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

From sabotaging sex to axing attraction, new research is showing that the birth control pill can have impacts you never imagined Dr Sarah Hill is a renowned evolutionary social psychologist whose work focuses on women and health. She is also the author of the book, ‘How the Pill Changes Everything: Your Brain on Birth Control’. In this conversation, Dr Sarah and Steven discuss topics such as, how the pill affects a woman’s choice in partner, the real reason people are having less sex, the link between the pill and orgasms, and the optimum time to initiate sex. 00:00 Intro 02:18 What Is the Mission You Are On? 03:12 Is This Conversation Only for Women? 04:01 Why Does Sarah Hill Do This Work? 05:27 Is There a Problem in Dating When Women Have More Resources? 09:14 Is Sex Trending Down? 10:37 Why Don’t Women Date Broke Men? 12:23 Is This Patriarchy? 14:49 Why Do Men Take More Risks? 16:36 Are Men Better at Business Than Women? 23:00 Why Don’t We Live Like Our Biology Intended? 25:36 Signs of a High-Status Male 27:19 How Women’s Preferences Change During Their Cycle 33:32 High Testosterone and Relationship Status 34:27 Do Men’s Testosterone Levels Plummet After Having a Baby? 36:12 Do Nice Guys Get Laid? 37:22 What Makes Us Attracted to Someone? 41:21 Are Men Less Attracted to Successful Women? 42:55 Jealousy Among the Sexes 47:17 Why Do Women Have Gay Best Friends? 49:12 Why Did Sarah Write Her Book on Birth Control? 53:49 What Does Sarah Wish She Was Told About the Pill? 55:48 How the Pill Changes Your Sexual Desires 01:02:19 If My Partner Is on the Pill, Will She Like Me If She Comes Off? 01:06:02 Would a Man’s Attraction Change If a Woman Is Off the Pill? 01:08:18 Will My Testosterone Be Lower If My Partner Is on Birth Control? 01:11:14 Is There a Population Crash Coming? 01:12:59 What Is a Good Man? 01:15:07 Sex Appetite Across Genders and Why 01:18:26 Advice for Young Men Struggling to Get a Woman 01:21:17 Advice for Daughters on Attracting a Man 01:23:43 Are Men Attracted to Confident Women? 01:26:38 What Are Daddy Issues? 01:28:18 What Role Does a Father Play in a Woman’s Sexual Partner? 01:28:53 What Impact Does the Birth Control Pill Have on Stress? 01:31:37 Depression and Suicide Linked to the Pill 01:33:31 How Did Sarah Feel About Her Daughter’s Decision on Birth Control? 01:38:36 What If Men Had to Take the Pill? 01:42:26 What’s the Most Popular Email Sarah Gets? 01:45:53 Guest’s Last Question 🚀 The 1% Diary is live - and it won’t be around for long, so act fast! https://bit.ly/1-Diary-YT-ad-reads Follow Dr Sarah: Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/KjuJon93HOb Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/UFHinMb4HOb Website - https://g2ul0.app.link/f3JSWDd4HOb You can purchase Dr Sarah’s book, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/oEjQpGOwJOb Studies mentioned: https://beacons.ai/thediaryofaceo Watch the episodes on Youtube: https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACEpisodes My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now: https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACBook You can purchase the The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards: Second Edition, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb Follow me: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: ZOE - http://joinzoe.com with code BARTLETT10 for 10% off Colgate - https://www.colgate.com/en-gb/colgate-total Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Steven Bartlett?

  Are you saying that you'd recommend that a woman looking for a partner gets off the birth control pill until they find one?

• 0:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 0:20Steven Bartlett?

  It's quite frightening.

• 0:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  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 in 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 masks. 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.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:22Steven Bartlett?

  So what are the alternatives for women?

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Let's dive down into that. First.

• 1:28Steven Bartlett?

  Quick one before we get back to this episode. Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us, and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to, and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show. Thank you.

• 2:13Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you so much. Back to the episode. Dr Sarah Hill.

• 2:21Steven Bartlett?

  What is the mission that you're on? If you had to 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, who read and understand your work. What is that mission?

• 2:39Speaker 01

  It's to help women understand themselves. And I think that 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. I think that for a very long time, because of the way that medicine has been set up, the focus has been primarily on men. 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.

• 3:14Steven Bartlett?

  So would you say that this conversation is just for women?

• 3:16Speaker 01

  No, absolutely not. No, this is a conversation for women, for women's partners, and those who love women. And so I think that it's a conversation for everyone.

• 3:24Steven Bartlett?

  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 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. But also, when we talk about the evolutionary psychology that is intertwined throughout your work, I was able to understand so much about me as a man, and the way 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 in your heart?

• 4:08Speaker 01

  I mean, for me, it's really fascinating to consider the way that hormones influence who we are. And then to 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. We already know that birth control has had an impact on women's ability to do things like go to school and get advanced degrees.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  And we see this played out when we look at college classrooms that are becoming 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.

• 5:28Steven Bartlett?

  We're seeing some of the downstream positive impacts of this. And then there's also some of the 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 classrooms, I think more women are college educated now in the US or becoming college educated and they're earning more and more and more. And it's interesting because there's a study which you cite 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 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

• 6:13Steven Bartlett?

  there an issue here?

