This Is Your Brain on Birth Control by Sarah Hill, PhD
ISBN: 978052536031
About a month ago I read this book. I'm not sure how I stumbled across it. But I did, and I bought it used, and the previous owner was using a $100 wine voucher as a bookmark. Seriously.
I think I was curious how birth control -- i.e., "the pill", actually works to prevent pregnancy. Also, maybe 2 months ago, someone here was posting about less masculine men. I think it was this tread https://poal.co/s/AskPoal/707476. I wondered if the pill had something to do with it. Well, it does.
The book is written like an article of Cosmopolitan and I believe the target audience is well, women, women of childbearing age (duh). The author has footnotes on some pages that are as long as the page itself trying to assure feminists that everything is A-OK, hunky dory, she isn't for or opposed, blah blah blah. Specifically, I think this book is for women who went to college, rode the cock carousel, lost sexual market value, held out for an attractive partner with money, but now her best child bearing years are gone, couldn't snag a man her age in her 30s when men are peaking and women are declining, wound up with a good job, house, wine, and cats at 40. Ala the bookmark.
Some of the stuff was interesting. I found out why women get periods, menstruate and ovulate at all. Well, the simple answer is that it takes a ton of resources, a 9 month gestation, and (used to be) a pretty large risk of death during childbirth to have a child. The period lets the woman shed her uterine lining if the body rejects a nonviable embryo, something it doesn't want to carry to term. The lining is actually there to make the egg harder to implant on a blood vessel and get nourishment. There was some experiment with mice where the mouse embryos were implanted outside the womb and basically sucked the mother mouse dry. Kinda dark, but interesting stuff.
Regardless!! The pill prevents pregnancy by tricking the woman's body into thinking its pregnant with artificial hormones. Somehow (I still really don't get it 100%), the hormone confusion prevents an egg from releasing at all. I think the synthetic progesterone (the other female sex hormone besides estrogen) prevents ovulation. No egg, no pregnancy, no baby.
This leads to unintended consequences. A woman who is pregnant (or whose synthetic hormones from the pill tell her she's pregnant) will not find masculine men as attractive as a woman in ovulation. She will instead look for intelligence, money, and wealth, generally speaking. Because there is no ovulation, there is no OMG FUCK ME NOW response from her. So what's funny is that a woman who was on the pill acts like a 50-year-old woman, marries a guy, then decides to have kids with him, may not find him sexually attractive off the pill and yearn to fuck Chads instead once her natural hormones come roaring back. In fact, cuckolding is mentioned as a mating strategy. Its pretty messed up.
The short story is men just don't have to try as hard for sex anymore and masculinity is not rewarded by pill taking woohmans.
Would I recommend this book? No, not really. It's a lot of scientific jargon presented in a plain to read kind of way with lots and lots of reassuring footnotes. I think the take away is that, if you or your woman is on the pill, it's influencing the way you think in subtle ways you might not notice. I'd think of it like taking lithium or an antipsychotic. The pill basically swaps out your natural hormones with synthetic ones and keeps synthetic progesterone high to prevent babies. Going off it would restore the natural ovulation cycle, for better or worse.
6/10
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