00:00:00
are you saying that you recommend that a woman looking for a partner gets off the birth control pill until they find one
00:00:05
yeah I mean researchers found when women who were partnered to attractive men went off hormonal birth control they
00:00:11
were more attracted to their partner but for women who were partnered with less attractive Partners they became less
00:00:16
attracted to their partners and reported being less sexually satisfied it's quite frightening Dr
00:00:23
Sarah Hill is a leading research psychologist and Professor uncovering the shocking effects the contraceptive pill has had on women relationships and
00:00:30
society and what we can do about it there's been nothing more instrumental to women's ability to be able to achieve
00:00:36
independence than the birth control pill and so we're very Cavalier and just giving it to people oh well you should go on it for this and you should go on
00:00:42
it for that but it has huge costs and when I started to dig into the research
00:00:48
I found there's at least five different things the birth control pill does to change who we are and these risk factors
00:00:54
they're swept under the rug by their doctors who are prescribing it first it changes our emotional states with increased risk for developing anxiety
00:01:01
and depression and then it influences our ability to put on muscle mass and it can also affect our sexual function
00:01:08
because it turns off that estrogen surge that makes us feel sexier and makes us want to have sex and there's more but we
00:01:15
also know that it affects men in two different ways and this has implications for society around us I'll tell you why
00:01:22
so so what are the alternatives for women let's dive down into that first
00:01:31
this has always blown my mind a little bit 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the
00:01:37
show so could I ask you for a favor before we start if you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us the free simple way that you
00:01:43
can do just that is by hitting the Subscribe button and my commitment to you is if you do that then I'll do everything in my power me and my team to
00:01:50
make sure that this show is better for you every single week we'll listen to your feedback we'll find the guest that
00:01:55
you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do thank you so much
00:02:02
Dr Sarah Hill what is the mission that you're on if you had to sort of encapsulate it
00:02:09
into a couple of sentences all of the work you're doing into a couple of sentences and the impact it has on
00:02:16
people like me but also my partners my mother my sisters um who read and understand your work what is that
00:02:22
mission um is to help women understand themselves and I think that you know
00:02:28
part of that is doing the science that helps to uncover the insights that help women understand themselves and then
00:02:33
also being able to communicate that to women um I think that you know for a very long time because of the way that
00:02:39
medicine has been set up um the the focus has been primarily on men um and
00:02:45
most of the things that we think that we know about health and functioning in the human body and brain is based on
00:02:51
Research conducted in men and so it's taking that back and helping women actually understand themselves as
00:02:57
themselves so would you say that this conversation is is just for women no absolutely not no this is a conversation
00:03:03
for women for women's partners and those who love women right and so I think that it's a conversation for everyone I have
00:03:09
these conversations because I'm interested in the subject matter and as I read through your work at the top of your work I saw that you know you really
00:03:15
have a focus towards Women's Health and women's issues but I can't explain how unbelievably fascinating and
00:03:20
enlightening it was for me as someone who is a boyfriend and a partner to a woman um but also when when we talk
00:03:28
about the evolutionary psychology that sort of is intertwined throughout your work I was able to understand so much
00:03:35
about me as a man and the way I I am and the way that I develop and my
00:03:40
testosterone and all those kinds of things and also attraction and mating preferences and all these things from
00:03:45
looking through your work why why are you so focused on this subject matter what is it what's the
00:03:51
sort of in your heart I mean for me it's really fascinating to consider the way
00:03:56
that hormones influence who we are and then to T think about something like the birth control pill which almost all
00:04:04
women are on at some point in their life and understanding that this actually by changing women's hormones has the impact
00:04:11
of kind of fundamentally changing some really important things about themselves I mean this is really huge and this has
00:04:17
consequences for everything ranging from who women are attracted to and might be choosing as partners to women's mental
00:04:24
health right and it could end up having consequences on the shape of the world around us like we already know know that
00:04:30
birth control has had an impact on women's ability to do things like go to school and get Advanced degrees and we
00:04:37
see this played out when we look at College classrooms that are becoming inre increasingly female and one of the
00:04:43
big reasons for this is the birth control pill it's like by allowing women to know with almost perfect certainty
00:04:49
that they're not going to get pregnant this has allowed women to make plans which means that they can dream bigger
00:04:56
and achieve more than most of us would have ever dreamed possible like 50 or 100 years ago right and so the pill
00:05:02
changes everything right by changing women we change the world this has implications for women this has
00:05:08
implications for their partners and this has implications for society around us we're seeing some of the downstream
00:05:15
positive impacts of this and then there's also some other sort of Downstream consequences which I think society's now trying to understand and
00:05:21
contend with and I think one of them you mentioned there is that more women in in classrooms I think more women are
00:05:26
college educated now in the US or becoming college educated and they're running more and more and more um and
00:05:32
it's interesting because there's a study which you site in your work I think it was in your book where I read it that
00:05:38
shows women still have a preference for men who have more resources and I was
00:05:43
wondering isn't this doesn't this create a little bit of a a fundamental issue because if more and more women have more
00:05:49
and more resources in many cases much more than men but they have a preference for men that have more resources isn't
00:05:57
there isn't there an issue here yeah no there's actually there is an issue there and in fact there have been people
00:06:03
including my former uh Mentor David bus who who have talked about this idea that
00:06:08
there's a mating crisis going on and that women who are becoming increasingly
00:06:14
college educated and you know getting access to resources of their own that they do continue to exhibit an increased
00:06:21
preference for partners with resources women are what we call hypergamous right
00:06:26
which means that we like to mate up in terms of achieve and educational attainment and when you
00:06:32
have a populace like we do in the US of women who are now on average more
00:06:39
educated than men it makes it more difficult to find a a suitable partner
00:06:44
if you're a woman with an advanced degree and you want somebody who has at least as much education for you that's
00:06:50
going to lead to a more narrow pool of mates and in fact what we see is that there are an increasingly like large
00:06:56
number of women who are just choosing not to get married and are choosing to stay single and in fact there's a wonderful um book called all the single
00:07:04
ladies that is about this very phenomenon and um women are increasingly choosing to opt out of long-term mating
00:07:11
if they're not able to find the relationship that they want so two questions there on the first point is how do we know that women are dating
00:07:17
upwards and to the right right we know that women are dating upwards because that's what women Express a preference
00:07:23
for and it's also who women tend to marry so when you look at um for example uh you know data looking at um the
00:07:31
education levels of people who get married and the age of of people when they get married women generally will marry somebody who's older and generally
00:07:38
earns more money than they do themselves um and you know this is something that isn't specific to the US this is
00:07:45
something that we tend to find um cross-culturally that women tend to express a preference for this and yes it
00:07:50
has become more common for women to be open to partnering with people who earn
00:07:56
less money than themselves for example or have less education in themselves than what it used to be um but it's
00:08:02
still not what it would be if women were actually more willing to make that tradeoff what we see is that instead of
00:08:09
choosing to marry down what many women are choosing to do is simply not get married at all are they making that
00:08:16
choice or is it just a lack of good options I think yes and yes right I
00:08:22
think that they're making that choice because there isn't there aren't good options so I think that many women feel
00:08:28
um the the constraint of the fact that there's not as many partners available as you know that have the qualities that
00:08:34
they're looking for and a long-term partner and as a result of that they're just making the choice when it's between
00:08:39
that like you know just staying single and not partnering with somebody that they desire or partnering with somebody
00:08:46
who has fewer resources than they do or less education than they do themselves they're choosing the former they're
00:08:52
instead choosing to be single instead of um having to partner with somebody who doesn't you know sort of meet what their
00:08:58
exacting standards are are are they still having sex yeah you know that's a good so sex is down like like sex is
00:09:05
trending downward um what we tend to see is that people are having a lot less sex than they used to they're having sex
00:09:11
later um they're having less they fewer uh people are not virgins and that's a
00:09:17
double negative more people are virgins when they're graduating high school and college than there were in the past this
00:09:23
is becoming increasingly common it's also really interesting when you consider that in face of the fact that
00:09:29
we have something like hormonal birth control where we have birth control where you have you know an opportunity
00:09:36
for men and women to be able to have sex without the having to have the fear of pregnancy and yet people are having less
00:09:43
sex and that's a very complicated issue that requires a lot of untangling to get to the bottom of but one of those
00:09:50
factors is the fact that it's harder for um you know imagine that you're a college aged woman and you were looking
00:09:58
for somebody who at least is you know on par with you in terms of their educational attainment um most college
00:10:06
campuses are like 60% female and just simply playing the odds I mean women are
00:10:12
going to have a harder time finding somebody within their pool that they can get together with and this is going to
00:10:17
mean less less dating for some of these women and and less sex if women have
00:10:23
more money and more Independence as a result of that money and success and education why don't they just date down
00:10:31
as in why don't they date men that are broke right yeah well you know we have inherited this mating Psychology from
00:10:38
our distant ancestors who are very much more reliant on men for things like
00:10:43
provisioning resource access and even protection than what contemporary women
00:10:48
need and this is because throughout most of our evolutionary history um we spent our lives you know having to be pregnant
00:10:56
regularly lactating caring for young children um and we're very heavily dependent on the ability um of our
00:11:04
partner to gain access to things like food and the other resources that we're not able to get access to when we are
00:11:11
you know very pregnant or dealing with young children like I don't know if you've ever gone hunting before or met a
00:11:18
2-year-old but like the two things don't mix right the children are loud they're not going to allow you to sneak up on a
00:11:24
buffalo um it's not an ideal situation for women so women historically have been very dependent on men for resources
00:11:31
and we've inherited that that brain because over the course of evolutionary history women who would have placed an
00:11:37
emphasis on you know choosing Partners who have these kinds of qualities they would have been more likely to have
00:11:43
surviving Offspring who then passed that tendency or that preference onto their offspring who'd pass that preference
00:11:49
down to their offspring and so human you know contemporary human women even though we're able to gain access to
00:11:55
resources of our own we still have that preference right we've inherited that preference from our successful ancestors
00:12:03
because women who had that preference would have performed better than women who didn't pay attention to that sort of
00:12:08
thing so oftentimes people think things are the way they are because of a
00:12:14
patriarchy or because of sort of social factors yeah but you're saying that there are sort of innate biological
00:12:20
differences and evolutionary differences in men and women that go beyond our sort
00:12:25
of sexual organs and stuff oh yeah no absolutely yeah you know in fact the patriarchy which just refers to you know
00:12:31
male control of resources wouldn't really exist if women
00:12:37
didn't desire resources and their Partners um because the reason that men tend to control a lot of resources is
00:12:43
because women demand resource access on the part of their partners and if women didn't care then men wouldn't work so
00:12:51
hard to get access to them you know there's this really great quote by Aristotle Onasis where he once said
00:12:56
without women all the power and money in the world would be completely meaningless and I think that there's a
00:13:03
lot of wisdom in that men work so hard to control the resources not because men
00:13:08
together are banding you know together and trying to hoard the resources and keep them from women I don't think that
00:13:14
that's really how the world works and I think if you have a look around we'd see that that's not really how the world Works instead it's an epiphenomenon of
00:13:22
the fact that men are competing amongst you know amongst whoever else has access to resources to get resources of Their
00:13:28
Own right and because women value this in their choice of Partners oftentimes men will go to Greater lengths to get
00:13:34
