Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?

are you saying that you recommend that a woman looking for a partner gets off the birth control pill until they find one yeah I mean researchers found when women who were partnered to attractive men went off hormonal birth control they were more attracted to their partner but for women who were partnered with less attractive Partners they became less attracted to their partners and reported being less sexually satisfied it's quite frightening Dr Sarah Hill is a leading research psychologist and Professor uncovering the shocking effects the contraceptive pill has had on women relationships and society and what

we can do about it there's been nothing more instrumental to women's ability to be able to achieve 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 it for that but it has huge costs and when I started to dig into the research I found there's at least five different things the birth control pill does to change who we are and these risk factors 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 and depression and then it influences our ability to put on muscle mass and it can also affect our sexual function 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 also know that it affects men in two different ways and this has implications for society around us I'll tell you why so so what are the alternatives for women let's dive down into that first this has always blown my mind a

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feedback we'll find the guest that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do thank you so much Dr Sarah Hill what is the mission that you're on if you had to sort of encapsulate it into a couple of sentences all of the work you're doing into a couple of sentences and the impact it has on people like me but also my partners my mother my sisters um who read and understand your work what is that mission um is to help women understand themselves and I think that you know part

of that is doing the science that helps to uncover the insights that help women understand themselves and then also being able to communicate that to women um I think that you know for a very long time because of the way that medicine has been set up um the the focus has been primarily on men um and most of the things that we think that we know about health and functioning in the human body and brain is based on Research conducted in men and so it's taking that back and helping women actually understand themselves as themselves

so would you say that this conversation is is just for women no absolutely not no this is a conversation 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 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 have a focus towards Women's Health and women's issues but I can't explain how unbelievably fascinating and enlightening it was for me as someone who is a boyfriend

and a partner to a woman um but also when when we talk about the evolutionary psychology that sort of is intertwined throughout your work I was able to understand so much about me as a man and the way I I am and the way that I develop and my testosterone and all those kinds of things and also attraction and mating preferences and all these things from looking through your work why why are you so focused on this subject matter what is it what's the sort of in your heart I mean for me it's really fascinating

to consider the way that hormones influence who we are and then to T think about something like the birth control pill which almost all women are on at some point in their life and understanding that this actually by changing women's hormones has the impact of kind of fundamentally changing some really important things about themselves I mean this is really huge and this has consequences for everything ranging from who women are attracted to and might be choosing as partners to women's mental health right and it could end up having consequences on the shape of the world

around us like we already know know that birth control has had an impact on women's ability to do things like go to school and get Advanced degrees and we see this played out when we look at College classrooms that are becoming inre increasingly female and one of the big reasons for this is the birth control pill it's like by allowing women to know with almost perfect certainty that they're not going to get pregnant this has allowed women to make plans which means that they can dream bigger and achieve more than most of us would have

ever dreamed possible like 50 or 100 years ago right and so the pill changes everything right by changing women we change the world this has implications for women this has implications for their partners and this has implications for society around us we're seeing some of the downstream 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 contend with and I think one of them you mentioned there is that more women in in classrooms I think more women are college educated now in the

US or becoming college educated and they're running more and more and more um and 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 shows women still have a preference for men who have more resources and I was wondering isn't this doesn't this create a little bit of a a fundamental issue because if more and more women have more and more resources in many cases much more than men but they have a preference for men that have more resources isn't there isn't

there an issue here yeah no there's actually there is an issue there and in fact there have been people including my former uh Mentor David bus who who have talked about this idea that there's a mating crisis going on and that women who are becoming increasingly college educated and you know getting access to resources of their own that they do continue to exhibit an increased preference for partners with resources women are what we call hypergamous right which means that we like to mate up in terms of achieve and educational attainment and when you have a

populace like we do in the US of women who are now on average more educated than men it makes it more difficult to find a a suitable partner if you're a woman with an advanced degree and you want somebody who has at least as much education for you that's going to lead to a more narrow pool of mates and in fact what we see is that there are an increasingly like large 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 ladies that is about this very phenomenon and um women are increasingly choosing to opt out of long-term mating 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 upwards and to the right right we know that women are dating upwards because that's what women Express a preference 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 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 earns more money than they do themselves um and you know this is something that isn't specific to the US this is something that we tend to find um cross-culturally that women tend to express a preference for this and yes it has become more common for women to be open to partnering with people who earn less money than themselves for example or have less education in themselves than what it used to be um but it's

still not what it would be if women were actually more willing to make that tradeoff what we see is that instead of choosing to marry down what many women are choosing to do is simply not get married at all are they making that choice or is it just a lack of good options I think yes and yes right I think that they're making that choice because there isn't there aren't good options so I think that many women feel um the the constraint of the fact that there's not as many partners available as you know that

have the qualities that 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 that like you know just staying single and not partnering with somebody that they desire or partnering with somebody who has fewer resources than they do or less education than they do themselves they're choosing the former they're instead choosing to be single instead of um having to partner with somebody who doesn't you know sort of meet what their exacting standards are are are they still having sex yeah you know that's a good

so sex is down like like sex is 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 later um they're having less they fewer uh people are not virgins and that's a double negative more people are virgins when they're graduating high school and college than there were in the past this is becoming increasingly common it's also really interesting when you consider that in face of the fact that we have something like hormonal birth control where we have birth control where you have

you know an opportunity 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 sex and that's a very complicated issue that requires a lot of untangling to get to the bottom of but one of those factors is the fact that it's harder for um you know imagine that you're a college aged woman and you were looking for somebody who at least is you know on par with you in terms of their educational attainment um most college campuses are like 60% female

and just simply playing the odds I mean women are going to have a harder time finding somebody within their pool that they can get together with and this is going to mean less less dating for some of these women and and less sex if women have more money and more Independence as a result of that money and success and education why don't they just date down as in why don't they date men that are broke right yeah well you know we have inherited this mating Psychology from our distant ancestors who are very much more reliant

on men for things like provisioning resource access and even protection than what contemporary women need and this is because throughout most of our evolutionary history um we spent our lives you know having to be pregnant regularly lactating caring for young children um and we're very heavily dependent on the ability um of our partner to gain access to things like food and the other resources that we're not able to get access to when we are you know very pregnant or dealing with young children like I don't know if you've ever gone hunting before or met a

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 buffalo um it's not an ideal situation for women so women historically have been very dependent on men for resources and we've inherited that that brain because over the course of evolutionary history women who would have placed an emphasis on you know choosing Partners who have these kinds of qualities they would have been more likely to have surviving Offspring who then passed that tendency or that preference onto their offspring who'd pass that preference

down to their offspring and so human you know contemporary human women even though we're able to gain access to resources of our own we still have that preference right we've inherited that preference from our successful ancestors because women who had that preference would have performed better than women who didn't pay attention to that sort of thing so oftentimes people think things are the way they are because of a patriarchy or because of sort of social factors yeah but you're saying that there are sort of innate biological differences and evolutionary differences in men and women that

go beyond our sort of sexual organs and stuff oh yeah no absolutely yeah you know in fact the patriarchy which just refers to you know male control of resources wouldn't really exist if women didn't desire resources and their Partners um because the reason that men tend to control a lot of resources is because women demand resource access on the part of their partners and if women didn't care then men wouldn't work so hard to get access to them you know there's this really great quote by Aristotle Onasis where he once said without women all the

power and money in the world would be completely meaningless and I think that there's a lot of wisdom in that men work so hard to control the resources not because men together are banding you know together and trying to hoard the resources and keep them from women I don't think that 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 the fact that men are competing amongst you know amongst whoever else has access to resources to