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, there's actually, there is an issue there. And in fact, there have been people, including my former mentor, David Buss, who have talked about this idea that there's a mating crisis going on. And that women who are becoming increasingly college educated and 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, which means that we like to mate up in terms of achievement 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,

• 6:56Speaker 01

  it makes it more difficult to find 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 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 book called All the Single Ladies that is about this very phenomenon. And women are increasingly choosing to opt out of long-term mating if they're not able to find the relationship that they want.

• 7:29Steven Bartlett?

  So two questions there. On the first point is, how do we know that women are dating upwards and to the right?

• 7:35Speaker 01

  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, for example, data, looking at the education levels of people who get married and age of people when they get married, women generally will marry somebody who's older and generally earns more money than they do themselves. And this is something that isn't specific to the US. This is something that we tend to find 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 than themselves than what it used to be. But it's still not what it would be

• 8:19Speaker 01

  if women were actually more willing to make that trade-off. 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.

• 8:30Steven Bartlett?

  Are they making that choice? Or is it just a lack of good options?

• 8:35Speaker 01

  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 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 in 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 having to partner with somebody who doesn't, you know, sort of meet what their exacting standards are.

• 9:15Steven Bartlett?

  Are they still having sex?

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, that's a good, so sex is down, like, sex is trending downward. What we tend to see is that people are having a lot less sex than they used to. They're having sex later. They're having less, there, fewer 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, or 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.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  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, you know, imagine that you're a college-aged woman and you are looking for somebody who at least is, you know, on par with you in terms of their educational attainment. 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.

• 10:38Steven Bartlett?

  If women have more money and more independence as a result of that money and success in education, why don't they just date down? As in, why don't they date men that are broke?

• 10:49Speaker 01

  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, we spent our lives, you know, having to be pregnant regularly, lactating, caring for young children. And we're very heavily dependent on the ability 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.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Like, I don't know if you've ever gone hunting before or met a two-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. 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 on to their offspring, who'd pass that preference on 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?

• 12:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:24Steven Bartlett?

  So oftentimes, people think things are the way they are because of a patriarchy or because of sort of social factors.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:33Steven Bartlett?

  But you're saying that there are sort of innate biological differences and evolutionary differences in men and women? That go beyond our sexual organs and stuff.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, you know, and in fact, the patriarchy, which just refers to, you know, male control of resources, wouldn't really exist if women didn't desire resources in their partners. 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 Onassis, 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

• 13:27Speaker 01

  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, you know, positions of being a CEO, for example, is because oftentimes, men are more willing to make the trade offs 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

• 14:12Speaker 01

  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. 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, trying to work as hard as they can to get access to resources, in part because women require them.

• 14:50Steven Bartlett?

  And men are much more likely to take risks, aren't they, as you say? So as you were speaking, I was thinking about the gambling statistics that I read that said the vast majority of gambling addicts are men. 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?

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, you know, I would think so, yes. And the reason being that it is about risk, right? And women oftentimes, again, you know, a lot of this has to do with the psychology that we've inherited. 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 have to do. It's like 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 this is somehow destining women to do one, you know, this set of activities. But instead, throughout most of our history, we spent a lot of our time pregnant and caring for young children.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  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 are men. And we can see this play out in terms of things like 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. But the risk associated with the possibility of a bust is something that women's psychology is a little bit less tolerant of relative to men's.

• 16:38Steven Bartlett?

  I think one of the interesting observations I've had as an investor, but also as an entrepreneur myself, is 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 to 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 realistic about what the business is actually capable of. And men tend to overforecast. In terms of business performance, they tend so. But then also, I think it's interesting because I heard Kevin O'Leary, who's the shark on Shark Tank

• 17:23Steven Bartlett?

  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 taking more calculated risks, women tend to be better at that than men.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:42Steven Bartlett?

  Which is an interesting.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, I think that it's totally spot on. That, you know, men tend to be riskier and they tend to have a little bit more hubris. I mean, there's a tendency to assume that they're going to, and they have an exaggerated belief about how successful they're going to be because in part, you know, I think it ultimately boils down to the differences in our mating psychology. And then also the psychology of parenting compared to provisioning. And I think that for men, 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

• 18:29Speaker 01

  to be, even if it's not necessarily all that great. This leads people to take risks 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

• 19:11Speaker 01

  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, fitness benefits, related to men and women from winning big. Right. And so men's psychology is geared toward wanting to do things that are 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.

• 19:48Steven Bartlett?

  So if I become a billionaire,

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:50Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And that's actually, there's in evolutionary biology, there's a principle behind that. It's called the Bateman 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, their increased status and their increased access to resources by gaining access to an astronomical number of partners. But historically, that's something that men sometimes do. Right. If we look at history, you'll see in particularly in polygynous cultures where

• 20:55Speaker 01

  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 descendants 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, you know, gaining access to resources in part because gaining access to resources leads to a greater fitness return than what gets is available to women from doing the exact same thing.

• 21:32Steven Bartlett?

  This wasn't a long time ago in human history either, because my granddad in Nigeria, I, I've never met the guy. I don't believe he's still alive. I've never been close to him. But I was told that he had 10 or 14 wives.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:48Steven Bartlett?

  And so I was told that I have 30, 40 cousins in Nigeria.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah.

• 21:52Steven Bartlett?

  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. But 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 in, that could be part of, passed down to me in some way.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:16Steven Bartlett?

