545.
Cesari, M., Kritchevsky, S., Pennninx, B., Nicklas, B., Simonsick, E., Newman, A., Tylavsky, F., Brach, J., Satterfield, S., Bauer, D., Visser, M., Rubin, S., Harris, T., & Pahor, M. (2005). Prognostic value of usual gait speed in well-functioning older people: Results from the health, aging and body composition study. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 3(10), p. 1675-1680.
Cho, S., Park, J., & Kwon, O. (2004). Gender differences in three dimensional gait analysis data from 98 health Korean adults. Clinical Biomechanics 19(2), p. 145-152.
Cutting, J. & Kozlowski, L. (1977). Recognizing friends by their walk: Gait perception without familiarity cues. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 9(5), p. 353-356.
Doyle, J. (2009). A woman’s walk: Attractiveness in motion. Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology 3(2), p. 81-92.
Fink, B., André, S., Mines, J., Weege, B., Shackelford, T., & Butovskaya, M. (2016). Sex differences in attractiveness perceptions of strong and weak male walkers. American Journal of Human Biology 28(6), p. 913-917.
Fink, B., Apalkova, Y., Butovskaya, M., & Shackleford, T. (2021). Are there differences in experts’ and lay assessors’ attractiveness judgments of non-professional men’s dance/gait movements? Perceptual and Motor Skills 128(1), p. 492–506.
Fink, B., Weege, B., Neave, N., Pham, M., & Shackleford, T. (2015). Integrating body movements into attractiveness research. Frontiers in Psychology 6, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00220
Fox, R. & McDaniel, C. (1982). The perception of biological motion by human infants. Science 218(4571), p. 486–487.
Frith, C. & Frith, U. (1999). Interacting mind: A biological basis. 1999. Science 286(5445), p. 1692-1695.
Guéguen, N. (2012). Gait and menstrual cycle: Ovulating women use sexier gaits and walk slowly ahead of them. Gait & Poster 35, p. 621-624.
Herbenick, D. & Fortenberry, D. (2011). Exercise-induced orgasm and pleasure among women. Sexual and Relationship Therapy 26(4), p. 373-388.
Johansson, G. (1973). Visual perception of biological motion and a model for its analysis. Perception & Psychophysics 14(2), p. 201-211.
—– (1976). Spatio-temporal differentiation and integration in visual motion perception. Psychological Research 38, p. 379-393.
Johnson, K., Gill, S., Reichman, & Tassinary, L. (2007). Swagger, sway, and sexuality: Judging sexual orientation from body motion and morphology. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 93(3), p. 321-334.
Lick, D., Johnson, K., & Gill, S. (2013). Deliberate changes to gendered body motion influence basic social perceptions. Social Cognition, 31(6), p. 656–671.
Michalak, J., Troje, N., Fischer, J., Vollmar, P., Heidenreich, T., & Schulte, D. (2009). Embodiment of sadness and depression: Gait patterns associated with dysphoric mood. Psychosomatic Medicine 71(5), p. 580-587.
Morris, P., White, J., Morrison, E., and Fisher, K. (2013) High heels as supernormal stimuli: How wearing high heels affects judgements of female attractiveness. Evolution and Human Behavior 34, p. 176-181.
Nicholas, A., Brody S., de Sutter, P., & de Carufel, F. (2008). Woman’s history of vaginal orgasm is discernible from her walk. Journal of Sexual Medicine 5, p. 2119–2124.
Pollick, F., Lestou, V., Ryu, J., & Cho, S. (2002). Estimating the efficiency of recognizing gender and affect from biological motion. Vision Research 42, p. 2345-2355.
Rowe, E., Beauchamp, M., & Wilson, J. (2021). Age and sex differences in normative gait patterns. Gait & Posture 88, p. 109-115.
Tanabe, H. & Yamamoto, K. (2022). The relationship between attractiveness and femininity in female gait. 9th International Conference on Kansei Engineering and Emotional Research, doi: 10.5821/conference-9788419184849.67
Thompson, J. & Parasuraman, R. (2012). Attention, biological motion, and action recognition. Neuroimage 59(1), p. 4-13.
Troje, N. (2013). What is biological motion? Definition, stimuli and paradigms. In M. Rutherford & Kuhlmeier, V. (Eds.), Social Perception: Detection and Interpretation of Animacy, Agency, and Intention. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 13-36.
[1] See Troje (2013) for a deeper discussion of biological motion including its scientific history.