get resources of Their Own right and because women value this in their choice of Partners oftentimes men will go to Greater lengths to get them right one of the reasons not the only reason but certainly one of the reasons that we see that more men tend to be in um you know positions of being a CEO for example is because oftentimes men are more willing to make the tradeoffs that you have to make to get into those positions because men are wired that way right and the reason that they're wired that way is because they've

inherited these Tendencies to want this despite the costs because it would have paid off in terms of being able to attract better Partners a greater number of Partners right and then being able to have your children do better right and so you know the patriarchy yes that is something that exists right we do tend to see that men tend to control resources more frequently than women in most societies around the world um but this isn't because men are banding together and trying to keep exclude women instead this is just a product of men's evolved psychology

um trying to work as hard as they can to get access to resources in part because women require them and men 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 said the vast majority of gambling addicts are are men so so I was just thinking about that in the context of like entrepreneurship and these kinds of things is that to say that men are going to be more entrepreneurial yeah yeah you know I would

think so yes and and the reason being that that it is about risk right and women often times um again you know a lot of this has to do with this this the psychology that we've inherited and and throughout most of our history women 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 our our bodies are wired for having babies right and this doesn't mean that this is what women should do right or what women need to do or that you

know that that this is somehow destining women to do one you know this set of activities but instead throughout most of our history we spend a lot of our time pregnant and caring for young children and that has selected for our psychology to be very risk sensitive and 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 terms of things like um gambling right we know that overwhelmingly men tend to be the ones who are gambling addicts relative to women

but also in terms of good risks right because you do see something like being a being an entrepreneur for example which is something that does come with a pretty big risk attached to it meaning that you know there's a big boom and bust um but it the the risk associated with the possibility of a bust um is something that women's uh psychology is a is a little bit less tolerant of relative to men's I think one of the interesting observations I've had as a investor but also as an entrepreneur myself is that 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 that links what you said about this relationship with risk because being prone to risk in business doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be good at entrepreneurship and I often tend to find that when you have a woman leading a business they're much more accurate and honest with their forecasting and much more um yeah realistic about what the business is actually capable of and men tend to over forecast um in terms of

business 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 the USA say that in his portfolio of investments from Shark Tank the best performing Investments that he had were women and I think again I think from memory what he was saying was when it comes to forecasting and um taking C more calculated risks wom women tend to be better at that than men right which 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 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 have an exaggerated belief about how successful they're going to be because in part you know I think it It ultimately boils down the to the differences in our mating psychology and then also the psychology of of parenting compared to provisioning and I think that for men um you know seeing the world in a way that's distorted in terms of assuming that things are going to be better than

they are is going to allow them to be able to better attract mates for example because they're buying their own story you know it's like they're buying their own story about how great everything is going to be even if it's not necessarily all that great um this leads people to take risks and and with big risks come big rewards and historically evolutionarily for men those rewards could potentially translate into additional mating opportunities that have a direct impact 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 that's going to get you access to the greatest number of mates possible the number of offspring that a woman can potentially have into the future is dependent completely on the limits of her own reproductive biology so a woman with access to 10 Partners can only pass down the same number of genes as a woman with access to one whereas the same 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 what they can have if they have

access to one and this creates an asymmetry in the potential benefits um Fitness benefits related to men and women um from winning big right and so men's psychology is geared toward wanting to do things that are and and having their brain tell themselves stories about how successful things are going to be to act as a carrot that then leads them to want to pursue those types of things even when it's highly risky so if I become a billionaire yeah then I can afford to and I will attract potentially hundreds of thousands of Partners and then

I can have hundreds of thousands of kids 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 woman if she becomes a billionaire she can only have one kid every nine months or 12 months whatever it is yeah yeah 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 men's fitness can increase with each partner they have access to and for women it tops out after one right so the potential

reproductive returns from having access to novel Partners is greater for men than it is for women right and this does not mean that this is what most men do right most men don't translate their increased uh their increased status and their increased access to Resources by gaining access to an AS astronomical number of Partners um but historically that's something that men sometimes do right if we look at history um you'll see in particularly in polygynous cultures where you have men who are able to have access to multiple partners at the same time those men who

have the most resources and have the highest status tend to have multiple wives right they tend to have a greater number of children right and we are the descendence of people who would sometimes make that decision right and so what we tend to see is that that has shaped men's mating psychology and shaped men's achievement motivation psychology in ways that helps to promote um you know gaining access to resources in part because gaining access to resources leads to a greater Fitness return than what gets um is available to women from doing the exact same thing

this wasn't a long time ago in human history either because my granddad in Nigeria mhm I I've never met the guy um I don't believe he's still alive I've never been close to to him um but I was told that he had 10 or 14 wives right and so I was told that I have 30 40 cousins in Nigeria right yeah I mean I'm doing okay financially but I probably don't have the means the means to meet them all and become friends with all of them um but uh yeah I uh that's pretty pretty striking

that just sort of one generation above my dad was this a man that had multiple wives and so when you 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 to acquire more resources so that I can support more people it's quite frightening I don't think that it's something to be frightened of I think that you know when we understand the the tendencies that we've inherited I actually think that it gives us greater appreciation for the kinds of decisions that we

actually end up making why is it that you know especially in um cultures like the US and I think about in European culture we're monogamous ly mating you know species we we form these long-term pair bonds and so then we also have to ask ourselves you know given that this is something that is possible for men right to increase their um their reproductive output simply by gaining access to new partners why is it that most men don't do this like what are the benefits when you look at contemporary hunter gatherer groups where humans are living

in ways that are more similar to um the way that our ancestors likely lived than what we do currently what you tend to see is that those children who have an investing father around their probability of survival is vastly higher than that of the children of women who do not have an investing partner around one of the other parts of the answer is that women generally don't want to share right and so what you get is um by men being willing to restrict their own what we call reproductive value which just refers to the number

of potential children that they can have into the 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 you are a woman who's of high value meaning that you have a lot of the qualities that men desire in their Partners you can be really picky and say no I'm not going to share and so if you want to mate with me then that means that you're going to have to make some decisions because you know imagine that 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 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 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 again I'm saying the Royal you of seven is because so just bear with me here your value of seven is because you

are not really willing to commit to a long-term relationship right so you're you have all these resources and you have you know and you've got your attractiveness you've got your good jeans and all the other things a dog right yeah but you're not yeah exactly 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 just you know commit your resources and to to one person um and you meet somebody who's just you know she's amazing and she she also has a podcast and she's

gorgeous and and she's a nine you can increase your value to her just by Will being willing to invest by being willing because women desire that because women generally place a priority on somebody's willingness to stick around and continue invest to continue 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 willing to commit how does a woman know if I am high status or not like AR there 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 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 great question it's really interesting because um a lot of the qualities that men value in their Partners like for women are things that are immediately available just based on physical appearance because we know that men have um placed a priority on cues related to fertility and reproductive value and reproductive value is

just essentially a person's reproductive shelf life I mean I was reading in your book about how mating and attraction preferences change for woman throughout her cycle yeah so throughout a woman's 28 day cycle does she always want a nice guy no so women's partner preferences and the types of qualities that women tend to prioritize in their choice of Partners do change across the menstrual cycle um and this changes with our sex hormones so during uh the early part of the menstrual cycle both sets of sex hormones so our our estrogen and progesterone which is our

second uh primary sex hormone they are low and then as estrogen begins to increase which is something that happens as eggs start to mature in the ovary and as the eggs are maturing they release estrogen and as an egg as a dominant egg is chosen and um begins to fully mature so that way it will be released at ovulation which is how many days into the cycle um usually estrogen really starts to Surge right around day nine of the cycle but it really hits its like High Point usually right around day 14 which is when