  That sort of proclivity to have, to wanna acquire more resources so that I can support more people. It's quite frightening.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  I don't think that it's something to be frightened of. I think that, you know, when we understand that 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 cultures like the US, and I think about in European culture, we're monogamously 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, 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,

• 23:06Speaker 01

  where humans are living in ways that are more similar to 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 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 gonna be able to have. Because most women don't want to share.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  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 of the qualities that you have, let's say that your mate value is, and let's assume that mate value has a one to 10 scale. Okay, so there's a one to 10 scale and you're a seven.

• 24:18Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, excuse me.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  All the qualities. I'm just, I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the royal you.

• 24:23Steven Bartlett?

  What have I got to do to be an eight?

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Well, the reason, the reason, the reason I'm making you, and again, I'm saying the royal you, a seven is because, so just bear with me here. Imagine that you're a seven, right? And you're a seven without being willing to, I know, without being willing, I know it sounds sad, but just gotta trust me here.

• 24:41Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Your, your, 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 genes and all the other things.

• 24:55Steven Bartlett?

  I've got a dog.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Right? Yeah, but you're not willing.

• 24:58Steven Bartlett?

  Podcast.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. You've got a podcast. You've got all this like great stuff going for you, but you're not willing, you're not gonna just, you know, commit your resources to one person. 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 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 to 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.

• 25:38Steven Bartlett?

  How does a woman know if I am high status or not? Like, are 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 aftershave and 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?

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. No, that's a really great question. It's really interesting because 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, place a priority on cues related to fertility and reproductive value. And reproductive value is just essentially a person's reproductive shelf life.

• 26:16Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so if you were my coach and you were trying to train me to be high value to women. Even though maybe I'm not, like even though maybe I don't have a lot of money and I don't have a lot of, I don't know, resources.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:29Steven Bartlett?

  What kind of like things would you give me, what kind of advice would you give me?

• 26:33Speaker 01

  I would probably encourage you to play up your nice guy attributes and your willingness to commit and, you know, your willingness to, for example, and interest in things like having children, for example, because these are qualities that women desire in their choice of long-term partners and being able to have those qualities, I think, is something that can certainly, you know, give you a leg up in terms of mate attraction.

• 26:58Steven Bartlett?

  So you'd tell me to be a nice guy?

• 27:00Speaker 01

  I would say, I would say to be a nice guy.

• 27:02Steven Bartlett?

  Do nice guys get laid?

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Nice guys do get laid. I think that, I think that nice guys are less likely to have short-term, you know, casual sex. They probably have fewer casual sexual partners than non-nice guys, but it'll certainly get you access to women. Yeah.

• 27:20Steven Bartlett?

  I, I mean, I was reading in your book about how mating and attraction preferences change for a woman throughout her cycle.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:29Steven Bartlett?

  So throughout a woman's 28-day cycle, does she always want a nice guy?

• 27:35Speaker 01

  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. And this changes with our sex hormones. So during the early part of the menstrual cycle, both sets of sex hormones, so our estrogen and progesterone, which is our second 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 begins to fully mature, so that way it will be released at ovulation.

• 28:17Steven Bartlett?

  Which is how many days into the cycle?

• 28:19Speaker 01

  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, 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 is when ovulation occurs. And this is when an egg, of course, is released and pregnancy is possible from sex.

• 29:03Steven Bartlett?

  So from day nine till day 15?

• 29:05Speaker 01

  Till day, yeah, till day 15. Day nine to day 15 are usually, like, that's usually when we sort of bookend the fertile window. And during this time, not surprisingly, 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

• 29:50Speaker 01

  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 in terms of women's interest 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 immunosuppressive, 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?

• 30:34Speaker 01

  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, lo and behold, 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 more masculinized male faces, voices, and behavior at high fertility in the cycle compared to low fertility in the cycle.

• 31:14Steven Bartlett?

  How do you test this?

• 31:16Speaker 01

  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 in a freezer bag, and they had them spit into these little 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.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Because the researchers had men come into the research lab beforehand, and it 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 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 testosterone levels

• 32:43Speaker 01

  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 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 relative to what we tend to see when women are at low fertility in the cycle.

• 33:22Steven Bartlett?

  So I'm more likely to get laid if I.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, there you go. I think that voice right there that you did. I think it's gonna get you all the girls.

• 33:29Steven Bartlett?

  You think?

• 33:30Speaker 01

  Yes, I do. I do. I would, I would try that one out at the bar tonight.

• 33:33Steven Bartlett?

  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. They also found that men who have high testosterone levels are more likely to be in a relationship the next year than men that don't have high testosterone levels.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we know that, 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, lo and behold, men with higher level of testosterone are more likely to be married at time two, 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.

• 34:28Steven Bartlett?

  And something that I found really bizarre, no one's ever explained to me, is, I also read, I believe it was in your book, or it had been in a, in a video I watched of yours, they found that men who had a baby had plummeting testosterone levels.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:43Steven Bartlett?

  Like, how does, how does my body know that I have a baby?

• 34:45Speaker 01

  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 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, 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 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.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  And what we tend to see is that when men are good 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.

• 36:13Steven Bartlett?

  So, nice guys, don't get laid as much.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  So, nice guys might not get laid as much. 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 as a mating strategy tend to be men with higher levels of testosterone. There's just no question about that. Nonetheless, 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 to be able to find a partner. And this is something that anybody can do to increase their value to women. And so you could be somebody who has low testosterone, right? You're lacking these cues to high genetic quality or even genetic compatibility, right?