them right one of the reasons not the only reason but certainly one of the reasons that we see that more men tend
00:13:40
to be in um you know positions of being a CEO for example is because oftentimes
00:13:46
men are more willing to make the tradeoffs that you have to make to get into those positions because men are
00:13:51
wired that way right and the reason that they're wired that way is because they've inherited these Tendencies to
00:13:57
want this despite the costs because it would have paid off in terms of being able to attract better Partners
00:14:04
a greater number of Partners right and then being able to have your children do better right and so you know the
00:14:10
patriarchy yes that is something that exists right we do tend to see that men tend to control resources more
00:14:16
frequently than women in most societies around the world um but this isn't because men are banding together and
00:14:22
trying to keep exclude women instead this is just a product of men's evolved psychology um trying to work as hard as
00:14:30
they can to get access to resources in part because women require them and men
00:14:35
are much more likely to take risks aren't they as you say so I was as you were speaking I was thinking about the the gambling statistics that I read that
00:14:41
said the vast majority of gambling addicts are are men so so I was just thinking about that in the context of
00:14:47
like entrepreneurship and these kinds of things is that to say that men are going
00:14:53
to be more entrepreneurial yeah yeah you know I would think so yes and and the reason
00:14:58
being that that it is about risk right and women often times um again you know
00:15:04
a lot of this has to do with this this the psychology that we've inherited and and throughout most of our history women
00:15:11
were caring for young children I mean this was you know kind of what our bodies made us just have to do it's like
00:15:17
our our bodies are wired for having babies right and this doesn't mean that
00:15:22
this is what women should do right or what women need to do or that you know that that this is somehow destining
00:15:28
women to do one you know this set of activities but instead throughout most of our history we spend a lot of our
00:15:34
time pregnant and caring for young children and that has selected for our psychology to be very risk sensitive and
00:15:41
risk averse and what we tend to see is that women are more risk averse than our men and we can see this play out in
00:15:49
terms of things like um gambling right we know that overwhelmingly men tend to be the ones who are gambling addicts
00:15:56
relative to women but also in terms of good risks right because you do see something like being a being an
00:16:02
entrepreneur for example which is something that does come with a pretty big risk attached to it meaning that you
00:16:08
know there's a big boom and bust um but it the the risk associated with the
00:16:14
possibility of a bust um is something that women's uh psychology is a is a little bit less tolerant of relative to
00:16:21
men's I think one of the interesting observations I've had as a investor but also as an entrepreneur myself is that
00:16:28
there may be data to support the fact that more men are likely to start businesses but it doesn't necessarily mean they're better at it and part of
00:16:36
that links what you said about this relationship with risk because being prone to risk in business doesn't
00:16:42
necessarily mean you're going to be good at entrepreneurship and I often tend to find that when you have a woman leading
00:16:49
a business they're much more accurate and honest with their forecasting and much more um yeah realistic about what
00:16:56
the business is actually capable of and men tend to over forecast um in terms of business
00:17:02
performance they tend so but then also I think it's interesting because I had Kevin o who's the shark on Shark Tank in
00:17:08
the USA say that in his portfolio of investments from Shark Tank the best performing Investments that he had were
00:17:13
women and I think again I think from memory what he was saying was when it comes to forecasting and um taking C
00:17:22
more calculated risks wom women tend to be better at that than men right which
00:17:27
is an interesting it's interesting yeah no I think that it's totally spoton um that you know men tend to be riskier and
00:17:35
and they tend to have a little bit more hubris I mean there there's a tendency um to assume that they're going to and
00:17:42
have an exaggerated belief about how successful they're going to be because in part you know I think it It
00:17:48
ultimately boils down the to the differences in our mating psychology and then also the psychology of of parenting
00:17:55
compared to provisioning and I think that for men um you know seeing the world in a way that's distorted in terms
00:18:02
of assuming that things are going to be better than they are is going to allow them to be able to better attract mates
00:18:08
for example because they're buying their own story you know it's like they're buying their own story about how great
00:18:13
everything is going to be even if it's not necessarily all that great um this leads people to take risks and and with
00:18:20
big risks come big rewards and historically evolutionarily for men
00:18:25
those rewards could potentially translate into additional mating opportunities that have a direct impact
00:18:31
on men's ability to pass down genes for women it's not so much you know because even if you have the best idea ever
00:18:38
that's going to get you access to the greatest number of mates possible the number of offspring that a woman can
00:18:44
potentially have into the future is dependent completely on the limits of her own reproductive biology so a woman
00:18:51
with access to 10 Partners can only pass down the same number of genes as a woman with access to one whereas the same
00:18:58
hasn't been true for men right for men who have access to 10 Partners this can lead to 10 times as many offspring as
00:19:04
what they can have if they have access to one and this creates an asymmetry in the potential benefits um Fitness
00:19:12
benefits related to men and women um from winning big right and so men's
00:19:17
psychology is geared toward wanting to do things that are and and having their brain tell themselves stories about how
00:19:24
successful things are going to be to act as a carrot that then leads them to want to pursue those types of things even
00:19:31
when it's highly risky so if I become a billionaire yeah then I can afford to and I will
00:19:37
attract potentially hundreds of thousands of Partners and then I can have hundreds of thousands of kids
00:19:42
because I can afford to and I'm going to have so much interest because I'm a high resource High status male whereas a
00:19:47
woman if she becomes a billionaire she can only have one kid every nine months or 12 months whatever it is yeah yeah
00:19:55
and that's actually there's in evolutionary biology there's a principle behind that it's called the baitman principle it refers to the fact that
00:20:02
men's fitness can increase with each partner they have access to and for women it tops out after one right so the
00:20:10
potential reproductive returns from having access to novel Partners is greater for men than it is for women
00:20:17
right and this does not mean that this is what most men do right most men don't translate their increased uh their
00:20:23
increased status and their increased access to Resources by gaining access to an AS astronomical number of Partners um
00:20:30
but historically that's something that men sometimes do right if we look at history um you'll see in particularly in
00:20:38
polygynous cultures where you have men who are able to have access to multiple partners at the same time those men who
00:20:44
have the most resources and have the highest status tend to have multiple wives right they tend to have a greater
00:20:50
number of children right and we are the descendence of people who would sometimes make that decision right and
00:20:55
so what we tend to see is that that has shaped men's mating psychology and shaped men's achievement motivation
00:21:01
psychology in ways that helps to promote um you know gaining access to resources
00:21:08
in part because gaining access to resources leads to a greater Fitness return than what gets um is available to
00:21:14
women from doing the exact same thing this wasn't a long time ago in human history either because my granddad in
00:21:21
Nigeria mhm I I've never met the guy um I don't believe he's still alive I've
00:21:27
never been close to to him um but I was told that he had 10 or 14 wives right
00:21:32
and so I was told that I have 30 40 cousins in Nigeria right yeah I mean I'm
00:21:38
doing okay financially but I probably don't have the means the means to meet them all and become friends with all of
00:21:44
them um but uh yeah I uh that's pretty pretty striking that just sort of one
00:21:49
generation above my dad was this a man that had multiple wives and so when you
00:21:57
say that that's him that could be part of passed down to me in some way yeah that sort of proclivity to have to want
00:22:03
to acquire more resources so that I can support more people it's quite frightening I don't think that it's
00:22:09
something to be frightened of I think that you know when we understand the the tendencies that we've inherited I
00:22:15
actually think that it gives us greater appreciation for the kinds of decisions that we actually end up making why is it
00:22:21
that you know especially in um cultures like the US and I think about in European culture we're monogamous ly
00:22:28
mating you know species we we form these long-term pair bonds and so then we also have to ask ourselves you know given
00:22:35
that this is something that is possible for men right to increase their um their reproductive output simply by gaining
00:22:42
access to new partners why is it that most men don't do this like what are the benefits when you look at contemporary
00:22:49
hunter gatherer groups where humans are living in ways that are more similar to um the way that our ancestors likely
00:22:55
lived than what we do currently what you tend to see is that those children who have an investing father around their
00:23:03
probability of survival is vastly higher than that of the children of women who
00:23:09
do not have an investing partner around one of the other parts of the answer is that women generally don't want to share
00:23:17
right and so what you get is um by men being willing to restrict their own what
00:23:22
we call reproductive value which just refers to the number of potential children that they can have into the
00:23:28
future that increases the quality of partner they're going to be able to have because most women don't want to share and so if
00:23:36
you are a woman who's of high value meaning that you have a lot of the qualities that men desire in their
00:23:41
Partners you can be really picky and say no I'm not going to share and so if you
00:23:46
want to mate with me then that means that you're going to have to make some decisions because you know imagine that
00:23:52
you're a man and just based on all the qualities that you have let's say that your mate value is and let's assume that
00:23:58
mate value has a 1 to 10 scale okay so there's a 1 to 10 scale and you're a seven right all the qualities I'm just
00:24:05
I'm I'm not talking about you I'm talking the Royal you and what if I to do to be an eight well the reason the reason the reason I'm making you and
00:24:12
again I'm saying the Royal you of seven is because so just bear with me here
00:24:18
your value of seven is because you are not really willing to commit to a long-term relationship right so you're
00:24:24
you have all these resources and you have you know and you've got your attractiveness you've got your good
00:24:29
jeans and all the other things a dog right yeah but you're not yeah exactly
00:24:34
you've got a podcast you got all this like great stuff going for you but you're not willing you're not going to
00:24:40
just you know commit your resources and to to one person um and you meet somebody who's just you know she's
00:24:46
amazing and she she also has a podcast and she's gorgeous and and she's a nine
00:24:52
you can increase your value to her just by Will being willing to invest by being willing because women desire that
00:24:59
because women generally place a priority on somebody's willingness to stick around and continue invest to continue
00:25:05
to invest resources in just her you can increase your value from a seven to a nine or a 10 just by virtue of being
00:25:12
willing to commit how does a woman know if I am high status or not like AR there
00:25:18
ways that I can just like signal that I am if I go to the gym and then I don't know I got nice after shaven perfume and
00:25:24
I'm wearing I don't know a cool t-shirt what are what are the cues how does the brain know that I'm a good reproductive partner right yeah no that's a really
00:25:31
great question it's really interesting because um a lot of the qualities that men value in their Partners like for
00:25:36
women are things that are immediately available just based on physical appearance because we know that men have
00:25:42
um placed a priority on cues related to fertility and reproductive value and
00:25:48
reproductive value is just essentially a person's reproductive shelf life I mean I was reading in your book about how
00:25:55
mating and attraction preferences change for woman throughout her cycle yeah so
00:26:00
throughout a woman's 28 day cycle does she always want a nice guy no so women's
00:26:07
partner preferences and the types of qualities that women tend to prioritize in their choice of Partners do change
00:26:13
across the menstrual cycle um and this changes with our sex hormones so during
00:26:19
uh the early part of the menstrual cycle both sets of sex hormones so our our estrogen and progesterone which is our
00:26:25
second uh primary sex hormone they are low and then as estrogen begins to
00:26:31
increase which is something that happens as eggs start to mature in the ovary and
00:26:37
as the eggs are maturing they release estrogen and as an egg as a dominant egg
00:26:42
is chosen and um begins to fully mature so that way it will be released at ovulation which is how many days into
00:26:49
the cycle um usually estrogen really starts to Surge right around day nine of the cycle but it really hits its like
00:26:57
High Point usually right around day 14 which is when ovulation occurs so
00:27:02
estrogen begins Rising sharply around day nine of the cycle and again the first day of the menstrual cycle is the
00:27:08
day that um is the day that your period arrives so that's day one about day nine
00:27:14
so about a week and a half after your period started most women will start to have a pretty dramatic increase in
00:27:20
estrogen estrogen will climb climb climb climb climb it will Peak around day 14
00:27:25
which um is when ovulation occurs and this is when an egg of course is
00:27:30
released and pregnancy is possible from sex so from day nine till day 15 till