ovulation occurs so estrogen begins Rising sharply around day nine of the cycle and again the first day of the menstrual cycle is the day that um is the day that your period arrives so that's day one about day nine so about a week and a half after your period started most women will start to have a pretty dramatic increase in estrogen estrogen will climb climb climb climb climb it will Peak around day 14 which um is when ovulation occurs and this is when an egg of course is released and pregnancy is possible from sex so

from day nine till day 15 till 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 and during this time not surprisingly um women experience a change in their sexual psychology right so women become increasingly attuned to All Things sex so what we tend to see is that women's sexual desire increases right around that time in the cycle women have more sex during that time in the cycle women masturbate more during that time in the cycle and women become more exacting 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 as estrogen is increasing across the cycle so too does women's interest in cues that historically have been related to high genetic quality or genetic compatibility within their choice of Partners so two of the traits that we know to be particularly pronounced um in terms of women's interest um near high fertility in the cycle are cues related to testosterone and masculinity and the reason for this one is because testosterone is a known imuno

supressive meaning that it has the effect of suppressing the immune system and so people who have relatively High levels of testosterone this is a cue that their bodies are in such good physical condition right their immune system is so strong and robust that it can handle being suppressed by testosterone so people who have higher testosterone are believed to have greater immunocompetence relative to people with lower levels of testosterone and what we tend to see is that low and behold um during that Peak fertility time in the menstrual cycle when estrogen is high that women exhibit

a greater preference for cues related to testosterone in men so we find for example that women desire a more masculinized male faces voices and behavior at high fertility in the cycle compared to low fertility in the cycle how do you test this you test this 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 the sort of most robust studies that's been done looking at this phenomenon researchers had a group of women bring home a bunch of little

plastic tubes um in a freezer bag and they had them spit into these little um saliva collection tubes every day of the cycle across two menstrual cycles on those same days when women were taking a saliva sample they were also evaluating the attractiveness of male faces and the thing that the women didn't know is that the researchers knew the testosterone levels of the faces of the men that they had them looking at because the researchers had men come into the research lab beforehand and took their morning testosterone levels over the course of several days to

get an average morning testosterone level for these men and so when they got all the saliva samples from the women they assayed all of their saliva and they were able to look at Women's estrogen changes across the cycle and then how it related to their facial preferences for men and what they found was first that of course estrogen tended to increase and Peak during this fertile window so days n nine or so to day 15 women's estrogen levels were high and during this time what they also found is that women's preference for for testosterone levels

in the faces of the men they preferred also increased and so there was this really beautiful overlap between women's estrogen levels and their preference for testosterone going to show that estrogen loves testosterone right so women during this estrogenic phase in the cycle have a heightened preference for cues related to facial masculin masculinity they also have a greater preference for vocal masculinity so women at high fertility in the cycle also like the sound of more masculinized male voices they tend to like more social dominance in terms of behavior um relative to what we tend to see

when women are at low fertility in the cycle so I'm more likely to get laid if I yeah 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 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 pretending I knew it um they also found that men who have high testosterone levels are more likely

to be in a relationship um the next year than men that don't have high testosterone levels yeah so we know that um we know from research that not only you know do women desire testosterone in their partners women choose men with higher levels of testosterone as their Partners so they've done studies looking at whether or not men are partnered over time right based on what their testosterone levels are at time one and then looking at whether or not they're married at time two and what we tend to find is that low and behold men with

higher levels of testosterone are more likely to be married at time too suggesting that men are probably more likely to be chosen as partners when they have higher levels of testosterone relative to when they do not 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 I watched of yours um they found that men who had a baby had plummeting testosterone levels 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 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 knows everything I mean it knows everything and what the research finds is that yes when men get into a long-term relationship for example a men's testosterone decreases a little bit right and we tend to you know culturally we have this narrative about testosterone where it's like more is better right and it's always seen as something that men should have a lot

of and you see there's testosterone clinics on all these different Corners um because you know this idea that men need lots of testosterone and to have low testosterone means that you have a 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 relationship testosterone takes a little dip and when men have children that they're caring for testosterone takes 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 pedal

of sexual desire and attraction all the time it's just not necessarily the best thing to do if you're a man engaged in a long-term relationship or you're a man who's caring for young children it would be better to take some of that effort they'd be spend you know looking at the next door neighbor and you know looking at her shorts or whatever it is that you're looking at and instead using that effort to channel it toward caring for your children caring for your partner so nice guys don't get laid as much so nice guys might

not get laid as much and and when you look at short-term casual sexual behavior in particular we tend to find that the ones who are more successful with that a mating strategy tend to be men with higher levels of testosterone there's just no question about that nonetheless um being somebody who's willing to invest and willing to have long-term relationships with women generally is going to get you in a good position um to be able to find a partner and this is something that anybody can do to increase their value to women um and so you

could be somebody who has low testosterone right you're lacking these cues to um High genetic quality or even genetic compatibility right like let's say that your immune genes which is one thing that women also pick up on at high fertility is they tend to pick up on qualities related to somebody having different immune genes than themselves men who are lacking these things completely um Can can make themselves desirable to women simply by virtue of being the type of person who's willing to in invest in a committed relationship because it is something that women value 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 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 we often think of attractiveness as maybe you know this body part on the person is a certain shape or their face 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 there's almost like a thousand tiny little micro expressions or something in the air which makes us attracted to 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 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 is idiosyncratic and finicky right so all of us when we think about the things that we find sexy and attractive um 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 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 element to our attraction that is very person specific and idiosyncratic right and may might there be some evolutionary Roots behind all of that may be right so it could be for example that the kinds of qualities that you find you know just really

attractive in another person that that make you feel so attracted to them might be cued that they are a really compatible mate for you and maybe that's why you have a very sort of you specific response to that person but there are also Dimensions that are shared right so we know for example that men tend to place a greater emphasis relative to women on cues related to physical attractiveness and that physical attractiveness tends to be related to things that have historically been related to fertility right so for example having an hourglass body shape we know

that this is something that's related to a woman's level of sex hormones and that women with higher levels of estrogen for example are more likely to put on fat around their butt and their thighs and less likely to put on fat around their waist um relative to women with higher or lower levels of estrogen right as estrogen levels decline when women age their bodies become more straight up and down than they do hourglass and this has to do with changes in estrogen and um and so we know that that's something that men generally desire to

a greater extent than women right we also know that men tend to PR place a greater emphasis on cues related to youthfulness right so the cues that are related to H maturity in a face that's something that women tend to have aen preference for so if somebody has sort of an older you know an older face um they they tend to be seen as more attractive like so like 50-year-old George Clooney seems more attractive most women think that that looks more attractive than you know 25-year-old um George Clooney and and we see that because our

brains have inherited this tendency to find cues related to wisdom and status and resource acquisition all of which come with greater age um women have in have inherited that preference for those kinds of qualities because that would have given them a mating related Advantage relative to preferring a more youthful face conversely for men they would have been penalized if they had a preference for maturity in the face of a potential partner because if you like women who have signs of maturity and wisdom and resource acquisition ability you'd probably choose somebody who's approaching menopause right and

that's not going to lead to any Gene transmission at all right and so we tend to see that men have a heightened preference for cues related to youthfulness and faces and so even though yes there are differen or there are differences between individuals and there is some idiosyncrasy that tends to characterize human mate Choice there are a lot of things that we can actually make some pretty strong predictions about too so there are some overall themes that tend to characterize men's and women's partner preferences is it true that men are less attractive to successful women

