THE BODY LANGUAGE OF SEX
I know that body language is different in different
cultures, but it seems to me that there must be some
signals that cut across every land. When I was in France
recently I was able to pick up people my own age by
using the same flirting technique I had learned in the
States, a sideways glance and a smile. If things are so
different in different lands, why did this work so well?
First of all, while some signals are different, many are
the same from culture to culture. We borrow body language
from other cultures just as we borrow words. The
movies are the greatest source of cross-cultural body
language borrowing.
Second, your flirting signal worked in France because
it is a part of French body language. The gesture you
used is one compounded of eye and eyebrow movements
combined with a smile. In doing it, the eyebrows are
jerked upward for about one-sixth of a second—so small
a time that its impact is subliminal—and the glance is
given from the corner of the eye. It's a simple greeting,
a look that in essence says "hello!," then slides away before
it can be answered.
The accompanying smile, of course, does a great deal.
It says you're interested and receptive, and it invites the
man to take the initiative.
In tests in primitive tribes in various parts of the world,
the smile was found to be the only universal body language
signal, and the ability to smile is undoubtedly inTHE
BODY LANGUAGE OF SEX 33
herited. We never have to learn how to do it. We're
born with the knowledge.
The greeting with the eyes, the flirting glance, is
another matter. Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, a German behavioral
scientist, used cameras and mirrorlike attachments
that permitted him to film people all over the
world without their knowledge. With each picture, he
wrote down the social context in which the filmed incident
occurred.
Comparing his films, he found that among the most
different people in the world, Balinese, Papuans, French,
and Waika Indians, a rapid raising and lowering of the
eyebrows accompanied by a smile and often a nod was
used as a friendly flirting gesture—the same sort of gesture
you describe. It worked for you in the States and in
France, too. Eibl-Eibesfeldt found that it works all over
the world.
He likens this flirting glance to one of the gestures
passed down from "an ancient evolutionary inheritance."
Other inherited gestures, according to this German behaviorist,
are rotating our arms inward and raising our
shoulders when we're threatened, pulling the corners of
our mouths down when we're angry, exposing upper
canine teeth which are no longer large enough to be
dangerous when we're annoyed, and, in women, lowering
the eyelids and head as they look away. This, he feels is
a evolutionary remnant of the animal's flight reaction.
These findings of hereditary signals in our body language
lexicon contradict the idea that only the smile
