The lascivious swing of a woman's hips may fascinate men, but watch out: those are not the kind of women who go out to 'devour' men!

A new research at Queen's University, Ontario, and published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior checked the connection between female subjects' walks and the stage of the menstrual cycle based on levels of sex hormones measured in their saliva. Surprisingly, the sexiest walks did not correspond to ovulation, but, on the contrary - to the furthest away days from ovulation.

A British expert said the research, featured by New Scientist magazine, supported the idea according to which women disguise their fertility to deter unsuitable partners. Women have a wide array of subtle methods for suggesting a man that they are in the fertile period, and the hip-swing was expected to be one of them. That's why the team made videos of the gait of female subjects which were presented to 40 male subjects, put to assess the level of attractiveness based on this, after which the results were compared with the hormonal checks. "The results were so surprising that I repeated the experiment again with another group of male viewers", said lead researcher Meghan Provost.

In fact, women found at their monthly peak of fertility had the least provocative walk, with fewer hip movements and knees closer together. This led to other researches pointing out the fact that ovulating women hide this 'small detail' from males other than their mate of choice. An alluring gait would signal strongly around, that's why women rather employ changes in smell and mimics, which can be detected just from a short distance. "If women are trying to protect themselves from sexual assault at times of peak fertility, it would make sense for them to advertise attractiveness on a broad scale when they are not fertile.", Provost told New Scientist.

"It is in a woman's best interests to form a closer attachment to one man to help raise children, rather than to advertise her fertile time and be approached by a larger number of competing males. I think that the subtle signs of ovulation are used, in a sense, to promote monogamy. If you want to pick up on these, you have to be already living with, or close to, the woman, so this constrains the man into daily attendance on a woman.", Dr John Manning, from the University of Central Lancashire, not involved in this research, told BBC News.