is there any sort of evolutionary basis for that I do know that research finds that men don't place as much of a priority on that that compared to women but I don't know that they penalize them exactly right if you had somebody if you show a man a photograph 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 Burger King service you know person and she's drop dead gorgeous men are going to find her similarly attractive in both 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 women photographs of people in different types of outfits and the men's ratings of how attractive the women are has just everything to do with how attractive the women are um for women rating men it all depends on what they're wearing right do they show cues to Resource access do they not show cues to Resource access and women tend to modulate how physically attractive they find men based on whether or not they

have these cues related to provisioning Ability so I don't know if there was a really attractive and there are a lot of really attractive uh females in positions of power um men will find them just as attractive as they do somebody who's not in a position of power although they may be you know potentially less likely to choose them as a long-term mate um you know if there's issues related to power dynamics and that sort of thing that they don't want to mess with with what about jealousy and specifically is the term interex women being

jealous of women men being jealous of men you mentioned a second ago that 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% which are men isn't there going to be a ton of competition amongst women and what direction does that competition travel in is it low status women having competition with high status women or is it what is it I mean the competition when you have cases where there's an asymmetrical sex ratio and like we do on college campuses I mean

women are very competitive amongst one another for access to the men that are available and oftentimes the way that this like the form that this tends to take is that women become increasingly likely to be 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 is because men are more or oriented toward casual sex and non-committed relationships than women are what we tend to see is that short-term hookups and Casual Sex tend to be very common on college campuses and in

part this is the result of the fact that women are competing for access to mates and one of 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 um providing you know the structure of the relationship and if men are only looking for casual sex even though women are tend to be more oriented toward long-term relationships they're going to be um more inclined to just give in to whatever it is that the men desire um as a means to be able

to get a partner are women more competitive with beautiful women or women that are less stereotypically and socially considered beautiful oh women are more competitive with beautiful women I mean there's just no question about that and the reason for this is that given that this is something that men desire and their Partners um this is the primary Dimension by which women compete for access to Partners right and so this is the big this is the big one um given men place a really pretty strong priority on physical attractiveness in their choice of Partners and in

fact one of the biggest predictors of a woman's upward social mobility in the US is how physically attractive a woman is and in fact that's a bigger predictor of a woman's upward Mobility than her education level or even her socioeconomic status of origin when you say upward social Mobility what do you mean I mean the ability to transcend the social class in which you were born okay so if you're somebody who was uh you know working class or middle class or upper class your ability to transcend those ranks of um of you know socioeconomic status

is um more strongly predicted by physical attractiveness than a woman's education level and 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 so women are more competitive against beautiful women in the lens of society and stereotypically yes and and one of the ways that women compete against one another is by derogating their competitors right and derogating their competitors just meaning saying mean things about them or saying mean things to them and a lot of times those mean things that they have

to say have to do with a woman's attractiveness right they'll try to downplay how attractive she is to other people by saying things like um you know oh she's 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 women and and this is something that's done to try to manipulate other people's perceptions of that woman's value but because attractiveness plays such an important role in terms of a woman's ability to successfully attract a romantic partner um this is a dimension in which

women are fiercely competitive 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 some of these kinds of issues and just this idea that women want to pretend like none of this stuff matters right that it's not that important and that we don't value this stuff but nonetheless um this is still a very important domain of competition for women always has been I think it probably always will be are women more likely to trust a

beautiful woman or a woman that is less stereotypically Beautiful cuz I was thinking about this um this thing about gay male shopping sales associates uhhuh it was a test that you did right yeah so this was I have um one of my former this is digging deep so um this one of my former students um who was really into and so he's a gay man um and just to set the stage for all of this he became really interested in the friendship that tends to form between gay men and straight women which is actually actually

you know it there's a this is something that happens everywhere so having like the the gay man and the straight woman friendship is something that's not just you know something that we see in Europe and the US it is sort of cross-culturally ubiquitous and he was trying to understand this relationship and one of the things that he noted in his research is that um the people who tend to form friendships most frequently with gay men are beautiful women um it's like attractive women who who are more competitive and potentially May perceive more competition on the

part of other women and they form these friendships because gay men can provide them with really important information um that's relevant on the mating Market that is not colored by one intersexual competition right so if you say do these pants make me look fat right your um your gay man friend isn't going to tell you no they look great even though they make you look terrible because they're trying to send you out and look terrible right so there's no like there's no thread of competition in that relationship and there's also not the 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 women can have with um with gay men this is your brain on birth control yes why did you choose to write this book I chose to write this book because I was on hormonal birth control for more than a decade of my life and I'm a psychologist who studies women and women's Brains and I had absolutely no idea that any of the things that the birth control 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 a decade straight and when I went off it I felt like I woke up it was like I had this moment it was about 3 months after I discontinued it where all of a sudden I 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 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 was

then an iPod um for the first time I know and yeah it's like it's like a it's 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 just interested in pleasure I had more energy I was feeling things more deeply and I thought what is this and I was on it you know during the time that I was on birth control I never had any issues with it like I wasn't one of those people who had uh negative mood related 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 and started to realize how much more alive I felt that I started to dig into the research behind the way that hormonal birth control changed changes women and it was then that I learned that people had been studying this in some cases for 30 years on the way that hormonal birth control changes the way that women think feel and experience the world and it was then that I knew that I had to

share this information with other women because here I was as somebody who's on the pill studies women studies women's Brains I'd even published papers on the effects of women's changing hormones over the cycle and the way that 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 know that the birth control pill was changing me that nobody else knew it either and so that led me to dig into the science behind hormones hormonal birth control um and how that changes women um

and I put together that book to tell everybody the things that I learned pretty dangerous subject matter to take on it can seem like a dangerous subject matter to take on and and you know and for good reason uh hormonal birth control and having a reliable way to prevent pregnancy has been by far the biggest game Cher that women have ever experienced you know in history um there's been nothing that has been more instrumental to women's ability to be able to achieve political and economic independence for men than the birth control pill um and because

of this saying anything that is critical of the birth control pill um can be seen very dangerous right because it's like um oh 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 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 different ways that hormones influence us and the surprising ways that hormonal birth control can change who we are in the way that we experience

the world and then give that information to women so that way when they're making decisions about whether to be on or off of hormonal birth control they have all the information about the trade-offs that they're making and this will allow them then to make decisions about whether or not to be on it depending on what's going on in their own lives because everything that I've learned about the way that the birth control pill changes 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 on this is going to be very woman specific right for some women the decision is still going to be yes I I'm willing to make these trade-offs and for other women the answer is going to be no I am not willing to make these trade-offs and whether or not we make those sort of where we land on that is going to differ depending on where we 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 to really

