The Elite Women are Quitting Birth Control

This episode is actually inspired by the Substack article by Ellen Knowles titled I Actually Think It Is A Partial Feminist Slay The Girlies Are Getting Off Birth Control.

And Knowles, along with so many other women, they credit Dr. Hill's This Is Your Brain On Birth Control as the catalyst for the hormonal birth control exodus.

"I see one of my friends reading How The Pill Changes Everything: Your Brain On Birth Control, and then another year, and my TikTok For You page is filled with other women like me who are ditching birth control for more natural methods." Hill is an evolutionary psychologist at TCU, and her book argues that hormonal contraception doesn't only prevent pregnancy, it also acts on brain systems governing stress response, attraction, and mood because those systems are also affected by changes in hormones.

Before we get to the claims made in the book, I wanna make it clear that Dr. Hill's stated position as per her TCU interview is that this is a case for informed individualized decision-making with a doctor, not a case against the pill itself.

Okay? Now here are the claims.

According to the book, "The full extent to which the artificial hormones of the birth control pill influence every other cell in the body that has hormone receptors for progesterone and estrogen, and whether they make these other bodily systems also act as if they are in the second half of the cycle when progesterone is dominant, isn't all that well understood." This is nothing new, by the way, because there are plenty of other FDA-approved medication on the market whose mechanisms of action we do not yet fully understand.

Metformin, a generally remarkable drug that millions of diabetics depend on, is still being investigated because we do not know how it fully works.

Acetaminophen is over the counter, yet we are still discovering unexplained mechanisms of action.

So yeah, it is important to note that we do not know everything about the pill, but it's also important to not be so alarmed when you hear about it.

According to the book, women on the pill have been said to have increased preference for less masculine men compared to naturally cycling women.

Now, this is one of the most often cited studies in the book, and a lot of anti-hormonal birth control advocates, they refer to this over and over again to dissuade women from taking birth control or encourage them to quit birth control.

When you're on birth control, you are attracted to men that have lower testosterone.

That's why you'll see all these women on social media being like, "Timothée Chalamet is so attractive.

He's, like, 120 pounds."

Dr. Hill explains it this way.

"Research regularly finds that masculine, symmetrical, and socially dominant men tend to be sexy to women, and sexy men unfortunately show less interest in babies and are more interested in stepping out," if you get my drift.

They are shown to be more unstable partners compared to their less masculine, less symmetrical, less sexy counterparts.

And as it turns out, women on the pill tend to go for the less masculine but more stable men.

And this does make some logical sense because the pill tricks your brain into believing that you are perpetually pregnant in a deja vu way, and that's how it keeps you from being pregnant, because you can't get pregnant again if you're already pregnant or if your body thinks that you're already pregnant, and that's how it works, right? So women's attraction pattern may reflect that as well.

If you are on the pill and pseudo-pregnant, then you may just date like it too.

Because you think you're pregnant, you may prioritize the stable provider and intelligent men.

Yeah, so apparently the women who are taking the birth control pill, they were more satisfied with their partner's intelligence level as well as financial provision level.

So it's really confusing to me because the people who espouse this rhetoric, they are all about family values.

It seems like the women on hormonal birth control do tend to date specifically for family values.

So what if you date and then you get married while you're on the birth control pill, and then suddenly you get off of it and you're still married to this person, but then you lose that attraction? So that is a very valid concern that women have, that the pill changes your attraction pattern, and it may affect your ability to make certain decisions.