Flirtatious females confuse men: Study

London: The flutter of eyelashes, the sparkling smile, the chuckle after a lame joke – nothing will help you entice the attention of the man you desire, not because you’re doing it wrongly, but because your male interest can’t understand the signals.

According to a new research, men are blind to the subtle seduction techniques of the opposite sex.

The study suggests that apart from pouncing on the object of her lust, a woman's non-verbal signals of sexual interest often prove sadly lost on the young male brain.

In the study of nearly 300 undergraduates of both sexes, researchers at Indiana University tested students' abilities to spot a come-on.

The students were asked to view images of women and categorize them as friendly, sexually interested, sad or rejecting.

Each undergraduate reported on 280 photographs, which had been sorted into the four categories based on surveys by different groups of students.

Male students scored worse for accuracy than females - and they were particularly confused by amiability and amorousness. The men commonly mistook women's sexual signals as merely friendly and were prone to see friendliness as a blatant advance.

According to the researchers, rather than going through life thinking: "She wants me", men often find themselves trying to navigate a foreign world of social signals without a phrasebook.

"Women are fluent in body language, men just have the gift of the grab,” the Telegraph quoted Kathy Lette, the best-selling author, as saying.

"It is really confusing for women. The average bloke either doesn't realise that we fancy them until we are giving birth to their children in the labour ward; or he presumes all women fancy him all the time.

"God was playing some kind of prank when he developed two sexes,” she added.

But the research does not mean that women might as well ditch the lipstick. Not all flirting gets lost in translation.

"These are average differences. Some men are very skilled in reading clues,” said Coreen Ferris, the lead researcher.

The study is published in Psychological Science.