Empower women to be able to make informed decisions about who they want to be right and how they want to regulate their fertility what do you wish you were told on that day when you've first given that little packet of pill pills what what do you think they if they were been completely honest with you and they knew what you know now what 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 and then we can kind of dive down into

what this all means but the thing that would have really made a difference to me is that your hormones make you who you are and when you change your hormones you change who you are right so the birth control pill is going to change you it changes the version of yourself that your brain creates and so if you're going to be going on this you need to understand what that does so this of course begs the question what does it do right and there are several things that the birth control pill does right and there's

at least five different things that the birth control B does to change who we are right it changes our sexual desire and who we are attracted to it changes our emotional states right it can affect our moods it can affect our ability to regulate and to manage stress right it influences sexual desire and sexual function it influences our ability to be able to put on muscle mass and affects our like nutrition and fitness goals right it affects all of us and not knowing all of that and not knowing the potential risks of having side effects

related related to mental health and libido all the way to everything you know to like who a person is attracted to I wish I would have known that that probably would have you know impacted again um decisions that I would have made about staying on it when I didn't need to because there was there's no reason to change who you are um if you don't need the contraceptive benefits so on that first point then it changes who you're attracted to your sexual desire how well so mechanistically the way that this happens has everything to do

with the hormonal changes that are initiated by the birth control pill and so just to talk about the mechanics of this first and then talking about the downstream effects of it next um mechanically what goes on when you take hormonal birth control is you are suppressing ovulation right and the way that that that birth control does this is it does this by giving you a combination of hormones or a single hormone that tells your brain not to stimulate the ovaries and not to ovulate right and it does this by way of a synthetic progesterone called

a progestin and progestin which are in all forms of hormonal birth control when they get picked up in the hypothalamus in the brain that sends a signal that the brain should not stimulate the ovaries and should not lead to egg maturation and egg development and when this happens when the brain is not stimulating the ovaries this means the body is not producing estrogen right so estrogen levels are kept really low and instead you get this daily dose of a synthetic progesterone or progestin that is supplanting that right many forms of hormonal birth control in addition

to having that synthetic progesterone or progestin that's that turns off the brain's communication with the ovaries it also has a relatively low level of estrogen that is also added so combination hormonal birth control pills contain progestin and a little bit of estrogen but the estrogen levels are kept really low and the progesterone levels or the progestin levels are the the dominant hormone and you get that same hormonal message every day right when you do that what happens when you Flatline a woman's own production of hormones and replace them with a daily dose of synthetic progesterone

this does a few things to sexual like women's sexual psychology the first thing that it does is it turns off that estrogen surge that you get right prior to ovulation that's related to a heightened preference for sex you know it Inc like that estrogen surge is related to um an increased preference for testosterone markers and mates right it's related to women's interest in sex it's related to sexual function all of those things that increase right prior to ovulation that help to promote reproduction sexual reproduction all of those things are turned off on women on hormonal

birth control control because instead they're getting the same daily message in which progestin is the dominant hormonal message and estrogen levels are really low so that's the first thing that happens but they they're still horny right they're still uh yes I mean they still will have sex and they still want sex but many women report experiencing a a real decrease in their libido when they're on hormonal birth control that's a very common response um and the reason for this is twofold one one of the things that's a big factor in promoting women's sexual desire and

um and libido is estrogen and as estrogen is rising in the cycle because when estrogen is rising this is a time in the cycle when sex can lead to conception this is something that's known to fuel the female sexual response so women's sexual response and and their sexual desire um all increases with estrogen levels across the cycle so when you take hormonal birth control and that's flatlined which is what it does this means that sexual desire is kept more constant across the cycle so you do tend to find that women who are using hormonal birth

control tend to have fewer Peaks and valleys in sexual desire than naturally cycling women do but on the whole it tends to be lower the other thing that happens on hormonal birth control that can lead to a decrease in libido is that all of those synthetic hormones that are in hormonal birth control they tend to lead to an increase in what's known as sex hormone binding globulin which is a real mouthful but what it does is that this is a this is something that's released by the liver and it binds up free testosterone right so

it binds up testosterone and makes it 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 hormone um it's actually really important in terms of promoting women's sexual desire and women who are on hormonal birth control have levels of free testosterone that are about 60% lower than that of their naturally cycling peers and so what this means again is that you have another you know blow to women's sexual desire when they're on hormonal birth control those low levels of estrogen and

then really low levels of free testosterone those two things work together to suppress sexual desire in women and it can also change attraction because as we noted when women are approaching you know ovulation their estrogen levels increase and this is something that research finds to be related to women's interest in testosterone markers in men researchers more recently said if that's true you know what happens when you put women on hormonal birth control and estrogen levels are kept really low and what they find is that low and behold women who are using hormonal birth control do

seem to have a dampened preference for cues related to masculinity and testosterone in Partners relative to what's observed in naturally cycling women which specifically means that a woman on birth control is less likely to be interested in a guy who is what a guy who has um really masculinized features so for example if you see a face um that has high levels of testosterone generally men um will have like more deep set eyes they tend to have a wider jaw in in the IES they tend to have broader shoulders in a more narrow Waist Deep

men with more deep voices men who have um cues to like behavioral cues to social dominance that's also something related to testosterone and what the research finds is that women who are using hormonal birth control do prefer a less masculinized male face relative to what is observed in naturally recycling women I mean this is slightly concerning if you're a man right because if my 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 real important question I mean it's very

provocative cuz what does that mean and there have been some research studies that have looked at that exact question and one of the best studies that's looked at this question is one that was a longitudinal study of married couples they followed women who were using hormonal birth control at the time that they met their partner and then they just followed them over time to see what would happen when women discontinued the pill what happened when they discontinued was that there were real significant changes in how attracted women were to their partner um depending on whether

they chose them using hormonal birth control but what was interesting about it is whether the women became more or less attracted to their partner depends on how attractive their partner was and so what the researchers found is that women who were partnered to attractive men when they went off hormonal birth control they were more attracted to their partner and were more sexually attracted to their partner and more sexually satisfied within their relationship relative to where they were beforehand but for women who were partnered with less attractive Partners they had the opposite effect so when they

went off hormonal birth control they became less attracted to their partners and reported being less sexually satisfied with their Partners than where they were beforehand and so this suggests that yes it is a very real possibility that if you um have a partner who chose you when you're using hormonal birth control that this can change attraction within the context of the relationship but whether that's good or bad probably depends on a bunch of other dimensions that you need to take into effect including partner's attractiveness so if you're not a very good-look guy you probably want

have to 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 really quickly become alarmed with this right the good news is this and that is most women who are who choose their Partners when they're on hormonal birth control go off of hormonal birth control and then there's really not a huge shakeup in their relationship right and the reason for this is the way that hormones influence us is they kind of nudge us a little bit one way or the other

right they kind of nudge us toward preferring this type of mate or that type of mate it's generally not these big sweeping changes where all of a 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 it's just that for some people who were teetering on the edge of not necessarily being attracted to their partner going off hormonal birth control can tilt them out of Attraction right the same is true 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 like they're bisexual or women who are bisexual and then they go off of the pill and all of a sudden they realize that they're not interested in women anymore I mean it's like sexual orientation attraction of All Sorts 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 in terms of the specific partners that you're attracted to all of those things are influenced by sex hormones and you know when sex hormones kind of nudge you

this way or the other way depending on where you fall in that distribution of you know sort of where you are in terms of sexual orientation or am I attracted to this mate or that mate those people who are on the Tails can get nudged into a place that puts them into the uncomfortable situation where they realize that they're no longer attracted to the person they chose on the pill as a man is my attraction going to change if my partner comes off the pill um so there is evidence that suggests that women are more

attractive to men when they're naturally cycling relative to when they're on hormonal birth control and so chances are if you have a partner 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 an increase in attraction so there's a ton of research that finds that men find women sexiest they think that they smell better they think that they you know that they look more attractive men will tip women more um at you know at strip clubs when the women are at high

fertility across the cycle relative to low fertility across the cycle meaning that men are cued into estrogen levels and scent V phys you know visual appearance and even just the way that women act and move so they've done studies where they have um men looking at women moving um seeing just seeing their Silhouettes move like behind a sheet right so they'll see women walking or dancing and they have them walking or dancing at high or low fertility across the cycle and men find the women more attractive when they just see their outlines moving at high