00:27:36
day yeah till day 15 day N9 to day 15 are are usually like that's usually when we sort of bookend the fertile window
00:27:44
and during this time not surprisingly um women experience a change in their
00:27:50
sexual psychology right so women become increasingly attuned to All Things sex
00:27:57
so what we tend to see is that women's sexual desire increases right around that time in the cycle women have more
00:28:03
sex during that time in the cycle women masturbate more during that time in the cycle and women become more exacting
00:28:11
about who it is that they desire as a romantic partner or a sex partner and in particular what we tend to see is that
00:28:19
as estrogen is increasing across the cycle so too does women's interest in
00:28:24
cues that historically have been related to high genetic quality or genetic
00:28:29
compatibility within their choice of Partners so two of the traits that we know to be particularly pronounced um in
00:28:36
terms of women's interest um near high fertility in the cycle are cues related
00:28:42
to testosterone and masculinity and the reason for this one is because
00:28:47
testosterone is a known imuno supressive meaning that it has the effect of
00:28:53
suppressing the immune system and so people who have relatively High levels of testosterone this is a cue that their
00:29:01
bodies are in such good physical condition right their immune system is so strong and robust that it can handle
00:29:09
being suppressed by testosterone so people who have higher testosterone are
00:29:14
believed to have greater immunocompetence relative to people with lower levels of testosterone and what we
00:29:20
tend to see is that low and behold um during that Peak fertility time in the
00:29:26
menstrual cycle when estrogen is high that women exhibit a greater preference for cues related to testosterone in men
00:29:34
so we find for example that women desire a more masculinized male faces voices
00:29:40
and behavior at high fertility in the cycle compared to low fertility in the cycle how do you test this you test this
00:29:47
by looking at what it is that women are looking for and you look at it over time so just to give you an example of one of
00:29:54
the sort of most robust studies that's been done looking at this phenomenon researchers had a group of women bring
00:30:01
home a bunch of little plastic tubes um in a freezer bag and they had them spit
00:30:07
into these little um saliva collection tubes every day of the cycle across two
00:30:13
menstrual cycles on those same days when women were taking a saliva sample they were also evaluating the attractiveness
00:30:20
of male faces and the thing that the women didn't know is that the researchers knew the testosterone levels
00:30:27
of the faces of the men that they had them looking at because the researchers had men come into the research lab
00:30:32
beforehand and took their morning testosterone levels over the course of several days to get an average morning
00:30:39
testosterone level for these men and so when they got all the saliva samples from the women they assayed all of their
00:30:46
saliva and they were able to look at Women's estrogen changes across the cycle and then how it related to their
00:30:53
facial preferences for men and what they found was first that of course estrogen
00:30:59
tended to increase and Peak during this fertile window so days n nine or so to
00:31:05
day 15 women's estrogen levels were high and during this time what they also
00:31:10
found is that women's preference for for testosterone levels in the faces of the men they preferred also increased and so
00:31:18
there was this really beautiful overlap between women's estrogen levels and their preference for testosterone going
00:31:24
to show that estrogen loves testosterone right so women during this estrogenic
00:31:30
phase in the cycle have a heightened preference for cues related to facial masculin masculinity they also have a
00:31:37
greater preference for vocal masculinity so women at high fertility in the cycle also like the sound of more masculinized
00:31:44
male voices they tend to like more social dominance in terms of behavior um relative to what we tend to see when
00:31:50
women are at low fertility in the cycle so I'm more likely to get laid if I yeah
00:31:56
there you go I think that voice right there that you did I think it's going to get you all the girls think I do I do I
00:32:02
would I would try that one out at the bar tonight they must then find that and I think I read this in your work well I did read it in your work I'm just
00:32:07
pretending I knew it um they also found that men who have high testosterone
00:32:13
levels are more likely to be in a relationship um the next year than men
00:32:18
that don't have high testosterone levels yeah so we know that um we know from research that not only you know do women
00:32:25
desire testosterone in their partners women choose men with higher levels of testosterone as their Partners so
00:32:32
they've done studies looking at whether or not men are partnered over time right
00:32:37
based on what their testosterone levels are at time one and then looking at whether or not they're married at time
00:32:42
two and what we tend to find is that low and behold men with higher levels of testosterone are more likely to be
00:32:48
married at time too suggesting that men are probably more likely to be chosen as
00:32:53
partners when they have higher levels of testosterone relative to when they do not
00:32:59
and something that I found really bizarre and no one's ever explained to me is I also read I believe it was in your book or might been in a in a video
00:33:06
I watched of yours um they found that men who had a baby had plummeting testosterone levels
00:33:13
yeah like how does the how does the my body know that I have a baby isn't that fascinating like the exact mechanisms I
00:33:19
don't know exactly what they are but the connection between the brain and the rest of the body I mean it's it's it it
00:33:26
knows everything I mean it knows everything and what the research finds is that yes when men get into a
00:33:32
long-term relationship for example a men's testosterone decreases a little bit right and we tend to you know
00:33:38
culturally we have this narrative about testosterone where it's like more is better right and it's always seen as
00:33:44
something that men should have a lot of and you see there's testosterone clinics on all these different Corners um
00:33:51
because you know this idea that men need lots of testosterone and to have low testosterone means that you have a
00:33:56
problem but it doesn't always mean that at all and what we tend to see is that when men are get into a long-term
00:34:01
relationship testosterone takes a little dip and when men have children that they're caring for testosterone takes
00:34:08
another dip and the reason for this is that it's not always in a man's best interest to have their foot on the gas
00:34:15
pedal of sexual desire and attraction all the time it's just not necessarily the best thing to do if you're a man
00:34:23
engaged in a long-term relationship or you're a man who's caring for young children it would be better to take some
00:34:29
of that effort they'd be spend you know looking at the next door neighbor and you know looking at her shorts or
00:34:35
whatever it is that you're looking at and instead using that effort to channel it toward caring for your children
00:34:41
caring for your partner so nice guys don't get laid as
00:34:46
much so nice guys might not get laid as much and and when you look at short-term
00:34:52
casual sexual behavior in particular we tend to find that the ones who are more successful with that a mating strategy
00:34:58
tend to be men with higher levels of testosterone there's just no question about that nonetheless um being somebody
00:35:06
who's willing to invest and willing to have long-term relationships with women generally is going to get you in a good
00:35:13
position um to be able to find a partner and this is something that anybody can do to increase their value to women um
00:35:20
and so you could be somebody who has low testosterone right you're lacking these cues to um High genetic quality or even
00:35:28
genetic compatibility right like let's say that your immune genes which is one thing that women also pick up on at high
00:35:34
fertility is they tend to pick up on qualities related to somebody having different immune genes than themselves
00:35:41
men who are lacking these things completely um Can can make themselves desirable to women simply by virtue of
00:35:48
being the type of person who's willing to in invest in a committed relationship because it is something that women value
00:35:54
this is a bit of a side point and I haven't seen this in na work but it just came to mind cuz I was just thinking of a conversation I had with one of my
00:36:01
friends attraction for me is such a delicate thing it's almost it's almost un it's well it is unconscious and I I
00:36:08
we often think of attractiveness as maybe you know this body part on the person is a certain shape or their face
00:36:13
looks like this but the older I've gotten and the more I look back on my life The more I've come to believe that
00:36:19
there's almost like a thousand tiny little micro expressions or something in the air which makes us attracted to
00:36:25
someone else and so when we're giving people advice on how to be attract Ive I wonder if most most of the advice is pretty futile because it's deeper than
00:36:32
that right it's so much deeper than that yeah so I and and you're totally right about that I mean the fact is attraction
00:36:38
is idiosyncratic and finicky right so all of us when we think about the things that we find sexy and attractive um
00:36:45
there's going to be a lot of ways that that you're going to disagree with other people right like you're going to think that somebody like is so sexy to you and
00:36:52
other people might say yeah you know she's all right but it doesn't really do it for them um and there's a there is an
00:36:58
element to our attraction that is very person specific and idiosyncratic right
00:37:03
and may might there be some evolutionary Roots behind all of that may be right so
00:37:09
it could be for example that the kinds of qualities that you find you know just really attractive in another person that
00:37:15
that make you feel so attracted to them might be cued that they are a really compatible mate for you and maybe that's
00:37:20
why you have a very sort of you specific response to that person but there are also Dimensions that are shared right so
00:37:26
we know for example that men tend to place a greater emphasis relative to women on cues related to physical
00:37:33
attractiveness and that physical attractiveness tends to be related to things that have historically been
00:37:39
related to fertility right so for example having an hourglass body shape we know that this is something that's
00:37:45
related to a woman's level of sex hormones and that women with higher levels of estrogen for example are more
00:37:51
likely to put on fat around their butt and their thighs and less likely to put on fat around their waist um relative to
00:37:57
women with higher or lower levels of estrogen right as estrogen levels decline when women age their bodies
00:38:04
become more straight up and down than they do hourglass and this has to do with changes in estrogen and um and so
00:38:11
we know that that's something that men generally desire to a greater extent than women right we also know that men
00:38:16
tend to PR place a greater emphasis on cues related to youthfulness right so
00:38:21
the cues that are related to H maturity in a face that's something that women tend to have aen preference for so if
00:38:27
somebody has sort of an older you know an older face um they they tend to be seen as more attractive like so like
00:38:35
50-year-old George Clooney seems more attractive most women think that that looks more attractive than you know
00:38:41
25-year-old um George Clooney and and we see that because our brains have
00:38:46
inherited this tendency to find cues related to wisdom and status and
00:38:53
resource acquisition all of which come with greater age um women have in have
00:38:59
inherited that preference for those kinds of qualities because that would have given them a mating related
00:39:04
Advantage relative to preferring a more youthful face conversely for men they
00:39:10
would have been penalized if they had a preference for maturity in the face of a potential partner because if you like
00:39:17
women who have signs of maturity and wisdom and resource acquisition ability you'd probably choose somebody who's
00:39:23
approaching menopause right and that's not going to lead to any Gene transmission at all right and so we tend
00:39:29
to see that men have a heightened preference for cues related to youthfulness and faces and so even
00:39:35
though yes there are differen or there are differences between individuals and there is some idiosyncrasy that tends to
00:39:41
characterize human mate Choice there are a lot of things that we can actually make some pretty strong predictions
00:39:46
about too so there are some overall themes that tend to characterize men's
00:39:51
and women's partner preferences is it true that men are less attractive to
00:39:57
successful women is there any sort of evolutionary basis for that I do know
00:40:02
that research finds that men don't place as much of a priority on that that compared to
00:40:08
women but I don't know that they penalize them exactly right if you had somebody if you show a man a photograph
00:40:15
of a woman who's dressed like a CEO and she's gorgeous and you show a man a picture of a woman who's dressed like a
00:40:22
Burger King service you know person and she's drop dead gorgeous men are going to find her similarly attractive in both
00:40:30
conditions it doesn't matter the woman can be doing it doesn't matter what the woman is doing and there's been research that shows this they'll show men and
00:40:37
women photographs of people in different types of outfits and the men's ratings
00:40:42
of how attractive the women are has just everything to do with how attractive the women are um for women rating men it all
00:40:49
depends on what they're wearing right do they show cues to Resource access do they not show cues to Resource access
00:40:56
and women tend to modulate how physically attractive they find men based on whether or not they have these
00:41:02
cues related to provisioning Ability so I don't know if there was a really attractive and there are a lot of really
00:41:08
attractive uh females in positions of power um men will find them just as
00:41:13
attractive as they do somebody who's not in a position of power although they may be you know potentially less likely to
00:41:19
choose them as a long-term mate um you know if there's issues related to power
00:41:25
dynamics and that sort of thing that they don't want to mess with with what about jealousy and
00:41:30
specifically is the term interex women being jealous of women men being jealous of men you mentioned a second ago that
