Tags : dating, hormonal contraception, sex, side effects, the pill
The pill: It picked your boyfriend
New data was released this morning regarding secondary effects of 40 years of widespread usage of the birth control pill.
A study published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution this morning has shed some light of the effects of hormonal contraception and mate selection. While it appears that women suppressing ovulation may be choosing mates with a slightly different evolutionary profile, it also seems that suppression of ovulation affects how attractive women may be to potential mates.
Dan Savage has an interesting perspective on the findings:
It goes like this: the type of man a woman finds attractive varies pretty widely according to her menstrual cycle. Women who are ovulating prefer men who are more masculine and “more… genetically unrelated,” like the guy on the right, above; women who aren’t ovulating prefer guys who are more feminine and genetically more similar, like the guy on the right. Since the pill suppresses ovulation, and since many women are on the pill when they’re dating and sleeping around—or “selecting a mate,” as the docs put it—women may be marrying men they find attractive on the pill but not so much once they’ve gone off the pill.
The study goes on to predict that “commencement or cessation of the pill influences the quality and stability of pre-existing long-term relationships.” But it also asserts that the benefits of the pill are a huge factor, and that women who use the pill as contraception have had no problems attracting or retaining partners.
[Source: Trends in Ecology and Evolution PDF]
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