fertility compared to low fertility so men's brains are wired to pick up on estrogen cues and this makes perfect sense when we consider the evolutionary process that designed us right because over the course of evolutionary history men who were really dialed into women's estrogen levels they would have passed down more genes than men who didn't really pay attention to those cues because estrogen across the lifespan is linked with fertility and estrogen across the cycle is linked with fertility right it's a it's linked with fertility no matter which way you look at it and so men

who are really queued into um estrogen levels they would have 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 of a sudden she starts cycling again my guess is that most men will experience an increase in attraction to their partner particularly at high fertility in the cycle because there's so much research that suggests that this is 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 control pill

are my testosterone levels going to be lower that's a fascinating question and it's one I'm super interested in so I actually was just I just had this conversation not that long ago with my my graduate students in my lab there is research that suggest that men's testosterone levels increase in response to the scent of fertile women right so when women are at high fertility if men sniff t-shirts that they were wearing or in one study they actually had men sniffing the 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 low fertility so smelling um women's vaginal secretions both of those things have been shown in research to be related um to an increase in testosterone levels in men so it increases men's testosterone levels to be around these cues to high fertility so what happens then when men are spending their time or are partnered with some some who's on hormonal birth control right so given that um estrogen levels can increase testosterone does a lack of estrogen presence lead to lower levels of testosterone on average and this is

a question that we do not have a research answer to but it's one that's incredibly fascinating because here we are right 2024 almost 2025 and we have a testosterone crisis 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 it's possible that one contributor to this is the fact that so many women are using hormonal birth control and when you have on average lower levels of estrogen in the population might this then also predict lower levels of testosterone in men and the

answer to that is we don't know and another possibility with that by the way and one that I I think is so interesting is you know we talked about kids and we talked about the fact that men's testosterone levels um will decrease when men are in long-term relationships and then they'll decrease a little bit more when men uh have children that they're caring for and another possibility for men's lowered levels of testosterone I mean in addition to all the you know trash that's in the water and you know all the chemicals that were um that

were exposed to is the fact that men are now responsible for more caregiving and you know than than they ever have been in history right with many women you know being in the workforce men are having to also do more in the home than they ever did before and so it's also possible that some of the differences that we see in testosterone levels that have changed over time may be the result of men um their bodies actually decreasing testosterone uh production in response to their changing roles in the home which is also sort of a

fascinating possibility are you all concerned that there'll be a bit of a population collapse if we don't start having more kids gosh you know I have thought about 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 take the next step and say that it's everybody's you know obligation to reproduce that women need to be having more babies and so I I hasten like if if if I say yes I do think about 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 I do wonder what's going to happen you know because people are not reproducing the way that they used to and um and 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 idea but I I don't think it's necessarily going to be good every single time you eat you have an opportunity to improve your health that's why I love Zoe because it helps me to make the

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use the code diary at checkout and you'll also get free shipping and a year-long warranty head to bonch charge.com diary and get started on your in Fred SAA Journey today just for a second because I've had so many conversations on this podcast about men's issues and the state of the the world for men right now it's quite an interesting moment with like the depression statistics and suicidality and sexlessness and all these things and I don't know if you you've even got an answer to this question but what advice would have you got a son I

do what advice do you give to a young man how old is he he's he's 15 he's 15 perfect he's like right at the age where 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 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 think there's room for masculinity like I and honestly sex demands it I mean I I so I teach

a class called Evolution sex in the brain and one of the things that we talk about is just how problematic um you know sex has become because there's so much of a a dance with like seduction you know it's like everybody knows when um sort of you know masculinity has gone 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 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

requires like Ian the whole idea of Seduction is this idea that men um can lead women into sexuality and so trying to have a conversation with my son about 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 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 would never at the you I can imagine thinking you know is it okay if 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 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 you're you know you don't want to do something that's obviously going to be detrimental or hurtful to a woman or violate her in some way but on the other hand you know you can go too far with the permissions in a way that can be really bad for sex and um because attraction and sexual

desire is all 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 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 friends can't Pro can barely well couldn't provide for myself let alone anybody else right and in terms of dating Dynamics I often hear that the like top 10% of men are pretty much having all the fun right yeah that's 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 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 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 sex it's not hard to find like any woman who is um listening to this right now if 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 beautiful actor on a campus oh yes no that's a wonderful study so that's a classic social psychology study that was done at the University of Florida a number of years ago what the researchers did is they had a male and female model so an really attractive person approached strangers on campus and they would introduce themselves they would just say hello I've been noticing you around campus and find you very attractive and after they made this introduction they would then follow this with one of three requests it would

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 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 no and what they found was that for both men and women 50% agreed to the date 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% of women said yes after

that the sexes diverged in pretty pretty marked ways right what they found is that very few women almost zero women said yes to go back to the apartment with the person 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 men right for men what they found was that men were more likely to agree to go back to somebody's apartment with them than they were to the date and men were most likely to agree to just have sex 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 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 some real differences when it comes to men's and women's sort of tendency towards sexual opportunism and the fact is you know historically women have had huge costs related to sexual behavior just simply because women to reproduce have a minimum investment of 9 months time in pregnancy and

then subsequent time spent breastfeeding right and so for women who were sexually opportunistic in other was willingness to con willing to consent to sex without strings or investment women would have been penalized for that right because throughout most of our evolutionary history that could result in a pregnancy 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 to consent to sex without commitment that's an evolutionary win right that's a potential Gene transmission opportunity because short-term sex of course can lead to pregnancy

and if there is no expectation of further investment it's very low cost right so the costs and benefits related to short-term casual sex are vastly different depending on whether or not you have a male or female body so if your son comes home one day and says mom listen I've tried my best um I can't seem to persuade a woman to give me a chance right then I would say go to the gym and be a nice guy well I mean honestly be a nice guy well no but nice guys can can form relationships right

if he's looking for a girlfriend I think one of the ways 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 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 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 bad boys they seem to get a lot of the sort of sexual

attention right what is that about but 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 those are cues related to testosterone right so having you know being risk tolerant so being willing to do things that are really risky um and you know and and being a little bit arrogant because you know you're always going to succeed I mean those are cues related to status and related to sometimes uh testosterone levels right and

so we know that women like both of these things in their partners and so because of that those men will tend to do pretty well on the mating market for for men who um you know don't have those quality so so men who are not you know risk seeking and are not arrogant um that's not necessarily going to not do them favors unless that also is you know an indicator that they have other qualities that aren't working for them you can have somebody who's very successful right and has high 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 would tell my son to go to the gym because um it's like one way that you can naturally increase your testosterone levels is by building muscle and also another thing that that does um is that muscle mass is related to reductions in anxiety and the reason for this is because if you're a big dude it means that you're going to be able to protect yourself and so your brain makes the adjustment and it makes you more 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 then also doing the things that you can to get access to resources and Status right so study and work hard um because ultimately people who do that tend to do well and people um who do well financially and do well in terms of you know ascending the status hierarchy they tend to also do well in the mating Market if they're men have you got a daughter I sure do your daughter comes home

mom I've tried my best and no one's interested right yeah no so for my daughter then I would say then you just need you need to wait right you are probably you are probably in the wrong you are probably in the wrong mating pool um would be my would be my advice to her why uh my advice are well because so a few things so many of the things that women um sort of possess that men desire in their choice of Partners um are things that women don't have that much control over right it's like