00:41:38
if you know 60% of the college educated or college attendees or 70% of them are women and there's only a pool of 30%
00:41:46
which are men isn't there going to be a ton of competition amongst women and what direction does that competition
00:41:52
travel in is it low status women having competition with high status women or is
00:41:57
it what is it I mean the competition when you have cases where there's an asymmetrical sex ratio and like we do on
00:42:04
college campuses I mean women are very competitive amongst one another for access to the men that are available and
00:42:11
oftentimes the way that this like the form that this tends to take is that women become increasingly likely to be
00:42:18
willing to do whatever men want of them in order to be chosen as a mate and what we've tended to see on college campuses
00:42:25
is because men are more or oriented toward casual sex and non-committed
00:42:30
relationships than women are what we tend to see is that short-term hookups and Casual Sex tend to be very common on
00:42:39
college campuses and in part this is the result of the fact that women are competing for access to mates and one of
00:42:46
the ways that they can compete for access to Mates is to be willing to do whatever it is that men want in terms of
00:42:52
um providing you know the structure of the relationship and if men are only looking for casual sex even though women
00:42:59
are tend to be more oriented toward long-term relationships they're going to be um more inclined to just give in to
00:43:06
whatever it is that the men desire um as a means to be able to get a partner are women more competitive with beautiful
00:43:13
women or women that are less stereotypically and socially
00:43:19
considered beautiful oh women are more competitive with beautiful women I mean there's just no question about that and
00:43:24
the reason for this is that given that this is something that men desire and their Partners um this is the primary
00:43:30
Dimension by which women compete for access to Partners right and so this is the big this is the big one um given men
00:43:38
place a really pretty strong priority on physical attractiveness in their choice of Partners and in fact one of the
00:43:44
biggest predictors of a woman's upward social mobility in the US is how physically attractive a woman is and in
00:43:51
fact that's a bigger predictor of a woman's upward Mobility than her education level or even her
00:43:57
socioeconomic status of origin when you say upward social Mobility what do you mean I mean the ability to transcend the
00:44:03
social class in which you were born okay so if you're somebody who was uh you know working class or middle class or
00:44:08
upper class your ability to transcend those ranks of um of you know
00:44:13
socioeconomic status is um more strongly predicted by physical attractiveness than a woman's education level and
00:44:20
that's like a tough thing to have to that's a tough nut to you know a tough nut to crack tough pill to swallow
00:44:27
so women are more competitive against beautiful women in the lens of
00:44:34
society and stereotypically yes and and one of the ways that women compete against one another is by derogating
00:44:42
their competitors right and derogating their competitors just meaning saying mean things about them or saying mean
00:44:48
things to them and a lot of times those mean things that they have to say have to do with a woman's attractiveness
00:44:55
right they'll try to downplay how attractive she is to other people by saying things like um you know oh she's
00:45:01
had a lot of work done right that's the thing that you'll hear women say um about each other or to men about other
00:45:08
women and and this is something that's done to try to manipulate other people's perceptions of that woman's value but
00:45:15
because attractiveness plays such an important role in terms of a woman's ability to successfully attract a
00:45:21
romantic partner um this is a dimension in which women are fiercely competitive
00:45:26
even when they don't want to say that they are and want to pretend that they're not right I think that the Barbie movie was you know sort of got at
00:45:33
some of these kinds of issues and just this idea that women want to pretend like none of this stuff matters right
00:45:39
that it's not that important and that we don't value this stuff but nonetheless um this is still a very important domain
00:45:45
of competition for women always has been I think it probably always will be are women more likely to trust a beautiful
00:45:52
woman or a woman that is less stereotypically Beautiful cuz I was thinking about this um this thing about
00:45:59
gay male shopping sales associates uhhuh it was a test that you did right yeah so
00:46:05
this was I have um one of my former this is digging deep so um this one of my
00:46:11
former students um who was really into and so he's a gay man um and just to set
00:46:17
the stage for all of this he became really interested in the friendship that
00:46:23
tends to form between gay men and straight women which is actually actually you know it there's a this is
00:46:29
something that happens everywhere so having like the the gay man and the straight woman friendship is something
00:46:34
that's not just you know something that we see in Europe and the US it is sort of cross-culturally ubiquitous and he
00:46:40
was trying to understand this relationship and one of the things that he noted in his research is that um the
00:46:47
people who tend to form friendships most frequently with gay men are beautiful women um it's like attractive women who
00:46:55
who are more competitive and potentially May perceive more competition on the
00:47:01
part of other women and they form these friendships because gay men can provide
00:47:06
them with really important information um that's relevant on the mating Market
00:47:12
that is not colored by one intersexual competition right so if you say do these
00:47:17
pants make me look fat right your um your gay man friend isn't going to tell
00:47:22
you no they look great even though they make you look terrible because they're trying to send you out and look terrible
00:47:28
right so there's no like there's no thread of competition in that relationship and there's also not the
00:47:35
fear that this person's just trying to get you in bed right and so there's this there's this really nice trust um that
00:47:42
women can have with um with gay men this is your brain on birth control yes why
00:47:48
did you choose to write this book I chose to write this book because I was on hormonal birth control for more than
00:47:54
a decade of my life and I'm a psychologist who studies women and
00:48:00
women's Brains and I had absolutely no idea that any of the things that the birth control
00:48:06
pill does to the brain were happening to me and so I went off of hormonal birth control after being on it for more than
00:48:13
a decade straight and when I went off it I felt like I woke up it was like I had this
00:48:19
moment it was about 3 months after I discontinued it where all of a sudden I
00:48:25
realized that over the last three months like I'd been feeling things more deeply I'd been interested in sex in a way that
00:48:32
I hadn't been in a long time I was exercising and going to the gym again I was downloading new music onto my what
00:48:39
was then an iPod um for the first time I know and yeah it's like it's like a it's
00:48:45
like an archaic iPhone people I was like downloading new music onto my phone and my iPod I was cooking it was like I was
00:48:53
just interested in pleasure I had more energy I was feeling things more deeply
00:48:58
and I thought what is this and I was on it you know during the time that I was
00:49:04
on birth control I never had any issues with it like I wasn't one of those people who had uh negative mood related
00:49:11
side effects and I didn't know that I was experiencing any side effects at all and it was only after I went off of it
00:49:18
and started to realize how much more alive I felt that I started to dig into
00:49:23
the research behind the way that hormonal birth control changed changes women and it was then that I learned
00:49:29
that people had been studying this in some cases for 30 years on the way that hormonal birth control changes the way
00:49:35
that women think feel and experience the world and it was then that I knew that I had to share this information with other
00:49:41
women because here I was as somebody who's on the pill studies women studies
00:49:47
women's Brains I'd even published papers on the effects of women's changing hormones over the cycle and the way that
00:49:54
they influence women and it never even occurred to me that my birth control was changing me and I knew that if I didn't
00:50:02
know that the birth control pill was changing me that nobody else knew it either and so that led me to dig into
00:50:08
the science behind hormones hormonal birth control um and how that changes
00:50:13
women um and I put together that book to tell everybody the things that I learned
00:50:19
pretty dangerous subject matter to take on it can seem like a dangerous subject matter to take on and and you know and
00:50:25
for good reason uh hormonal birth control and having a reliable way to
00:50:30
prevent pregnancy has been by far the biggest game Cher that women have ever
00:50:35
experienced you know in history um there's been nothing that has been more instrumental to women's ability to be
00:50:42
able to achieve political and economic independence for men than the birth control pill um and because of this
00:50:49
saying anything that is critical of the birth control pill um can be seen very dangerous right because it's like um oh
00:50:57
no don't say that too loudly or else they're going to take our birth control away or oh no don't say that too loudly
00:51:03
like what else are we going to do um but this book was really important to me to be able to present to women all of the
00:51:11
different ways that hormones influence us and the surprising ways that hormonal birth control can change who we are in
00:51:18
the way that we experience the world and then give that information to women so that way when they're making decisions
00:51:24
about whether to be on or off of hormonal birth control they have all the information about the trade-offs that
00:51:30
they're making and this will allow them then to make decisions about whether or not to be on it depending on what's
00:51:36
going on in their own lives because everything that I've learned about the way that the birth control pill changes
00:51:42
women means that the answer that you come to when you're asking yourself the question do I go on this or do I not go
00:51:49
on this is going to be very woman specific right for some women the decision is still going to be yes I I'm
00:51:55
willing to make these trade-offs and for other women the answer is going to be no I am not willing to make these
00:52:00
trade-offs and whether or not we make those sort of where we land on that is going to differ depending on where we
00:52:06
are in our life and and so on and so forth and so it was really important to me to present this information as a way
00:52:12
to really Empower women to be able to make informed decisions about who they want to be right and how they want to
00:52:20
regulate their fertility what do you wish you were told on that day when you've first given that little packet of
00:52:26
pill pills what what do you think they if they were been completely honest with you and they knew what you know now what
00:52:32
is the sort of the list of things you would have said to a young Sarah about this decision to me the the one thing
00:52:40
and then we can kind of dive down into what this all means but the thing that would have really made a difference to
00:52:46
me is that your hormones make you who you are and when you change your
00:52:51
hormones you change who you are right so the birth control pill is going to change you it changes the version of
00:52:58
yourself that your brain creates and so if you're going to be going on this you need to understand what that does so
00:53:04
this of course begs the question what does it do right and there are several
00:53:10
things that the birth control pill does right and there's at least five different things that the birth control
00:53:16
B does to change who we are right it changes our sexual desire and who we are
00:53:22
attracted to it changes our emotional states right it can affect our moods it
00:53:27
can affect our ability to regulate and to manage stress right it
00:53:35
influences sexual desire and sexual function it influences our ability to be
00:53:41
able to put on muscle mass and affects our like nutrition and fitness goals
00:53:47
right it affects all of us and not knowing all of that and not knowing the
00:53:53
potential risks of having side effects related related to mental health and libido all the way to everything you
00:54:00
know to like who a person is attracted to I wish I would have known that that
00:54:06
probably would have you know impacted again um decisions that I would have made about staying on it when I didn't
00:54:13
need to because there was there's no reason to change who you are um if you don't need the contraceptive benefits so
00:54:20
on that first point then it changes who you're attracted to your sexual desire how well so mechanistically the way that
00:54:28
this happens has everything to do with the hormonal changes that are initiated by the birth control pill and so just to
00:54:34
talk about the mechanics of this first and then talking about the downstream effects of it next um mechanically what
00:54:40
goes on when you take hormonal birth control is you are suppressing ovulation
00:54:46
right and the way that that that birth control does this is it does this by giving you a combination of hormones or
00:54:52
a single hormone that tells your brain not to stimulate the ovaries and not to
00:54:58
ovulate right and it does this by way of a synthetic progesterone called a
00:55:03
progestin and progestin which are in all forms of hormonal birth control when
00:55:09
they get picked up in the hypothalamus in the brain that sends a signal that the brain should not stimulate the
00:55:16
ovaries and should not lead to egg maturation and egg development and when this happens when the brain is not
00:55:23
stimulating the ovaries this means the body is not producing estrogen right so estrogen levels are kept really low and
00:55:30
instead you get this daily dose of a synthetic progesterone or progestin that is supplanting that right many forms of
00:55:38
hormonal birth control in addition to having that synthetic progesterone or progestin that's that turns off the
00:55:46
brain's communication with the ovaries it also has a relatively low level of estrogen that is also added so
00:55:52
combination hormonal birth control pills contain progestin and a little bit of estrogen but the estrogen levels are
00:55:59
kept really low and the progesterone levels or the progestin levels are the the dominant hormone and you get that
00:56:06
same hormonal message every day right when you do that what happens when you