• 36:59Speaker 01

  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 can can make themselves desirable to women simply by virtue of being the type of person who's willing to invest in a committed relationship because that is something that women value.

• 37:23Steven Bartlett?

  This is a bit of a side point, and I haven't seen this in any of your work, but it just came to mind because 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 it's when it is unconscious. And 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 attractive, I wonder if most of the advice is pretty futile because it's deeper than that.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:02Steven Bartlett?

  It's so much deeper than that.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so 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, there's going to be a lot of ways 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. And there is a there is an element to our attraction that is very person specific and idiosyncratic, right? And might there be some evolutionary roots behind all of that? Maybe, 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

• 38:46Speaker 01

  be cues 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. Relative to women with higher or lower levels of estrogen.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Right. As estrogen levels decline, when women age, their bodies become more straight up and down than they do our class. And this has to do with changes in estrogen. And, 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 praise a place a greater emphasis on cues related to youthfulness. Right. So the cues that are related to maturity in a face, that's something that women tend to have heightened preference for. So if somebody has sort of an older, you know, an older face, 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 George Clooney.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  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. Women 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.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  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 differences, 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.

• 41:22Steven Bartlett?

  Is it true that men are less attractive to successful women? Is there any sort of evolutionary basis for that?

• 41:30Speaker 01

  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

• 42:14Speaker 01

  how attractive the women are. 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 females in positions of power, 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, you know, if there's issues related to power dynamics and that sort of thing that they don't want to mess with.

• 42:56Steven Bartlett?

  What about jealousy? And specifically, is the term intersex of 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?

• 43:27Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  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 providing, you know, the structure of their 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 more inclined to just give in to whatever it is that the men desire as a means to be able to get a partner.

• 44:40Steven Bartlett?

  Are women more competitive with beautiful women or women that are less stereotypically and socially considered beautiful?

• 44:49Speaker 01

  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 in their partners, 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, 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.

• 45:28Steven Bartlett?

  When you say upward social mobility, what do you mean?

• 45:30Speaker 01

  I mean, the ability to transcend the social class in which you were born.

• 45:34Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  So if you're somebody who was, you know, working class or middle class or upper class, your ability to transcend those ranks of, you know, socioeconomic status is 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.

• 45:56Steven Bartlett?

  So women are more competitive against beautiful women in the lens of society and stereotypically.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  Yes, 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, you know, "Oh, she's had a lot of work done," right? That's the thing that you'll hear women say about each other or to men about other women. 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

• 46:49Speaker 01

  to successfully attract a romantic partner, 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, and that it's not that important and that we don't value this stuff. But nonetheless, this is still a very important domain of competition for women, always has been, I think it probably always will be.

• 47:18Steven Bartlett?

  Are women more likely to trust a beautiful woman or a woman that is less stereotypically beautiful? Because thinking about this, um, this thing about gay male shopping, sales associates.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 47:31Steven Bartlett?

  It was a test that you did, right?

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this was, I have, um, one of my former, this is digging deep. So, um, this, one of my former students was really into, and so he's a gay man, 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, you know, it, there's a, this is something that happens everywhere. So having like 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 the people who tend to form friendships

• 48:18Speaker 01

  most frequently with gay men are beautiful women. 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 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, 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.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  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 that women can have with, with gay men.

• 49:14Steven Bartlett?

  This is your brain on birth control?

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:17Steven Bartlett?

  Why did you choose to write this book?

• 49:20Speaker 01

  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 three 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.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  I was exercising and going to the gym again. I was downloading new music onto my, what was then an iPod. For the first time, I know. And yeah, it's like, it's like, it's like an archaic iPhone, people. I was like downloading new music onto my phone, 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 a 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

• 50:48Speaker 01

  how much more alive I felt, that I started to dig into the research behind the way that hormonal birth control 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,

• 51:33Speaker 01

  that nobody else knew it either. And so that led me to dig into the science behind hormones, hormonal birth control, and how that changes women. And I put together that book to tell everybody the things that I learned.

• 51:48Steven Bartlett?

  Pretty dangerous subject matter to take on.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  It can seem like a dangerous subject matter to take on 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 changer that women have ever experienced, you know, in history. There's been nothing that has been more instrumental to women's ability to be able to achieve political and economic independence from 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?

• 52:35Speaker 01

  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 of 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?

• 53:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 53:52Steven Bartlett?

  Do you wish you were told on that day when you first given that little packet of pills? What what do you think they if they were being 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?

• 54:06Speaker 01

  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 but does to change who we are.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  Right? It changes our sexual desire and who we're 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 to mental health and libido, all the way to everything, you know, to like who a person is attracted to.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  I wish I would have known that. That probably would have, you know, impacted again 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 if you don't need the contraceptive benefits.

• 55:50Steven Bartlett?

  So on that first point, then, it changes who you're attracted to, your sexual desire. How?

• 55:55Speaker 01

  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. Mechanically, what goes on when you take hormonal birth control is you are suppressing ovulation. And the way 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. And it does this by way of a synthetic progesterone called a progestin. And progestins, which are in all forms of hormonal birth control,

• 56:38Speaker 01

  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. So estrogen levels are kept really low. And instead, you get this daily dose of a synthetic progesterone or progestin that is supplanting that. Many forms of hormonal birth control, in addition to having that synthetic progesterone or progestin, that turns off the brain's communication with the ovaries. It also has a relatively low level of estrogen that is also added.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  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 dominant hormone. And you get that same hormonal message every day. 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.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  You know, like that estrogen surge is related to 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 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.