a woman's like Youth and and reproductive 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 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 hair done and you know um I'm trying to think oh well go off the birth control 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 what I would what I would tell her like things that women can do to increase their attractiveness to men I mean it's like okay go be more beautiful like what are you going to say um and so like I said my real advice if my daughter said this would I would say you like probably need a different pool of mates what if she was 35 if she was 35 hm good question so if she was 35 what would I recommend like is this like what I would

actually recommend to my daughter or do you are you trying to get at like what should a woman do because here's here's I I have two different answers right so if a woman is just like looking for if you want me to write a 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 list of unsavory like things that you know I mean it would be like consider Botox men are attracted to women who have features related to Youth and fertility consider having

a Brazilian buttlift because men are also interested in this why don't you also consider you know um spending time on your hair and 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 would give do men find confidence attractive in women cuz this is I was thinking about this as you're speaking because I I can think of many people that I know many women and men but many women that I know that are um you know maybe you know approaching their 40s

and they're beautiful but they're single and they don't want to be single and it's not necessarily it's not necessarily a physical thing it appears but it seems to be more of like a self-esteem confidence thing and I can see how in men confidence matters like if they're stood up straight and they exert those like those signals of dominance or not 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 are seen as more confident like that is

seen as more attractive for example like somebody who has some self assurance of 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 which that is prioritized is hugely different between the Sexes and if you are a woman and you sort of go out and exude those cues related to like social dominance for example and social status that's not going to necessarily get you a mate and in some cases it might actually detract from your attractiveness as a

mate because people seem to view women who are in positions of power more negatively than how they perceive men men and women who are in positions of power there's sort of a there's a there's definitely a double standard there and there and this is something that has been fairly well studied where they find that there's nobody more polarizing in the world than powerful women so for example you know somebody like KLA Harris who is running for president um people seem to either really love her or really hate her um so there's this polarization that happens

with powerful women this happens for anybody who's run for any political office that is a female you get these sorts of issues and women who are confident and um and uh direct and assertive are seen as being cold and and 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 leadership potential and so there is a double standard in how we tend to perceive this and and it's not you know over over the course of evolutionary history women did well when they

chose um High status men right that would have prefer that would have given them preferential access to resources for themselves and their children we don't get that same kind of a pattern for men choosing women right men who chose women who were you know high in status and um you know socially dominant that doesn't necessarily translate into anything that's going to correspond to increased reproductive success bit of a sort of correlated but uncorrelated Point people talk about daddy issues and 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 big impact on who I am is there any truth to this idea that people can have Daddy Issues yeah no there absolutely is and so and when I when I say this you know Daddy Issues just simply referring to the fact that women whose fathers are not invested in them or absent during childhood that these women women will tend to have more unrestricted or precocious sexual development and sexual behavior relative to what we see in women who grow up with investing dads so just to give you an

example of some research that's been done looking at this research finds that women who grow 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 not really investing and and um in in the family those women go into puberty significantly earlier they undo girls who grow up in two parent homes with investing fathers they also tend to have an earlier age at which they begin having sex relative to women who have two dads in the home um and they tend to

have um a greater number of sexual partners sort of overtime relative to girls who grow up with two parents in the home wouldn't they then also go into menopause area that's a really great question and um there is some evidence that suggests that there may be a decrease in ovarian reserve that might go on but there hasn't been anything linking that to just yet which is the the amount of eggs they have in their ovies what role does the father play on our sexual preferences and decision- making so if my if my dad am I

taking as a woman do I take cues on what a good partner is from looking at my dad I have not seen any research that has looked at that I've seen some research looking at whether women prefer Partners who are kind of similar to their dads do they um and they they do seem to um and which is interesting in its own right um but I do not know anything about men like and their 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 stress what is the impact that the birth control pill has on how woman experiences stress well the research finds that when women are on hormonal birth control that they have a blunted cortisol response to stress and cortisol 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 know seen as something that's bad because when you experience high levels of cortisol for a long period of time it actually is bad right so chronic stress causes all kinds of problems right

it makes you put on visceral fat so it makes you put on belly fat it um dumps fat and blood into your bloodstream um 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 Dynamic spikes in cortisol in response to stressful events is actually incredibly adaptive um and it's something that allows us to be able to regulate manage and cope with stress right there's a reason we experience cortisol in response to stress and what what research finds is that for women

who are using hormonal birth control that you get a no you know a blunted or absent cortisol response to stress and this is the sort of thing that we tend to see in people who've experienced PTSD or trauma because people who've experienced PTSD in trauma their stress responses um get shut down by their bodies because they've experienced so much stress that their body is like no more cortisol released for you because cortisol in the long term is not good right it is it is detrimental to the body and so what research finds is that people

with PTSD and people who've had trauma they have a blunted or absent cortisol response to stress because their body just doesn't allow them to release it anymore because it's chronically being released and we see the same thing in women who are using hormonal birth control so they experience a blunted or absent cortisol response to stress and this is something that can lead to disregulated responses and everything ranging from their immune system which um is regulated in part by cortisol because that helps to regulate the inflammatory response that we have both to stress and also injury

and it can lead to things like our ility to regulate our emotional responses because we know that cortisol has something to do with that as well and we know from so much research now that women who are on hormonal birth control that they have um dysregulations in um in emotional responses oftentimes with these women being at an increased risk for developing um things like uh anxiety and depression right and this may in part have something to do with the differences that we have in uh cortisol in your book you mentioned that in a study in

DeMont women on the pill were 50% more likely to be diagnosed with depression within 6 months of starting the pill compared to naturally cycling women and researchers showed that women who were on the pill were two times as likely to have attempted suicide than naturally cycling women yeah it's pretty Stark I mean there are some real risk factors that come up when women are using hormonal birth control and these are things that often times are swept under the rug by their doctors who are prescribing it right the fact is especially especially for teenage girlss going

on hormonal birth control can significantly increase your risk of developing a mental health disorder and significantly increase your risk of attempting or being successful at suicide and this is something that's absolutely necessary especially for mothers of young girls and young girls who are being put on these pills because they're the ones who asymmetrically bear the burden of the increased risk of mental health related problems and the about these girls is that we don't know whether or not these patterns are reversible because the teenage brain is still developing and to go into a teenage brain that's

still developing and suppress normal hormonal variation that occurs across the cycle and instead replace it with synthetic hormones we have no idea what this does to brain development and this is an important question because brain development that occurs during the puberal transition that is when the brain is remodeling itself from its child version of itself into the grown-up version of itself that remodeling job is being coordinated by sex hormones and so the idea that we're going to replace that you know these nor these naturally occurring variation in sex hormones and replace it with synthetics and

that is not going to have any impact on brain development doesn't seem realistic how old is your daughter she's 17 17 so she's right she's she's 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 decision I mean for me it's all about like what you know weighing the risks and the benefits and so for me the first you know risk and benefit question is is 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 have to worry about it it's a no-brainer you're not going on hormonal birth control if she is sexually active then the question becomes is there a way that we can protect her from pregnancy that doesn't introduce these exogenous hormones these synthetic hormones that are going to shut down her own hormone production and potentially impact brain development thankfully there are options um so there's not great right and they're not for everyone but for example um there's the copper IUD which is an intrauterine device that

um that prevents pregnancy without changing women's sex hormones and so I think that's a really good option for sexually active teenagers is that the coil it's 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 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 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 great option um for women to be able to protect themselves without having to think about it right and that's really important when we're talking about teenagers because a lot of times they don't make the best decisions um their frontal lobes are not done done to developing and because of this they don't always plan and they don't always think things clearly you know think think things through clearly um and so for a teenager who's not necessarily going to be all that on top of things when it comes to using things like condoms which is

a barrier method that requires that you actually use the condom right you can't just have them um and then protect yourself from pregnancy or something like the fertility awareness method which is where women 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 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 recommend those highly for teenagers if possible just because it requires a lot of thought and like