00:56:12
Flatline a woman's own production of hormones and replace them with a daily dose of synthetic progesterone this does
00:56:19
a few things to sexual like women's sexual psychology the first thing that it does is it turns off that estrogen
00:56:27
surge that you get right prior to ovulation that's related to a heightened preference for sex you know it Inc like
00:56:35
that estrogen surge is related to um an increased preference for testosterone markers and mates right it's related to
00:56:42
women's interest in sex it's related to sexual function all of those things that increase right prior to ovulation that
00:56:49
help to promote reproduction sexual reproduction all of those things are turned off on women on hormonal birth
00:56:56
control control because instead they're getting the same daily message in which progestin is the dominant hormonal
00:57:02
message and estrogen levels are really low so that's the first thing that happens but they they're still horny
00:57:07
right they're still uh yes I mean they still will have sex and they still want
00:57:12
sex but many women report experiencing a a real decrease in their libido when
00:57:18
they're on hormonal birth control that's a very common response um and the reason for this is twofold one one of the
00:57:25
things that's a big factor in promoting women's sexual desire and um and libido
00:57:31
is estrogen and as estrogen is rising in the cycle because when estrogen is
00:57:36
rising this is a time in the cycle when sex can lead to conception this is something that's known to fuel the
00:57:42
female sexual response so women's sexual response and and their sexual desire um
00:57:48
all increases with estrogen levels across the cycle so when you take hormonal birth control and that's
00:57:53
flatlined which is what it does this means that sexual desire is kept more
00:57:59
constant across the cycle so you do tend to find that women who are using hormonal birth control tend to have
00:58:05
fewer Peaks and valleys in sexual desire than naturally cycling women do but on the whole it tends to be lower the other
00:58:13
thing that happens on hormonal birth control that can lead to a decrease in libido is that all of those synthetic
00:58:18
hormones that are in hormonal birth control they tend to lead to an increase in what's known as sex hormone binding
00:58:26
globulin which is a real mouthful but what it does is that this is a this is something that's released by the liver
00:58:32
and it binds up free testosterone right so it binds up testosterone and makes it
00:58:38
inactive in the body and testosterone even though we tend to think of it as like a guy thing and like this is a male
00:58:44
hormone um it's actually really important in terms of promoting women's sexual desire and women who are on
00:58:51
hormonal birth control have levels of free testosterone that are about 60% lower than that of their naturally
00:58:57
cycling peers and so what this means again is that you have another you know
00:59:02
blow to women's sexual desire when they're on hormonal birth control those low levels of estrogen and then really
00:59:10
low levels of free testosterone those two things work together to suppress
00:59:15
sexual desire in women and it can also change attraction because as we noted
00:59:22
when women are approaching you know ovulation their estrogen levels increase
00:59:27
and this is something that research finds to be related to women's interest in testosterone markers in men
00:59:35
researchers more recently said if that's true you know what happens when you put
00:59:40
women on hormonal birth control and estrogen levels are kept really low and what they find is that low and behold
00:59:47
women who are using hormonal birth control do seem to have a dampened preference for cues related to
00:59:54
masculinity and testosterone in Partners relative to what's observed in naturally cycling women which
01:00:01
specifically means that a woman on birth control is less likely to be interested
01:00:07
in a guy who is what a guy who has um really masculinized features so for
01:00:14
example if you see a face um that has high levels of testosterone generally
01:00:19
men um will have like more deep set eyes they tend to have a wider jaw in in the
01:00:26
IES they tend to have broader shoulders in a more narrow Waist Deep men with more deep voices men who have um cues to
01:00:35
like behavioral cues to social dominance that's also something related to testosterone and what the research finds
01:00:41
is that women who are using hormonal birth control do prefer a less masculinized male face relative to what
01:00:48
is observed in naturally recycling women I mean this is slightly concerning if you're a man right because if my
01:00:54
partner's on the pill and and then she comes off the pill she might not like me right yeah no and that's like a that's a
01:01:00
real important question I mean it's very provocative cuz what does that mean and there have been some research studies
01:01:07
that have looked at that exact question and one of the best studies that's looked at this question is one that was
01:01:13
a longitudinal study of married couples they followed women who were using
01:01:18
hormonal birth control at the time that they met their partner and then they just followed them over time to see what
01:01:25
would happen when women discontinued the pill what happened when they discontinued was that there were real
01:01:31
significant changes in how attracted women were to their partner um depending
01:01:38
on whether they chose them using hormonal birth control but what was interesting about it is whether the
01:01:44
women became more or less attracted to their partner depends on how attractive their partner was and so what the
01:01:51
researchers found is that women who were partnered to attractive men when they went off hormonal birth control they
01:01:58
were more attracted to their partner and were more sexually attracted to their partner and more sexually satisfied
01:02:04
within their relationship relative to where they were beforehand but for women
01:02:09
who were partnered with less attractive Partners they had the opposite effect so when they went off hormonal birth
01:02:15
control they became less attracted to their partners and reported being less sexually satisfied with their Partners
01:02:21
than where they were beforehand and so this suggests that yes it is a very real possibility that if you um have a
01:02:28
partner who chose you when you're using hormonal birth control that this can change attraction within the context of
01:02:35
the relationship but whether that's good or bad probably depends on a bunch of other dimensions that you need to take
01:02:42
into effect including partner's attractiveness so if you're not a very good-look guy you probably want have to
01:02:47
stay on it run for the hills no I mean honestly you know it's one of these things where you know this is you can
01:02:53
really quickly become alarmed with this right the good news is this and that is
01:03:00
most women who are who choose their Partners when they're on hormonal birth control go off of hormonal birth control
01:03:07
and then there's really not a huge shakeup in their relationship right and the reason for this is the way that
01:03:12
hormones influence us is they kind of nudge us a little bit one way or the other right they kind of nudge us toward
01:03:19
preferring this type of mate or that type of mate it's generally not these big sweeping changes where all of a
01:03:24
sudden it's like the w off your eyes and you're like what in the world was I thinking right these are little nudges
01:03:30
it's just that for some people who were teetering on the edge of not necessarily
01:03:35
being attracted to their partner going off hormonal birth control can tilt them out of Attraction right the same is true
01:03:42
for i' I've talked to people who've had the experience of feeling like they were lesbian and all of a sudden they feel
01:03:48
like they're bisexual or women who are bisexual and then they go off of the pill and all of a sudden they realize
01:03:54
that they're not interested in women anymore I mean it's like sexual orientation attraction of All Sorts
01:03:59
whether it's you know who you're attracted to in terms of the sex you're attracted to or who you're attracted to
01:04:05
in terms of the specific partners that you're attracted to all of those things are influenced by sex hormones and you
01:04:11
know when sex hormones kind of nudge you this way or the other way depending on where you fall in that distribution of
01:04:17
you know sort of where you are in terms of sexual orientation or am I attracted to this mate or that mate those people
01:04:23
who are on the Tails can get nudged into a place that puts them into the uncomfortable situation where they
01:04:30
realize that they're no longer attracted to the person they chose on the pill as a man is my attraction going to change
01:04:37
if my partner comes off the pill um so there is evidence that suggests that women are more attractive to men when
01:04:45
they're naturally cycling relative to when they're on hormonal birth control and so chances are if you have a partner
01:04:52
um that you are attracted to when she's on hormonal birth control when she goes off of it it's actually going to lead to
01:04:57
an increase in attraction so there's a ton of research that finds that men find
01:05:02
women sexiest they think that they smell better they think that they you know that they look more
01:05:09
attractive men will tip women more um at you know at strip clubs when the women
01:05:16
are at high fertility across the cycle relative to low fertility across the cycle meaning that men are cued into
01:05:23
estrogen levels and scent V phys you know visual appearance and even just the
01:05:29
way that women act and move so they've done studies where they have um men looking at women moving um seeing just
01:05:36
seeing their Silhouettes move like behind a sheet right so they'll see women walking or dancing and they have
01:05:43
them walking or dancing at high or low fertility across the cycle and men find the women more attractive when they just
01:05:50
see their outlines moving at high fertility compared to low fertility so men's brains are wired to pick up on
01:05:57
estrogen cues and this makes perfect sense when we consider the evolutionary process that designed us right because
01:06:04
over the course of evolutionary history men who were really dialed into women's estrogen levels they would have passed
01:06:11
down more genes than men who didn't really pay attention to those cues because estrogen across the lifespan is
01:06:17
linked with fertility and estrogen across the cycle is linked with fertility right it's a it's linked with
01:06:22
fertility no matter which way you look at it and so men who are really queued into um estrogen levels they would have
01:06:29
done really well um and so if you are a man your partner chose you when she was using hormonal birth control and now all
01:06:36
of a sudden she starts cycling again my guess is that most men will experience an increase in attraction to their
01:06:42
partner particularly at high fertility in the cycle because there's so much research that suggests that this is
01:06:48
exactly what should go on here's a here's one where I've put a few dots together if my partner is on the birth
01:06:54
control pill are my testosterone levels going to be lower that's a fascinating question and
01:07:01
it's one I'm super interested in so I actually was just I just had this conversation not that long ago with my
01:07:08
my graduate students in my lab there is research that suggest that men's testosterone levels increase in response
01:07:14
to the scent of fertile women right so when women are at high fertility if men
01:07:20
sniff t-shirts that they were wearing or in one study they actually had men sniffing the
01:07:26
air that was being uh piped through a nebulizer that had a woman's panty liner in it that was either worn at high or
01:07:33
low fertility so smelling um women's vaginal secretions both of those things
01:07:38
have been shown in research to be related um to an increase in testosterone levels in men so it
01:07:44
increases men's testosterone levels to be around these cues to high fertility
01:07:49
so what happens then when men are spending their time or are partnered
01:07:55
with some some who's on hormonal birth control right so given that um estrogen levels can increase testosterone does a
01:08:02
lack of estrogen presence lead to lower levels of testosterone on average and
01:08:08
this is a question that we do not have a research answer to but it's one that's incredibly fascinating because here we
01:08:14
are right 2024 almost 2025 and we have a testosterone crisis
01:08:20
on our hands right men's testosterone levels are much lower um than what they used to be 50 year even 50 years ago and
01:08:28
it's possible that one contributor to this is the fact that so many women are using hormonal birth control and when
01:08:35
you have on average lower levels of estrogen in the population might this
01:08:40
then also predict lower levels of testosterone in men and the answer to
01:08:45
that is we don't know and another possibility with that by the way and one
01:08:50
that I I think is so interesting is you know we talked about kids and we talked about the fact that men's testosterone
01:08:56
levels um will decrease when men are in long-term relationships and then they'll decrease a little bit more when men uh
01:09:02
have children that they're caring for and another possibility for men's lowered levels of testosterone I mean in
01:09:09
addition to all the you know trash that's in the water and you know all the chemicals that were um that were exposed
01:09:15
to is the fact that men are now responsible for more caregiving and you know than than they ever have been in
01:09:21
history right with many women you know being in the workforce men are having to also do more in the home than they ever
01:09:28
did before and so it's also possible that some of the differences that we see in testosterone levels that have changed
01:09:34
over time may be the result of men um their bodies actually decreasing testosterone uh production in response
01:09:41
to their changing roles in the home which is also sort of a fascinating possibility are you all concerned that
01:09:47
there'll be a bit of a population collapse if we don't start having more kids gosh you know I have thought about
01:09:55
I don't I I can't spend you know it's like if you talk about something like that it almost sounds like like you can
01:10:01
take the next step and say that it's everybody's you know obligation to reproduce that women need to be having
01:10:06
more babies and so I I hasten like if if if I say yes I do think about
01:10:14
that I hasten to add that um that it's you know not women's responsibility to make sure that they're having babies but
01:10:20
I do wonder what's going to happen you know because people are not reproducing the way that they used to and um and
01:10:27