• 58:35Steven Bartlett?

  But they're still horny, right? They're still...

• 58:37Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, they still will have sex and they still want sex, but many women report experiencing a real decrease in their libido when they're on hormonal birth control. That's a very common response. And the reason for this is twofold. One, one of the things that's a big factor in promoting women's sexual desire 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 their sexual desire all increases with estrogen levels across the cycle.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  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 something that's released by the liver and it binds up free testosterone, right?

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:01:29Steven Bartlett?

  Which specifically means that a woman on birth control is less likely to be interested in a guy who is what?

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  A guy who has really masculinized features. So for example, if you see a face that has high levels of testosterone, generally, men will have like more deep-set eyes, they tend to have a wider jaw. In the bodies, they tend to have broader shoulders and a more narrow waist. Men with more deep voices, men who have 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 cycling women.

• 1:02:20Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, this is slightly concerning if you're a man, right? Because if my partner's on the pill and then she comes off the pill, she might not like me.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, no. And that's like a, that's a real important question. I mean, it's very provocative because 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, depending on whether they chose them using hormonal birth control.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  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

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  that if you 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.

• 1:04:14Steven Bartlett?

  So if you're not a very good-looking guy, you probably want to stay on it.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  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 wool comes 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

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  who are 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've, 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

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:06:03Steven Bartlett?

  As a man, is my attraction going to change if my partner comes off the pill?

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  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 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 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.

• 1:06:53Steven Bartlett?

  How?

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  And scent, you know, visual appearance and even just the way that women act and move. So they've done studies where they have men looking at women moving, 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,

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  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 linked with fertility no matter which way you look at it. And so men who are really cued into estrogen levels, they would have done really well. 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.

• 1:08:18Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  That's a fascinating question. 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 suggests 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're wearing, or in one study, they actually had men sniffing the air that was being piped through a nebulizer that had a woman's panty liner in it that was either worn at high or low fertility, so smelling women's vaginal secretions. Both of those things have been shown in research to be related to an increase in testosterone levels in men.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  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 somebody who's on hormonal birth control, right? So given that 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 than what they used to be 50, even 50 years ago.

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  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. Another possibility with that, by the way, and one that I think is so interesting, is, you know, we talked about kids and we talked about the fact that men's testosterone levels will decrease when men are in long-term relationships, and then they'll decrease a little bit more when men have children that they're caring for. And another possibility for men's lowered levels of testosterone, I mean, in addition

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  to all the, you know, trash that's in the water and, you know, all the chemicals that we're, that we're 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, their bodies actually decreasing testosterone production.

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  In response to their changing roles in the home, which is also sort of a fascinating possibility.

• 1:11:15Steven Bartlett?

  Are you at all concerned that there'll be a bit of a population collapse if we don't start having more kids?

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  Gosh, you know, I have thought about that. I don't, 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 and that women need to be having more babies. And so I hasten, like, if I say yes, I do think about that. I hasten to add that, that is, 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, 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?

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  I have no idea, but I don't think it's necessarily going to be good.

• 1:12:07Steven Bartlett?

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• 1:12:52Steven Bartlett?

  And if you haven't joined Zoe yet, I'm going to give you 10% off when you join Zoe now. Just use the code BARTLETTEN at checkout. Just for a second, because I've had so many conversations on this podcast about men's issues and the state of 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.

• 1:13:17Steven Bartlett?

  And I don't know if you've even got an answer to this question. But what advice would you have you got a son?

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  I do.

• 1:13:24Steven Bartlett?

  What advice do you give to a young man? How old is he?

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  He's he's 15.

• 1:13:29Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:36Steven Bartlett?

  What advice are you giving to him about like, what is a good man in the modern world?

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:13:40Steven Bartlett?

  Is it okay to be masculine?

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, I think, yes, I think that there's, I think there's room for masculinity. Like, I, and honestly, sex demands it. I mean, I, so I teach a class called Evolution, Sex and 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, when you see it, when somebody is, you know, like touching a woman when she's asking not to be, or is harassing somebody. It's like, we all know what that looks like.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  But then there's also, you know, seduction requires, like, I mean, the whole idea of seduction is this idea that men 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 interacting with girls, that there is consent and that that is consensual, any sort of a physical touch that goes on. But at the same time, you know, like, I would never, at the, you know, I can't 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.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  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 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 because attraction and sexual desire is all about sort of the push and the pull of the masculine and the feminine.

• 1:15:39Steven Bartlett?

  But also, if you're a low-status male, like I was at the start of my career, when I'm 18, no money, working in a call center, you know, not really any friends, can barely, well, couldn't provide for myself like I can anybody else.

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:15:56Steven Bartlett?

  And in terms of dating dynamics, I often hear that the like, top 10% of men are pretty much having all the fun.

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, that's probably true.

• 1:16:03Steven Bartlett?

  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% of men, 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 sought it. I mean, you did studies on this, right?

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  Right, well, yeah, I mean, if a woman is looking for sex, it's not hard to find. Like, any woman who is listening to this right now, if she decided to go and have sex tonight, she'd probably be able to find a taker.

