By the way, Nomo, I found this in the Atlantic and I thought it might interest you:
Not content with having perfected (at least in their own minds) the language of love, the French are now fine-tuning its body language as well. A researcher at the University of south Brittany enlisted a good-looking 20-year-old male to hit on 120 randomly chosen women at a nightclub in Vannes. “Hello. My name’s Antoine,” he would say. “Do you want to dance?” Then the researcher did another experiment, in which three other Frenchmen accosted 240 young women on the street and asked them for their phone numbers. In both cases, the cruising Frenchmen found that women were much more receptive if touched lightly on the forearm. At the nightclub, 43 per cent of the women who hadn’t been touched agreed to dance, compared with 65 per cent of the women who had been touched. On the street,, one in five women agreed to divulge their numbers after being touched---double the number who agreed without a touch. Other studies seem to confirm the researcher’s hunch that women find touchy men more “dominant” and therefore higher status and more attractive. He cautions, however, that North America is a less tactile culture, and that a positive response to discreet pawing by a stranger may, in fact, just be a French thing.