there's a lot of people now who are choosing not to have children at all and so what is that going to do I I have no
01:10:34
idea but I I don't think it's necessarily going to be good every single time you eat you have an
01:10:40
opportunity to improve your health that's why I love Zoe because it helps me to make the smartest food choices for
01:10:46
my body as you guys probably know Zoe is a sponsor of my podcast I'm also an investor in the company which is
01:10:51
important to say I invested in the company because Zoe combines My Health Data with their worldclass science using
01:10:57
these two things Zoe guides me to Better Health every single time I make a food choice and eat which means I have more
01:11:03
energy better sleep better mood and I'm less hungry and the best part about Zoe is that it's backed by their recent
01:11:10
clinical trial something called the method study which is the gold standard of scientific research I started Zoe
01:11:15
just over a year ago now and I've been able to track my progress week after week so I can learn how to be even
01:11:21
smarter the week after and if you haven't joined Zoe yet I'm going to give you 10% off when you joined Zoey today
01:11:27
just use the code Steven 10 at checkout so many of you have asked me for a bloody code for Zoe and here is your
01:11:33
opportunity stevenh turn at checkout there may not be another one quick one I want to tell you about a new health
01:11:39
product/ Gadget that's had a big impact on my life but also my partner's life they are a sponsor of this podcast and
01:11:44
me and my partner are both quite obsessed with it now it is the Bon charge infrared SAA blanket have you
01:11:50
ever heard of an infrared sauna blanket before infrared sauna blankets are designed to give you the exact same same benefits of infrared saers that you find
01:11:57
at gyms and spas and health clubs but they're portable you can use them at home you can use them when you travel
01:12:02
and anywhere in between it heats the body directly rather than the air around you and for me when I use the bond
01:12:07
charge infrared sa a blanket before I sleep my sleep scores go up I'm better recovered the next day when I go to the
01:12:13
gym because it helps with circulation and stiffness and muscle soreness but also infrared is associated with really
01:12:18
improving your skin they are a sponsor of this podcast and because of that they've offered all of you listeners a25
01:12:25
% discount when you try Bond charges infrared SAA blankets today to get that discount use the code diary at checkout
01:12:31
and you'll also get free shipping and a year-long warranty head to bonch charge.com diary and get started on your
01:12:38
in Fred SAA Journey today just for a second because I've had so many conversations on this podcast about
01:12:44
men's issues and the state of the the world for men right now it's quite an interesting moment with like the
01:12:50
depression statistics and suicidality and sexlessness and all these
01:12:56
things and I don't know if you you've even got an answer to this question but
01:13:01
what advice would have you got a son I do what advice do you give to a young
01:13:07
man how old is he he's he's 15 he's 15 perfect he's like right at the age where
01:13:13
he's just about to figure out what it is to be a man right what advice are you giving to him about like what is a good
01:13:19
man in the modern world right I mean is it okay to be masculine like yeah yeah no I yes I think I think that there's I
01:13:25
think there's room for masculinity like I and honestly sex demands it I mean I I so I
01:13:33
teach a class called Evolution sex in the brain and one of the things that we talk about is just how problematic um
01:13:42
you know sex has become because there's so much of a a dance with like seduction
01:13:49
you know it's like everybody knows when um sort of you know masculinity has gone
01:13:55
too far it's like you know it when you see it when somebody is you know like touching a woman when she's asking not
01:14:01
to be her or is harassing somebody it's like we all know what that looks like but then there's also you know seduction
01:14:08
requires like Ian the whole idea of Seduction is this idea that men um can
01:14:14
lead women into sexuality and so trying to have a conversation with my son about
01:14:21
you know it's like everything has to you know he has to make sure that if he's um interacting with girls that there is
01:14:27
consent and that that it's consensual any sort of a physical touch that goes on but at the same time you know like I
01:14:35
would never at the you I can imagine thinking you know is it okay if
01:14:43
I touch your breast you know like like I can't imagine that I can't imagine living in that world I mean it's it's a
01:14:50
really tricky world to be in being a male is hard I mean that's like a hard hard line to toe because on the one hand
01:14:57
you're you know you don't want to do something that's obviously going to be detrimental or hurtful to a woman or
01:15:04
violate her in some way but on the other hand you know you can go too far with
01:15:09
the permissions in a way that can be really bad for sex and um because attraction and sexual desire is all
01:15:17
about sort of the pushing the pull of the masculine and The Feminine but also if you're if you're a low status male
01:15:23
like I was at the start of my career when I'm 18 no money like working in a call center you know not really any
01:15:31
friends can't Pro can barely well couldn't provide for myself let alone anybody else right and in terms of
01:15:38
dating Dynamics I often hear that the like top 10% of men are pretty much having all the fun right yeah that's
01:15:43
probably true and then the bottom 50% of men haven't had sex for like a year or something crazy like that so if you're
01:15:49
in that bottom 50% and but that's not the case going the other way is it because it's much easier for a woman to
01:15:55
acquire sex if she sort sort it I mean you did studies on this right right well yeah I mean if a woman is looking for
01:16:00
sex it's not hard to find like any woman who is um listening to this right now if
01:16:06
she decided to go and have sex tonight she'd probably be able to find a taker what was the study of the actor the
01:16:13
beautiful actor on a campus oh yes no that's a wonderful study so that's a classic social psychology study that was
01:16:19
done at the University of Florida a number of years ago what the researchers did is they had a male and female model
01:16:26
so an really attractive person approached strangers on campus and they
01:16:32
would introduce themselves they would just say hello I've been noticing you around campus and find you very
01:16:38
attractive and after they made this introduction they would then follow this with one of three requests it would
01:16:44
either be would you like to go on a date with me would you like to go back to my apartment with me or would you like to
01:16:51
go and have sex with me right and then they simply made note of what the said right did they say yes or did they say
01:16:57
no and what they found was that for both men and women 50% agreed to the date
01:17:03
right so I've been noticing around campus I find you very attractive would you go on a date with me 50% of men 50%
01:17:09
of women said yes after that the sexes diverged in pretty pretty marked ways
01:17:15
right what they found is that very few women almost zero women said yes to go back to the apartment with the person
01:17:22
and a full 0% of women said that they would go back and have sex with the person this isn't what they found for
01:17:29
men right for men what they found was that men were more likely to agree to go
01:17:34
back to somebody's apartment with them than they were to the date and men were most likely to agree to just have sex
01:17:41
almost 80% of men agreed yeah I would love to go and have sex with you and the men who said No usually were in a
01:17:48
relationship right or noted that like their parents were in town and they wouldn't be able to go back to their apartment and so so this goes to show
01:17:57
some real differences when it comes to men's and women's sort of tendency towards sexual opportunism and the fact
01:18:05
is you know historically women have had huge costs related to sexual behavior
01:18:11
just simply because women to reproduce have a minimum investment of 9 months
01:18:16
time in pregnancy and then subsequent time spent breastfeeding right and so for women who were sexually
01:18:23
opportunistic in other was willingness to con willing to consent to sex without strings or investment women would have
01:18:30
been penalized for that right because throughout most of our evolutionary history that could result in a pregnancy
01:18:36
and it could result in a pregnancy for which you have no one to help co-invest for men on the other hand being willing
01:18:43
to consent to sex without commitment that's an evolutionary win right that's
01:18:49
a potential Gene transmission opportunity because short-term sex of course can lead to pregnancy and if
01:18:56
there is no expectation of further investment it's very low cost right so
01:19:01
the costs and benefits related to short-term casual sex are vastly
01:19:06
different depending on whether or not you have a male or female body so if your son comes home one day and says mom
01:19:12
listen I've tried my best um I can't seem to persuade a woman to give me a
01:19:18
chance right then I would say go to the gym and be a nice guy well I mean honestly be a nice guy
01:19:26
well no but nice guys can can form relationships right if he's looking for a girlfriend I think one of the ways
01:19:31
that you can get a girlfriend is by being willing to being willing to invest in a woman like if you're a jerk you
01:19:39
know you're going to have a harder time um even if you're an attractive jerk if you were like an attractive nice guy
01:19:46
you'd probably do better as long as you're not too nice right because that might give off like low testosterone cues I'm not really sure but these like
01:19:52
bad boys they seem to get a lot of the sort of sexual attention right what is that about but
01:19:59
that's but that's like despite the fact that they're bad boy I mean so so it depends on how we're defining Bad Boys okay so little bit yeah yeah so a lot of
01:20:07
those are cues related to testosterone right so having you know being risk tolerant so being willing to do things
01:20:14
that are really risky um and you know and and being a little bit arrogant
01:20:19
because you know you're always going to succeed I mean those are cues related to status and related to sometimes uh
01:20:26
testosterone levels right and so we know that women like both of these things in their partners and so because of that
01:20:33
those men will tend to do pretty well on the mating market for for men who um you
01:20:38
know don't have those quality so so men who are not you
01:20:44
know risk seeking and are not arrogant um that's not necessarily going to not
01:20:50
do them favors unless that also is you know an indicator that they
01:20:56
have other qualities that aren't working for them you can have somebody who's very successful right and has high
01:21:03
testosterone who's not a jerk right and that guy will do pretty well why would you tell your son to go to the gym I
01:21:10
would tell my son to go to the gym because um it's like one way that you can naturally increase your testosterone
01:21:15
levels is by building muscle and also another thing that that does um is that
01:21:20
muscle mass is related to reductions in anxiety and the reason for this is because if you're a big dude it means
01:21:27
that you're going to be able to protect yourself and so your brain makes the adjustment and it makes you more
01:21:33
confident and less anxious when you have um when you have some muscle mass and so I would say go and do those things and
01:21:40
then also doing the things that you can to get access to resources and Status right so study and work hard um because
01:21:48
ultimately people who do that tend to do well and people um who do well financially and do well in terms of you
01:21:56
know ascending the status hierarchy they tend to also do well in the mating Market if they're men have you got a
01:22:02
daughter I sure do your daughter comes home mom I've tried my best and no one's
01:22:08
interested right yeah no so for my daughter then I would say then you just need you need to wait right you are
01:22:15
probably you are probably in the wrong you are probably in the wrong mating pool um would be my would be my advice
01:22:23
to her why uh my advice are well because so a few things so many of the things
01:22:30
that women um sort of possess that men desire in their choice of Partners um
01:22:36
are things that women don't have that much control over right it's like a woman's like Youth and and reproductive
01:22:43
value and these things related to fertility you would tell her to hate the gym I I mean I guess I might tell her to
01:22:49
hit the I might tell her to hit the gym it probably make her feel better but I don't think that I would tell her like you know should probably go and get your
01:22:56
hair done and you know um I'm trying to think oh well go off the birth control
01:23:01
pill so that if if she was on the birth control pill which she is not um but I'm just thinking in an abstract way like
01:23:09
what I would what I would tell her like things that women can do to increase their attractiveness to men I mean it's
01:23:15
like okay go be more beautiful like what are you going to say um and so like I
01:23:20
said my real advice if my daughter said this would I would say you like probably need a different pool of
01:23:27
mates what if she was 35 if she was 35 hm good question so if she was 35 what
01:23:33
would I recommend like is this like what I would actually recommend to my daughter or do you are you trying to get
01:23:39
at like what should a woman do because here's here's I I have two different
01:23:45
answers right so if a woman is just like looking for if you want me to write a
01:23:50
pamphlet called 35-year-old woman here are the things you need to do to find a partner I mean it would have a whole
01:23:56
list of unsavory like things that you know I mean it would be like consider
01:24:01
Botox men are attracted to women who have features related to Youth and
01:24:07
fertility consider having a Brazilian buttlift because men are also interested
01:24:13
in this why don't you also consider you know um spending time on your hair and
01:24:20
makeup but I don't think I would write that book you know that's not the advice that's not the advice that I would I
01:24:26
would give do men find confidence attractive in women cuz this is I was
01:24:31
thinking about this as you're speaking because I I can think of many people that I know many women and men but many
01:24:37
women that I know that are um you know maybe you know approaching their 40s and they're
01:24:43
beautiful but they're single and they don't want to be single and it's not necessarily it's not necessarily a
01:24:50
physical thing it appears but it seems to be more of like a self-esteem confidence thing and I can see how in
