Need a reason to wear your sexiest high heels (even those ones that kill your feet)? New research shows men’s behavior is affected by a woman wearing heels.

The November 2014 study, published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, consisted of a few experiments that tested how the different shoes women wore influenced a man’s “helping behavior.” Researcher Nicolas Guéguen of the Université de Bretagne-Sud in France had women wearing flats go ask people to complete a survey. She then did the same thing while wearing high heels. Another experiment involved the same woman dropping a glove, once while wearing flats and another time in heels. 

While shoe height had zero bearing on women’s likeliness to help, men’s willingness to lend a hand to a damsel in distress correlated directly with the heel height. A third experiment even concluded that men were quicker to chat up a woman in a bar when she was wearing heels.

The fact that simply wearing high heels can have so much power over men’s behavior is interesting (and let’s face it, not that surprising). Women’s physical appearance — whether it be breast size, butt size, or lipstick color — has been shown time and time again to sway behavior of the opposite sex. Guéguen notes though that more research needs to be done to determine if maybe the power of the heel lies in how it changes the way women carry themselves, with that extra sway in the hips you get when walking in stilettos. Or, he wonders, maybe men have just begun to associate heels with sexual intent, since models are always shown strutting around in them.

Whatever the reason, we’ll be testing this theory tonight by throwing on a pair of heels before trying to con our boyfriends into cleaning up the dishes after dinner. Worth a try, right?

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