• 1:16:31Steven Bartlett?

  What was the study of the actor, the beautiful actor on a campus?

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  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 a really attractive person, approach 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 person said, right? Did they say yes, or did they say no?

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  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 marked ways. 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.

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  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 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 nine months' time in pregnancy, and then subsequent time spent breastfeeding. Right? And so for women who were sexually opportunistic,

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  in other words, 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,

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  depending on whether or not you have a male or female body.

• 1:19:30Steven Bartlett?

  So if your son comes home one day and says, mum, listen, I've tried my best. I can't seem to persuade a woman to give me a chance.

• 1:19:38Speaker 01

  Right, then I would say go to the gym and be a nice guy. Well, I mean, honestly, you know.

• 1:19:43Steven Bartlett?

  Be a nice guy.

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

  Be a nice guy.

• 1:19:44Steven Bartlett?

  Well, no.

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  Well, no, but a nice guy 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 invest in a woman. Like, if you're a jerk, you're gonna have a harder time, 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.

• 1:20:11Steven Bartlett?

  But these like, bad boys, they seem to get a lot of the sort of sexual attention, right? What is that about?

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  But that's like, despite the fact that they're bad boys. I mean, so it depends on how we're defining bad boys, okay?

• 1:20:24Steven Bartlett?

  Kind of arrogant, little bit.

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  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, and, you know, and being a little bit arrogant, because you know you're always gonna succeed. I mean, those are cues related to status and related to sometimes 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 men who, you know, don't have those qualities, so men who are not, you know,

• 1:21:04Speaker 01

  risk-seeking and are not arrogant, that's not necessarily gonna 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.

• 1:21:27Steven Bartlett?

  Why would you tell your son to go to the gym?

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  I would tell my son to go to the gym because it's like, one way that you can naturally increase your testosterone levels is by building muscle. And also, another thing that that does 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, 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. Because ultimately, people who do that tend to do well.

• 1:22:11Speaker 01

  And people 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.

• 1:22:21Steven Bartlett?

  Have you got a daughter?

• 1:22:22Speaker 01

  I sure do.

• 1:22:23Steven Bartlett?

  Your daughter comes home, "Mum, I've tried my best and no one's interested."

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, no. So, for my daughter, then I would say, then you just need, you need to wait, right? You're probably, you're probably in the wrong, you're probably in the wrong mating pool, would be my, would be my advice to her.

• 1:22:43Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  My advice to her, well, because, so, a few things. So, many of the things that women sort of possess, that men desire in their choice of partners, are things that women don't have that much control over, right? It's like, a woman's, like, youth and reproductive value and these things related to fertility.

• 1:23:05Steven Bartlett?

  You wouldn't tell her to hit the gym?

• 1:23:07Speaker 01

  I, I mean, I guess I might tell her to hit the, I might tell her to hit the gym. It'd probably make her feel better. But I don't think that I would tell her, like, you know, "You should probably go and get your hair done and, you know, 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." 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 gonna say? 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.

• 1:23:47Steven Bartlett?

  What if she was thirty-five?

• 1:23:48Speaker 01

  If she was thirty-five? Hmm, good question. So, if she was thirty-five, what would I recommend?

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  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 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 butt lift because men are also interested in this. Why don't you also consider, you know, spending time on your hair and makeup?

• 1:24:40Speaker 01

  But I don't think I would write that book. You know, that's not the advice that I, that's not the advice that I would, I would give.

• 1:24:47Steven Bartlett?

  Do men find confidence attractive in women? Cause this is, I was thinking about this as you're speaking, because 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.

• 1:25:04Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:25:23Steven Bartlett?

  That'd be attractive. Is it the same in women? Are men attracted to like confident women?

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  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 in the ground. Generally, 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

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  more negatively than how they perceive men. And women who are in positions of power, they're sort of a

• 1:26:19Speaker 01

  There's definitely a double standard 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 Kamala Harris, who is running for president, people seem to either really love her or really hate her. 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 direct and assertive are seen as being cold. And, you know, like, we call girls bossy, right?

• 1:27:02Speaker 01

  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 it's not, you know, over the course of evolutionary history, women did well when they chose high-status men, right? 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, you know, socially dominant, that doesn't necessarily translate into anything that's going to correspond to increased reproductive success.

• 1:27:42Steven Bartlett?

  Bit of a sort of correlated but uncorrelated point. People talk about daddy issues.

• 1:27:48Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:27:49Steven Bartlett?

  And in your work, I've kind of seen hints of an explanation for daddy issues. I.e., 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?

• 1:28:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, there absolutely is. And so, and 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 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 in the family. Those women go into puberty significantly earlier than do girls who grow up in two-parent

• 1:28:46Speaker 01

  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. And they tend to have a greater number of sexual partners sort of over time relative to girls who grow up with two parents in the home.

• 1:29:01Steven Bartlett?

  Wouldn't they then also go into menopause earlier?

• 1:29:03Speaker 01

  That's a really great question. And 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 menopause just yet.

• 1:29:14Steven Bartlett?

  Which is the amount of eggs they have in their ovaries.

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:29:17Steven Bartlett?

  What role does the father play on our sexual preferences and decision making? So if my dad, am I taking, as a woman, do I take cues on what a good partner is from looking at my dad?

• 1:29:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:29:39Steven Bartlett?