01:24:55
men confidence matters like if they're stood up straight and they exert those like those signals of dominance or not
01:25:02
dominance but like a high status right that' be attractive is it the same in women are men attracted to like confident women yes and no so women who
01:25:09
are seen as more confident like that is seen as more attractive for example like somebody who has some self assurance of
01:25:17
themselves instead of you know sort of like kicking their toe on the ground generally um people find that attractive both men and women but the degree to
01:25:24
which that is prioritized is hugely different between the Sexes and if you are a woman and you sort of go out and
01:25:31
exude those cues related to like social dominance for example and social
01:25:37
status that's not going to necessarily get you a mate and in some cases it
01:25:42
might actually detract from your attractiveness as a mate because people seem to view women who are in positions
01:25:50
of power more negatively than how they perceive men men and women who are in
01:25:56
positions of power there's sort of a there's a there's definitely a double
01:26:02
standard there and there and this is something that has been fairly well studied where they find that there's
01:26:08
nobody more polarizing in the world than powerful women so for example you know somebody
01:26:14
like KLA Harris who is running for president um people seem to either really love her or really hate her um so
01:26:21
there's this polarization that happens with powerful women this happens for anybody who's run for any political
01:26:26
office that is a female you get these sorts of issues and women who are
01:26:32
confident and um and uh direct and assertive are seen as being cold and and
01:26:40
you know like we call girls bossy right when they have these kinds of qualities whereas if it's a boy or men it's like
01:26:47
leadership potential and so there is a double standard in how we tend to perceive this and and it's not you know
01:26:53
over over the course of evolutionary history women did well when they chose um High status men right that would have
01:27:00
prefer that would have given them preferential access to resources for themselves and their children we don't
01:27:05
get that same kind of a pattern for men choosing women right men who chose women
01:27:11
who were you know high in status and um you know socially dominant that doesn't
01:27:18
necessarily translate into anything that's going to correspond to increased reproductive success bit of a
01:27:24
sort of correlated but uncorrelated Point people talk about daddy issues and
01:27:30
in your work I've I've kind of seen hints of an explanation for daddy issues I if my father isn't around that has a
01:27:37
big impact on who I am is there any truth to this idea that people can have Daddy Issues yeah no there absolutely is
01:27:43
and so and when I when I say this you know Daddy Issues just simply referring to the fact that women whose fathers are
01:27:50
not invested in them or absent during childhood that these women women will tend to have more unrestricted or
01:27:56
precocious sexual development and sexual behavior relative to what we see in women who grow up with investing dads so
01:28:03
just to give you an example of some research that's been done looking at this research finds that women who grow
01:28:09
up in a household without an investing dad so Dad is either gone or dad is there but you know in name only so he's
01:28:17
not really investing and and um in in the family those women go into puberty
01:28:22
significantly earlier they undo girls who grow up in two parent homes with investing fathers they also tend to have
01:28:29
an earlier age at which they begin having sex relative to women who have two dads in the home um and they tend to
01:28:36
have um a greater number of sexual partners sort of overtime relative to girls who grow up with two parents in
01:28:41
the home wouldn't they then also go into menopause area that's a really great question and um there is some evidence
01:28:47
that suggests that there may be a decrease in ovarian reserve that might go on but there hasn't been anything
01:28:53
linking that to just yet which is the the amount of eggs they have in their ovies what role does
01:28:59
the father play on our sexual preferences and decision- making so if my if my dad am I taking as a woman do I
01:29:06
take cues on what a good partner is from looking at my dad I have not seen any research that
01:29:12
has looked at that I've seen some research looking at whether women prefer Partners who are kind of similar to
01:29:18
their dads do they um and they they do seem to um and which is interesting in
01:29:24
its own right um but I do not know anything about men like and their
01:29:31
preferences and whether or not their sons then tend to emulate those preferences that's an interesting question so on the on the subject of
01:29:39
stress what is the impact that the birth control pill has on how woman experiences stress well the research
01:29:46
finds that when women are on hormonal birth control that they have a blunted cortisol response to stress and cortisol
01:29:52
is a stress hormone right and we all know it as this bad guy right this idea like oh no high cortisol and that's you
01:30:00
know seen as something that's bad because when you experience high levels of cortisol for a long period of time it
01:30:06
actually is bad right so chronic stress causes all kinds of problems right it makes you put on visceral fat so it
01:30:12
makes you put on belly fat it um dumps fat and blood into your bloodstream um
01:30:18
in ways that can raise your triglycerides and put you at a greater risk for heart and cardiovascular problems it's not good um but having
01:30:27
Dynamic spikes in cortisol in response to stressful events is actually incredibly adaptive um and it's
01:30:34
something that allows us to be able to regulate manage and cope with stress
01:30:39
right there's a reason we experience cortisol in response to stress and what what research finds is that for women
01:30:45
who are using hormonal birth control that you get a no you know a blunted or
01:30:51
absent cortisol response to stress and this is the sort of thing that we tend to see in people who've experienced PTSD
01:30:58
or trauma because people who've experienced PTSD in trauma their stress responses um get shut down by their
01:31:06
bodies because they've experienced so much stress that their body is like no more cortisol released for you because
01:31:11
cortisol in the long term is not good right it is it is detrimental to the body and so what research finds is that
01:31:20
people with PTSD and people who've had trauma they have a blunted or absent cortisol response to stress because
01:31:25
their body just doesn't allow them to release it anymore because it's chronically being released and we see
01:31:31
the same thing in women who are using hormonal birth control so they experience a blunted or absent cortisol
01:31:36
response to stress and this is something that can lead to disregulated responses and everything ranging from their immune
01:31:42
system which um is regulated in part by cortisol because that helps to regulate
01:31:48
the inflammatory response that we have both to stress and also injury and it can lead to things like our ility to
01:31:54
regulate our emotional responses because we know that cortisol has something to do with that as well and we know from so
01:32:01
much research now that women who are on hormonal birth control that they have um dysregulations in um in emotional
01:32:08
responses oftentimes with these women being at an increased risk for developing um things like uh anxiety and
01:32:15
depression right and this may in part have something to do with the differences that we have in uh cortisol
01:32:21
in your book you mentioned that in a study in DeMont women on the pill were 50% more likely to be diagnosed with
01:32:27
depression within 6 months of starting the pill compared to naturally cycling women and researchers showed that women
01:32:33
who were on the pill were two times as likely to have attempted suicide than naturally cycling women yeah it's pretty
01:32:41
Stark I mean there are some real risk factors that come up when women are using hormonal birth control and these
01:32:47
are things that often times are swept under the rug by their doctors who are prescribing it right the fact is
01:32:53
especially especially for teenage girlss going on hormonal birth control can significantly increase your risk of
01:33:00
developing a mental health disorder and significantly increase your risk of attempting or being successful at
01:33:06
suicide and this is something that's absolutely necessary especially for
01:33:12
mothers of young girls and young girls who are being put on these pills because they're the ones who asymmetrically bear
01:33:19
the burden of the increased risk of mental health related problems and the about these girls is that we don't know
01:33:25
whether or not these patterns are reversible because the teenage brain is still developing and to go into a
01:33:32
teenage brain that's still developing and suppress normal hormonal variation
01:33:38
that occurs across the cycle and instead replace it with synthetic hormones we
01:33:43
have no idea what this does to brain development and this is an important question because brain development that
01:33:49
occurs during the puberal transition that is when the brain is remodeling itself from its child version of itself
01:33:56
into the grown-up version of itself that remodeling job is being coordinated by
01:34:01
sex hormones and so the idea that we're going to replace that you know these nor these naturally occurring variation in
01:34:07
sex hormones and replace it with synthetics and that is not going to have any impact on brain development doesn't
01:34:13
seem realistic how old is your daughter she's 17 17 so she's right she's she's
01:34:19
at the age now where she's making the decision you mentioned Ellie she's not on birth control yes how did you feel feel when it came time to make that
01:34:26
decision I mean for me it's all about like what you know weighing the risks
01:34:31
and the benefits and so for me the first you know risk and benefit question is is
01:34:36
there a risk that this person is going to get pregnant right and so if she's not in a sexual relationship I don't
01:34:42
have to worry about it it's a no-brainer you're not going on hormonal birth control if she is sexually active then
01:34:48
the question becomes is there a way that we can protect her from pregnancy that
01:34:53
doesn't introduce these exogenous hormones these synthetic hormones that are going to shut down her own hormone
01:35:00
production and potentially impact brain development thankfully there are options um so there's not great right and
01:35:07
they're not for everyone but for example um there's the copper IUD which is an
01:35:13
intrauterine device that um that prevents pregnancy without changing
01:35:18
women's sex hormones and so I think that's a really good option for sexually active teenagers is that the coil it's
01:35:24
yes it's the coil it's the it's the um it's the copper coil because there's two different types of coils where does that
01:35:30
go it goes up in the vagina it goes up um into the cervix okay and it sits there for a long time sits there for a
01:35:35
long time sits there for like 5 years is how long it can stay in there without having to be replaced and it's a really
01:35:41
great option um for women to be able to protect themselves without having to think about it right and that's really
01:35:46
important when we're talking about teenagers because a lot of times they don't make the best decisions um their
01:35:51
frontal lobes are not done done to developing and because of this they don't always plan and they don't always
01:35:57
think things clearly you know think think things through clearly um and so
01:36:02
for a teenager who's not necessarily going to be all that on top of things when it comes to using things like
01:36:08
condoms which is a barrier method that requires that you actually use the condom right you can't just have them um
01:36:14
and then protect yourself from pregnancy or something like the fertility awareness method which is where women
01:36:20
keep track of where they are in their cycle and then um you know and then uh use or abstain from sex or use a barrier
01:36:27
method when they're at high fertility um and then they don't have to worry about it at low fertility I don't necessarily
01:36:34
recommend those highly for teenagers if possible just because it requires a lot of thought and like I said teenagers
01:36:41
aren't always great at thinking through things what about that thing that goes in the arm a lot of the girls in my
01:36:46
school when I was in secondary school were getting the little thing in their arm yeah so that is the implant so
01:36:51
that's um here in the US the one that people are on is called nexplanon and that gives a same it gives a daily dose
01:36:58
of a um synthetic progesterone or a progestin and that daily dose of that hormone is of course keeping the brain
01:37:05
from stimulating the ovaries and so it's keeping hormones flatlined and so that is something that yes is incredibly
01:37:12
effective and yes it is brainless because you don't have to think about it which is great because the best birth
01:37:17
control is birth control that you don't have to think about but you're getting a daily dose of this hormone hormone
01:37:23
that's shutting off your ovulation and so you're going to experience all of the changes that women experience when using
01:37:30
hormonal birth control when you're using that right it can change who you're attracted to it can change your sex
01:37:35
drive it can change your mood it can change your ability to regulate your stress response it can change your ability to put on muscle mass from
01:37:41
working out there's some new research that finds that women who are using
01:37:47
hormonal birth control who are doing the exact same exercises as women who are naturally cycling over a 12we per period
01:37:54
right put on less mus muscle mass and had lower levels of testosterone relative to what you see in the women
01:38:00
who are naturally cycling and of course that's what they find because women who are using hormonal birth control their
01:38:06
testosterone levels are kept suppressed and this is one of the big stimulators that we know of muscle growth and same
01:38:13
with um ampk levels are tend to be high when estrogen is high and that's also
01:38:18
something that promotes mus muscle growth and that's lower in in women who are using hormonal birth control
01:38:23
relative to Natural cyclers um and so you know it also can influence that it
01:38:28
influences everything and so the idea that you know um hormonal birth control
01:38:36
is the answer for women when it comes to regulating fertility um I just don't
01:38:42
think that it is you know it's an answer and it's one that we need to we need to make sure all women have access to it who need it but you know my whole
01:38:50