I said teenagers aren't always great at thinking through things what about that thing that goes in the arm a lot of the girls in my school when I was in secondary school were getting the little thing in their arm yeah so that is the implant so 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 of a um synthetic progesterone or a progestin and that daily dose of that hormone is of course keeping the brain from stimulating the ovaries and so

it's keeping hormones flatlined and so that is something that yes is incredibly effective and yes it is brainless because you don't have to think about it which is great because the best birth control is birth control that you don't have to think about but you're getting a daily dose of this hormone hormone that's shutting off your ovulation and so you're going to experience all of the changes that women experience when using hormonal birth control when you're using that right it can change who you're attracted to it can change your sex 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 working out there's some new research that finds that women who are using hormonal birth control who are doing the exact same exercises as women who are naturally cycling over a 12we per period right put on less mus muscle mass and had lower levels of testosterone relative to what you see in the women who are naturally cycling and of course that's what they find because women who are using hormonal birth control their testosterone levels are

kept suppressed and this is one of the big stimulators that we know of muscle growth and same with um ampk levels are tend to be high when estrogen is high and that's also something that promotes mus muscle growth and that's lower in in women who are using hormonal birth control relative to Natural cyclers um and so you know it also can influence that it influences everything and so the idea that you know um hormonal birth control is the answer for women when it comes to regulating fertility um I just don't 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 message with everything with my book and everything else has always been and we need more answers like we need better answers and it seems like things might be moving in that way there's more research being done on things um that you know male contraception and not just male hormonal contraception I don't think that's the answer either because the idea of suppressing men's hormone production to such an

extent that they no longer produce viable sperm which is 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 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 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 really interesting things that are happening in terms of like for example there's um can ask you a

question on 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 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 replaced with this pill do you think men would take it 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 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 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 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 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 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 but a lot of times what ends up happening is the women end up going on the pill and it's because for women 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 control because the fact is we're always the one who who end up ultimately having to pay the largest cost your daughter 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 you quote unquote woke up uhhuh so of course you're presumably you're scared of your Lo changing your daughter right and how how I mean under your analogy she'd be asleep right yeah yeah no I 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 brain is still developing because like I said there has been hardly any research that has looked at what happens to brain

development when you introduce synthetic sex hormones to women when their brains are developing and the research that does exist looking at this question doesn't paint a very good picture of it it looks like it can put women on a long-term risk of developing major depressive disorder over the course of their lifetime even after they've gone off of it and so no I don't you know I the idea of having my daughter on hormonal birth control is not something that I want to have happen especially when her brain is developing 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 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 hormonal side effects then I would say better that than pregnant the fact is teenage pregnancy 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 woman feels like she's awake or asleep and so sadly that's where we are and 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 hasn't been solved right and that we need more options besides just changing women's hormones it's my hope that 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 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 and so that way you know later on my daughter's

daughters and her daughter's daughter's daughters have more things to choose from than just change me or you know come at risk of a teenage pregnancy what kind of emails do you get like what's the most popular email you get from just the world the most popular email I get is thank you I knew that this was going on I had absolutely no language to describe it you nailed it 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 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 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 almost everybody goes on it we don't think about the fact that our hormones are an important part of what our brain uses to create the experience of being who we are right and so we're very Cavalier and just giving it to people 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 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 those changes that's changing who women are and um yeah so the most frequent thing that I get is like thank you for making me myself again thank you for helping identify what I knew was going on when I was on it and I didn't have the words to describe it yeah

and I I I I say this and I touch on the subject in particular because I've got so many friends who were in a relationship where their partner in their 20s turned around to them and said I'm not interested in sex anymore or just their libido fell off a cliff and they ultimately broke up and they never 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 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 was in Bob Marley's old house oh my gosh I love it that's what they told me it was 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 um yeah she turned around to me in bed and she said I'm not interested in sex 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 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 be something to do with right um we ended up breaking up she went off for a year and went to Barley did her own thing worked on herself I think around this time is when she stopped the birth control pill started 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 totally different

person like and I say this because I don't want people to give up right when the libido gives up right 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 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 with the birth control pill it's like there's a tendency um to fear that everything is permanent and like if you 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 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 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 the person that you were right and um yeah and that can include the recovery of your sexual desire even if you think that it's lost Dr Sarah hill we have

a closing tradition on this podcast where 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 is hm okay what is the Legacy that you want to leave behind I want to make the world a place where women understand themselves and that women are understood as themselves and not as being some sort of a malfunctioning male thank you thank you for all the work you do it's so interesting for me so interesting for me as a as a man

um but as men we have mothers we have sisters we have Partners um so helping us understand women in all in every facet of the word understanding their health their reproductive Health their sexual health why they are the way that they are helps us be better Sons better Brothers better husbands better boyfriends in a way that I think is really really important for both of us as Sexes to like get along 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 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 and understanding how pertinent hormones are to how we feel and how we behave and our mental health and our libido and all of these things again I think it breeds empathy it breeds empathy and understanding and awareness which um I think will allow us to have the relationships we hope to have with the people that are you know our mothers our sisters and our partners and had I known some of the things that I

know now from reading your book but also from learning more broadly about the subject matter of like women's sexual health and Women's Health and women's reproductive Health 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 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 someday which I think is really really important and sometimes I do hope that men click

these episodes and I hope they I could probably look at the numbers but I hope they they understand the importance of of of all the subject matter to them because yeah I mean we we live in we inhabit this world together and 50% of our um the inhabitants of this planet are women and and also there's something which I was quite Illuminating in your work which is I think I used to be in the of the opinion that only women had fluctuations in their hormones and feelings and I think I've joked before with my male

friends that like we're all just like this me and my friends right whereas our partners are like woo right 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 the day and they're higher in the morning than they are later on in the afternoon and they change in response to environmental cues so beautiful women you know the wind or loss of your favorite sports team the win or loss your favorite political candidate the presence of a weapon all of these things can change men's

testosterone levels and so men's hormones change quite rap like you know rapidly and in ways that are more unpr predictable than women's cuz women's hormones do cycle but they cycle predictably and if you tell me a woman's age and the first day of her last menstrual cycle I can tell you with almost really high degree of certainty what's going on with her primary sex hormones and the same is just not the truth for men so how the pill changes 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 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 your brain on birth control how the pill changes everything okay it's not on here I know that's because we CH they they changed the subtitle when we went to Paperback oh okay I know it's all very confusing I'll 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 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 questions or send youil emails or learn more yeah well they can find me online at Sarah hill.com and that's Sarah with an H and I am on Instagram is my most active platform and it's Sarah eill PhD um and that's my handle thank you so much Sarah thank you 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 team are our team because we absolutely obsess about the smallest things even with this podcast when we're recording this podcast we measure the CO2 levels in the studio because if it gets above a th000 parts per million cognitive performance dips this is the type of 1% Improvement we make on our show and that is why the show is the Way It Is by understanding the power of compounding 1% you can absolutely change your outcomes in your life it isn't about drastic Transformations or quick wins

it's about the small consistent actions that have a last change on your outcomes so 2 years ago we started the process of creating this beautiful diary and it's truly beautiful inside there's lots of pictures lots of inspiration and motivation as well some interactive elements and the purpose of this diary is to help you identify stay focused on develop consistency with the 1% that will ultimately change your life we're only going to do a limited run of these 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 right now I'll link it below oh [Music]