  Do they?

• 1:29:40Speaker 01

  And they do seem to, which is interesting in its own right. But I do not know anything about men and their preferences and whether or not their sons then tend to emulate those preferences. That's an interesting question.

• 1:29:56Steven Bartlett?

  So on the subject of stress, what is the impact that the birth control pill has on how a woman experiences stress?

• 1:30:04Speaker 01

  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 of like, oh no, high cortisol and that's 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 dumps fat and blood into your bloodstream in ways that can raise your triglycerides and put you at a greater risk for heart and cardiovascular problems. It's not good.

• 1:30:45Speaker 01

  But having dynamic spikes in cortisol in response to stressful events is actually incredibly adaptive. And it's something that allows us to be able to regulate, manage, and cope with stress. There's a reason we experience cortisol in response to stress. And what research finds is that for women who are using hormonal birth control, that you get 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 and trauma, their stress responses get shut down by their bodies because they've experienced so much stress that their body is like, no

• 1:31:29Speaker 01

  more cortisol release for you, because cortisol in the long term is not good. 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 dysregulated responses in everything ranging from their immune system, which is regulated in part by cortisol because that helps to regulate the inflammatory response that we have, both the stress and also injury.

• 1:32:11Speaker 01

  And it can lead to things like our ability 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 dysregulations in emotional responses oftentimes, with these women being at an increased risk for developing things like anxiety and depression. And this may in part have something to do with the differences that we have in cortisol.

• 1:32:40Steven Bartlett?

  In your book, you mention that in a study in Denmark, women on the pill were 50% more likely to be diagnosed with depression within six months of starting the pill compared to naturally cycling women. And research has showed that women who are on the pill are two times as likely to have attempted suicide than naturally cycling women.

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  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 oftentimes are swept under the rug by their doctors who are prescribing it. The fact is, especially for teenage girls, 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.

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  And the thing 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 pubertal 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 naturally occurring

• 1:34:26Speaker 01

  variation in sex hormones and replace it with synthetics and that it's not going to have any impact on brain development, doesn't seem realistic.

• 1:34:34Steven Bartlett?

  How old is your daughter?

• 1:34:35Speaker 01

  She's 17.

• 1:34:36Steven Bartlett?

  17. So she's right, she's at the age now where she's making the decision. You mentioned earlier she's not on birth control.

• 1:34:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:34:42Steven Bartlett?

  How did you feel when it came time to make that decision?

• 1:34:45Speaker 01

  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. So they're not great, right? And they're not for everyone.

• 1:35:28Speaker 01

  But for example, there's a copper IUD, which is an intrauterine device that prevents pregnancy without changing women's sex hormones. And so I think that's a really good option for sexually active teenagers.

• 1:35:43Steven Bartlett?

  It's like the coil?

• 1:35:43Speaker 01

  Yes, it's the coil. It's the copper coil. Because there's two different types of coils.

• 1:35:48Steven Bartlett?

  Where does that go? It goes up in the vagina?

• 1:35:50Speaker 01

  It goes up into the cervix.

• 1:35:52Steven Bartlett?

  OK, and it sits there for a long time?

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  It sits there for a long time. It sits there for like five years is how long it can stay in there without having to be replaced. And it's a really great option for women to be able to protect themselves without having to think about it. And that's really important when we're talking about teenagers, because a lot of times they don't make the best decisions. Their frontal lobes are not done developing. And because of this, they don't always plan. And they don't always think things clearly, you know, think things through clearly. 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 and then protect yourself from pregnancy. Or something like the fertility awareness method,

• 1:36:38Speaker 01

  which is where women keep track of where they are in their cycle. And then, you know, and then abstain from sex or use a barrier method when they're at high fertility. 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.

• 1:37:03Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:37:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that is the implant. So that's here in the US. The one that people are on is called an Explanon. And that gives a daily dose of a 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 they don't have to think about. But you're getting a daily dose of this 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?

• 1:37:52Speaker 01

  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 12-week period, right, put on less 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 AMPK levels are tend to be high when estrogen is high, and that's also

• 1:38:37Speaker 01

  something that promotes muscle growth. And that's lower in women who are using hormonal birth control relative to natural cyclists. And so, you know, it also can influence that. It influences everything. And so the idea that, you know, hormonal birth control is the answer for women when it comes to regulating fertility, 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, we need more answers, like, we need better answers. And it seems like things might be moving in that way.

• 1:39:19Speaker 01

  There's more research being done on things that, you know, male contraception, and not just male hormonal contraception, because 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 shifting. I really don't think men would sign up. Isn't that crazy? I know, I know. No, I don't think men would sign up either. I'm like, who would take this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm like, who would take, 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

• 1:39:58Steven Bartlett?

  Can I 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 replaced with this pill. Do you think men would take it?

• 1:40:15Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:40:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:40:24Steven Bartlett?

  I wouldn't take it. I'm just going to be honest.

• 1:40:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I don't know anybody. I honestly, I don't know any men who'd say, yeah, sign me up for that. I mean, the fact is, like, if you look anywhere.

• 1:40:34Steven Bartlett?

  So why do women take it?

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  Women take it because we have no choice.

• 1:40:38Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, because you're going to bear the.

• 1:40:39Speaker 01

  It's like, we're the ones who get stuck with the pregnancy. You know, 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.

• 1:40:48Steven Bartlett?

