Watch Her Strut

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Long have men made a hobby of studying women’s wiggles. Dale Hawkins liked the way his Susie Q swaggered in the ’50s. In the midst of his 1979 hit “Here Comes My Girl,” Tom Petty erupted in a growly “Watch her walk!” Jane Fonda’s girlish gait inspired Bob Seger to pen the roadhouse grinder “Her Strut”: “They do respect her, but … they love to watch her strut.” (Or perhaps it’s: “They do respect her butt. They love to watch her strut.” Either way, really.)

Starshine Roshell

Now researchers in Europe have turned men’s perambulation-peeping pastime from an art into a science. A recent study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine showed that just by watching a woman walk, experts could predict her ability to have vaginal orgasms (as opposed to clitoral orgasms, which sticklers consider to be cheating but which, for the record, most women still prefer over a dozen roses).

Researchers at the University of the West of Scotland had a sampling of young women answer questions about their sexual history. Then they videotaped the ladies walking through a public place and asked a couple of “trained sexologists” to watch the tape and guess which ones were prone to vaginal orgasms. Let’s pause here while our male readers kick themselves for going into the wrong line of work.

These esteemed professors of sexology guessed right more than 80 percent of the time, insisting that the subject’s stride length and vertebral rotation was greater for the vaginally orgasmic women. In layman’s terms, the climax-tending gals are just more loosey-goosey.

“This could reflect the free, unblocked energetic flow from the legs through the pelvis to the spine,” the authors noted. Or, they confessed, it could just be that women who get a rockin’ release every now and again have more spring in their step.

But maybe there’s a better explanation, as one reader on a news site (physorg.com/news) suggested: “Perhaps these women walk with a gait that attracts men who ‘know how to please a woman’?”

Another post implied that the sexy walk/satisfied lover correlation is already common knowledge — and common sense. “It’s no secret,” she wrote, “except to academics. And we all know how most of them walk.”

In my experience, a cowgirl’s trot has less to do with her yeehaw than her boots. Birdlike baby steps, for example, don’t mean a lady’s hard to please; it means she gets cheap, even dirty, thrills from platform heels and pencil skirts.

And a bombshell with a jazz-club bounce — you know, the kind of swishing saunter where her hips jut out to the right and left, snapping crisply before being slung to the other side, the kind of sway that makes you hear the brush of a high-hat with each sultry step — isn’t a sure thing, either. She’s probably just ecstatic over the squish of her Strappy Strips insoles.

In truth, it’s hard to fathom how this orgasm study might prove useful. The researchers say a potential link between muscle blocks and sexual function could improve women’s sex lives. And who am I to shuffle, amble, or even trip into the path of progress?

But one has to wonder whether the entire experiment was just an excuse to grill a group of young students about their sex lives and then — as Hawkins, Petty, and Seger did before them — check out their cha-chas.

The theory becomes ever more plausible when you consider the study’s paltry sample size: 16 Belgian coeds.

“Oh, they do respect her, but …”

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• More Starshine columns at independent.com

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