message with everything with my book and everything else has always been and we need more answers like we need better
01:38:57
answers and it seems like things might be moving in that way there's more research being done on things um that
01:39:03
you know male contraception and not just male hormonal contraception I don't think that's the answer either because
01:39:09
the idea of suppressing men's hormone production to such an extent that they no longer produce viable sperm which is
01:39:16
how they're looking at it by the way I don't think that's the answer that's just sh I think men would sign up is
01:39:22
that crazy no no I don't think men would sign up either I'm like who would take this I'm like who like this is madness
01:39:29
but that's what they're working on and it just shifts the problem you know it shifts it onto men but there are some
01:39:34
really interesting things that are happening in terms of like for example there's um can ask you a question on
01:39:40
that do you think that if the shoe was on the other foot and men had to take the pill so suddenly there was a thing
01:39:45
that came out and it's like oh you're a man and you can take a pill it messes with your hormones a little bit they're going to be like artificially um
01:39:52
replaced with this pill do you think men would take it
01:39:57
no no I don't I think some men would but do I think most men would take that absolutely not no way no way Jose I
01:40:05
wouldn't take it I'm just going to be honest I would I don't know anybody I honestly I don't know any men who' say
01:40:11
yeah sign me up for that I mean the fact is like if you look anywhere so why do women take it women take it because we
01:40:17
have no choice okay cuz you're going to B yeah it's like we're the ones who get stuck with the pregnancy you know for
01:40:23
for men their other option like if they say no I'm not going to take this is that their partner will be on the pill
01:40:29
but then if the partner's not on the pill either you have the partner's not on the pill then um you know then they've got to figure something else out
01:40:36
but a lot of times what ends up happening is the women end up going on the pill and it's because for women
01:40:42
pregnancy is so costly yeah that it's hard for us not to be the ones who are bearing the the price of of birth
01:40:48
control because the fact is we're always the one who who end up ultimately having to pay the largest cost your daughter
01:40:55
she's 17 years old you said that when you went on the birth control pill it changed you and after you came off it
01:41:01
you quote unquote woke up uhhuh so of course you're presumably you're scared of your Lo changing your daughter right
01:41:09
and how how I mean under your analogy she'd be asleep right yeah yeah no I
01:41:15
don't want I don't want that and I also especially don't want that when she's during this period in her life when her
01:41:20
brain is still developing because like I said there has been hardly any research that has looked at what happens to brain
01:41:27
development when you introduce synthetic sex hormones to women when their brains are
01:41:32
developing and the research that does exist looking at this question doesn't paint a very good picture of it it looks
01:41:39
like it can put women on a long-term risk of developing major depressive disorder over the course of their
01:41:45
lifetime even after they've gone off of it and so no I don't you know I the idea
01:41:50
of having my daughter on hormonal birth control is not something that I want to have happen especially when her brain is developing
01:41:57
she text you now and says I'm gonna start taking the pill mom how do you feel how would I feel I would feel like
01:42:02
if that was the best I mean if if if she really couldn't tolerate the the iug the the copper iug that doesn't have the
01:42:09
hormonal side effects then I would say better that than pregnant the fact is teenage pregnancy
01:42:16
is one of the biggest predictors of a woman ending up in poverty and that's a much bigger deal than whether or not a
01:42:23
woman feels like she's awake or asleep and so sadly that's where we are and
01:42:28
it's my hope that as we move forward and the more that we start to recognize that birth control as an issue for women
01:42:35
hasn't been solved right and that we need more options besides just changing women's hormones it's my hope that
01:42:42
things are going to get better and that we push for more options I mean I think that it's so long been consider you know
01:42:49
we think that birth control is solved and and it's not and so I'm I'm hoping that there's going to be more options
01:42:56
and so that way you know later on my daughter's daughters and her daughter's daughter's daughters have more things to
01:43:02
choose from than just change me or you know come at risk of a teenage
01:43:09
pregnancy what kind of emails do you get like what's the most popular email you get from just the world the most popular
01:43:16
email I get is thank you I knew that this was going on I had absolutely no language to describe it you nailed it
01:43:24
that's what I get the most and it's not like you nailed it Sarah while you wrote such a great book but instead I knew
01:43:30
that this had to be happening to me you know I knew that I didn't feel the same and and this is it like of course of
01:43:37
course it happened I mean I think for a lot of people we have a blind spot with the birth control pill I mean it's like
01:43:44
almost everybody goes on it we don't think about the fact that our hormones are an important part of what our brain
01:43:49
uses to create the experience of being who we are right and so we're very Cavalier and just giving it to people
01:43:55
was like oh well you should go on it for this and oh you've got some acne you should go on it too and oh you're
01:44:01
periods sometimes you spot between your periods you should go on the birth control pill it's like we don't think about the fact that when we're making
01:44:07
those changes that's changing who women are and um yeah so the most frequent
01:44:13
thing that I get is like thank you for making me myself again thank you for
01:44:18
helping identify what I knew was going on when I was on it and I didn't have
01:44:23
the words to describe it yeah and I I I I say this and I touch on the subject in particular because
01:44:29
I've got so many friends who were in a relationship where their partner in their 20s turned around to them and said
01:44:34
I'm not interested in sex anymore or just their libido fell off a cliff and they ultimately broke up and they never
01:44:41
really had an answer for it they just thought you know that person's broken or that you know women just don't like sex
01:44:47
it's funny cuz when my partner turned around to me that night in bed and said to me I remember where I was was in Jamaica this sounds super weird weird I
01:44:53
was in Bob Marley's old house oh my gosh I love it that's what they told me it was
01:44:58
anyway maybe that was just a sales picture to pay extra for that hotel but they told me I was in Bob Marley's old house and
01:45:05
um yeah she turned around to me in bed and she said I'm not interested in sex
01:45:10
but loads of women aren't don't aren't interested in sex either I've spoke to my friends they're not interested either
01:45:16
and that was like the the pitch of it and I remember thinking as a man obviously you just feel really emasculated by it cuz you're like must
01:45:22
be something to do with right um we ended up breaking up she went off for a year and went to Barley
01:45:31
did her own thing worked on herself I think around this time is when she stopped the birth control pill started
01:45:36
thinking about a lot a lot of other things and when she came back it was just a totally different person like we ended up getting back together just a
01:45:42
totally different person like and I say this because I don't want people to give up right when the libido gives up right
01:45:50
yeah no I no no I totally know what you mean no and I think that that's I think yes yes yes that she probably has a high
01:45:57
sex drive than Mina I'm just trying to keep up at this point yeah no I love it no I love it I think that um especially
01:46:03
with the birth control pill it's like there's a tendency um to fear that everything is permanent and like if you
01:46:10
go on it that it ruins you and that it's going to break you um and the the research just doesn't quite point in
01:46:16
that direction um unless you're a teenager if you go on it as a teen we don't yet know ultimately what that does
01:46:22
to brain development long term but if you go on it as an adult and then you discontinue it you can go back to being
01:46:29
the person that you were right and um yeah and that can include the recovery of your sexual desire even if you think
01:46:36
that it's lost Dr Sarah hill we have a closing tradition on this podcast where
01:46:41
the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for okay and the question left for you
01:46:50
is hm okay what is the Legacy that you want to
01:46:57
leave behind I want to make the world a place where women understand themselves and
01:47:03
that women are understood as themselves and not as being some sort of a
01:47:08
malfunctioning male thank you thank you for all the work you do it's so interesting for me
01:47:15
so interesting for me as a as a man um but as men we have mothers we have
01:47:20
sisters we have Partners um so helping us understand women in all in every facet of the word
01:47:28
understanding their health their reproductive Health their sexual health why they are the way that they are helps
01:47:33
us be better Sons better Brothers better husbands better boyfriends in a way that
01:47:40
I think is really really important for both of us as Sexes to like get along
01:47:46
because otherwise you know before I understood the menstrual cycle and I had conversations about menopause and I've had these conversations with you today
01:47:52
it's so so easy to jump to conclusions about the opposite sex when you're a man it's so easy to like misinterpret things
01:47:59
and understanding how pertinent hormones are to how we feel and how we behave and our mental health and our libido and all
01:48:05
of these things again I think it breeds empathy it breeds empathy and understanding and awareness which um I
01:48:12
think will allow us to have the relationships we hope to have with the people that are you know our mothers our
01:48:18
sisters and our partners and had I known some of the things that I know now from reading your book but also from learning
01:48:24
more broadly about the subject matter of like women's sexual health and Women's Health and women's reproductive Health
01:48:30
um a lot of my life would have been different and that's coming from as man right A lot of my life would have been
01:48:35
different and someday you know I'm going to have a daughter I hope someday and I think it's also informing me about how to be a better father for my daughter
01:48:41
someday which I think is really really important and sometimes I do hope that men click these episodes and I hope they
01:48:47
I could probably look at the numbers but I hope they they understand the importance of of of all the subject
01:48:53
matter to them because yeah I mean we we live in we inhabit this world together and 50% of
01:48:58
our um the inhabitants of this planet are women and and also there's something which I
01:49:06
was quite Illuminating in your work which is I think I used to be in the of the opinion that only women had
01:49:12
fluctuations in their hormones and feelings and I think I've joked before
01:49:17
with my male friends that like we're all just like this me and my friends right whereas our partners are like woo right
01:49:24
yeah but I've come to learn that that's also not true no that's also not true no men's hormones change dynamically across
01:49:29
the day and they're higher in the morning than they are later on in the afternoon and they change in response to
01:49:34
environmental cues so beautiful women you know the wind or loss of your favorite sports team the win or loss
01:49:41
your favorite political candidate the presence of a weapon all of these things can change men's testosterone levels and
01:49:47
so men's hormones change quite rap like you know rapidly and in ways that are more unpr predictable than women's cuz
01:49:54
women's hormones do cycle but they cycle predictably and if you tell me a woman's
01:50:00
age and the first day of her last menstrual cycle I can tell you with almost really high degree of certainty
01:50:07
what's going on with her primary sex hormones and the same is just not the truth for men so how the pill changes
01:50:13
everything or this is your brain on birth control I'll put them both below I'll link them both below the UK and the
01:50:19
US version I guess the US version is going to change to the UK title well no it's now now it's called this is
01:50:25
your brain on birth control how the pill changes everything okay it's not on here I know that's
01:50:32
because we CH they they changed the subtitle when we went to Paperback oh okay I know it's all very confusing I'll
01:50:39
link it below anyway so everyone can um have a reading thank you so much for writing such a a preeminent book on this subject because it's so so important and
01:50:46
I'm so excited to see the science and the conversation involved on all of these subject matters um where do people find you if they want to ask you
01:50:51
questions or send youil emails or learn more yeah well they can find me online at Sarah hill.com and that's Sarah with
01:50:58
an H and I am on Instagram is my most active platform and it's Sarah eill
01:51:06
PhD um and that's my handle thank you so much Sarah thank you
01:51:14
pleasure I'm going to let you into a little bit of a secret and you're probably going to think that I'm a little bit weird for saying this but our
01:51:20
team are our team because we absolutely obsess about the smallest things even
01:51:25
with this podcast when we're recording this podcast we measure the CO2 levels in the studio because if it gets above a
01:51:30
th000 parts per million cognitive performance dips this is the type of 1% Improvement we make on our show and that
01:51:36
is why the show is the Way It Is by understanding the power of compounding 1% you can absolutely change your
01:51:44
outcomes in your life it isn't about drastic Transformations or quick wins it's about the small consistent actions
01:51:51
that have a last change on your outcomes so 2 years ago we started the process of creating this beautiful diary and it's
01:51:58
truly beautiful inside there's lots of pictures lots of inspiration and motivation as well some interactive
01:52:03
elements and the purpose of this diary is to help you identify stay focused on
01:52:08
develop consistency with the 1% that will ultimately change your life we're only going to do a limited run of these
01:52:14
Diaries so if you want one for yourself or for a friend or for a colleague or for your team then head to the diary.com
01:52:20
right now I'll link it below oh
01:52:25
[Music]