  But then if the partner's not on the pill either.

• 1:40:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, if the partner's not on the pill, then, 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.

• 1:41:03Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:04Speaker 01

  That it's hard for us not to be the ones who are bearing the price of birth control. Because the fact is, we're always the one who end up ultimately having to pay the largest cost.

• 1:41:14Steven Bartlett?

  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. So of course you're presumably you're scared of you're losing, changing your daughter.

• 1:41:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:41:28Steven Bartlett?

  And then how not have, I mean, under your analogy, she'd be asleep.

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:42:16Steven Bartlett?

  She texts you now and says, I'm gonna start taking the pill, mum. How do you feel?

• 1:42:20Speaker 01

  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 IUD, the, the copper IUD that doesn't have the hormonal side effects, then I would say better that than pregnant.

• 1:42:34Speaker 01

  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 considered, 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.

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  And so that way, you know, later on, my daughter's daughters and her daughter's daughters' daughters have more things to choose from than just change me or, you know, come at risk of a teenage pregnancy.

• 1:43:29Steven Bartlett?

  What kind of emails do you get? Like, what's the most popular email you get from just the world?

• 1:43:35Speaker 01

  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, wow, 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. And 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 in just giving it to people. It's like, oh, well, you should go on it for this. And, oh, you've got some acne, you should go on it too. And,

• 1:44:19Speaker 01

  oh, your 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,

• 1:44:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:44:45Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, and 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 twenties, 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, because when my partner turned around to me that night in bed and said to me, I remember where I was, I was in Jamaica. This sounds super weird. I was in Bob Marley's old house.

• 1:45:14Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, I love it.

• 1:45:17Steven Bartlett?

  That's what they told me it was, anyway. Maybe that was just a sales pitch, you need 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 interested in sex either. I spoke to my friends, they're not interested either. And that was like the pitch of it. And I remember thinking, as a man, obviously, you just feel really emasculated by it, because you're like, it must be something to do with me.

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:45:44Steven Bartlett?

  We ended up breaking up. She went off for a year, went to Bali, 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 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

• 1:46:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:46:07Steven Bartlett?

  when the libido gives up.

• 1:46:09Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, no, I totally know what you mean. No, and I think that that's, I think, yes, yes, yes, that.

• 1:46:16Steven Bartlett?

  She probably has a high sex drive, Amina. I'm just trying to keep up at this point.

• 1:46:20Speaker 01

  No, I love it, no, I love it. I think that, especially with the birth control pill, it's like, there's a tendency 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. And the research just doesn't quite point in that direction. 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.

• 1:46:57Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:47:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:47:06Steven Bartlett?

  And the question left for you is, hmm, okay. What is the legacy that you want to leave behind?

• 1:47:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:47:29Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you. Thank you for all the work you do. It's so interesting for me, so interesting for me as a man. But as men, we have mothers, we have sisters, we have partners. So helping us understand women in every facet of the world, 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 get along.

• 1:48:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:06Steven Bartlett?

  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 easy to jump to conclusions about the opposite sex when you're a man. It's so easy to 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 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, a lot of my life would have been different.

• 1:48:51Steven Bartlett?

  And that's coming from as a man.

• 1:48:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:48:54Steven Bartlett?

  A lot of my life would have been different. And that someday, you know, I'm going to have a daughter, I hope someday. And I think that 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 understand the importance of understanding all this subject matter to them because, yeah, I mean, we inhabit this world together and 50% of the inhabitants of this planet are women and...

• 1:49:23Steven Bartlett?

  And also, there's something which I was quite illuminating in your work, which is I think I used to be 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.

• 1:49:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:49:40Steven Bartlett?

  Whereas our partners are like, woo.

• 1:49:42Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 1:49:43Steven Bartlett?

  But I've come to London, that's also not true.

• 1:49:45Speaker 01

  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 win or loss of your favorite sports team, the win or loss of 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 unpredictable than women's because 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.

• 1:50:28Speaker 01

  And the same is just not the truth for men, so.

• 1:50:31Steven Bartlett?

  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's going to change the UK title, right?

• 1:50:42Speaker 01

  Well, no, it's now it's called, this is your brain on birth control, how the pill changes everything.

• 1:50:47Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:50:50Steven Bartlett?

  It's not on here.

• 1:50:51Speaker 01

  I know, that's because we changed, they changed the subtitle when we went to paperback.

• 1:50:56Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:50:56Speaker 01

  I know, it's all very confusing.

• 1:50:59Steven Bartlett?

  I'll link it below anyway, so everyone can have a read of it. Thank you so much for writing such a preeminent book on this subject because it's so, so important. And I'm so excited to see the science and the conversation evolve on all of these subject matters. Where do people find you if they want to ask you questions or send you emails or learn more?

• 1:51:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, they can find me online at sarahehill.com and that's Sarah with an H and I am on Instagram as my most active platform and it's sarahehillphd and that's my handle.

• 1:51:29Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you so much, Sarah.

• 1:51:30Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:51:31Steven Bartlett?

  It's been a pleasure.

• 1:51:34Steven Bartlett?

  I'm gonna let you into a little bit of a secret. And you're probably gonna 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 thousand 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 lasting change in your outcomes. So two years ago, we started the process of creating this beautiful diary. And it's truly beautiful.

• 1:52:18Steven Bartlett?

  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 gonna 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 thediary.com right now. I'll link it below.