![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Possibly bad side effect of taking a birth control pill...
I was reading an article in Time magazine today and was curmuzzled to note research indicates that the birth control pill could mess with a woman's ability to detect a compatible mate by smell. According to this article as well,
Note that picking a mate whose MHC is different from your own is important in reproduction--couples with similar MHC suffer more difficulty in conception, higher rates of spontaneous abortion, and underweight babies (and possibly other effects of inbreeding) (see also this psychology today write-up on smell and attraction and MHC detection/compatibility). So to find a mate with whom she has high chances of successfully bearing children, a woman needs to be attracted to MHC-dissimilar men.
The Time article actually went one step further, suggesting that use of birth control could be partly responsible for high divorce rates. E.G. a couple meets while the woman is on the pill, and she is attracted to him, and then they settle down to have kids, she goes off the pill, and suddenly he's not the one for her. I guess to confirm that we'd need research on how many divorces do and do not involve going off the pill, and with what sort of correlation.
But anyway, this is all very interesting, and may call for the modern woman to apply a technological test to see if she is in fact MHC compatible with the man of her choice. Or she can take a break from birth control in order to have a "Sniffing" date, but unfortunately none of the research reported how long a break someone would have to take for the instinctual attraction to reverse back to normal.
The first study to indicate that chemical signals play a role in attraction was conducted by Claud Wedekind over a decade ago. Forty-four men wore the same T-shirt for three days. They refrained from deodorants and scented soaps so they wouldn’t interfere with their natural smell. Women then sniffed the shirts and indicated which ones smelled the best to them. By comparing the DNA of the women and men, the researchers found that women didn’t just choose their favorite scent randomly. They preferred the scent of man whose major histocompatibility complex (MHC) -- a series of genes involved in our immune system -- was most different from their own.
[...]
An interesting exception to the MHC attraction is for women taking the pill. Wedekind found that pill-takers responded in almost the exact opposite manner than would be expected. Because the pill tricks your body into thinking it is pregnant, it chemically alters your sense of attraction. Instead of finding the scent of genetically dissimilar men attractive, women on the pill found the scent of men with MHC’s similar to their own to be attractive.
Note that picking a mate whose MHC is different from your own is important in reproduction--couples with similar MHC suffer more difficulty in conception, higher rates of spontaneous abortion, and underweight babies (and possibly other effects of inbreeding) (see also this psychology today write-up on smell and attraction and MHC detection/compatibility). So to find a mate with whom she has high chances of successfully bearing children, a woman needs to be attracted to MHC-dissimilar men.
The Time article actually went one step further, suggesting that use of birth control could be partly responsible for high divorce rates. E.G. a couple meets while the woman is on the pill, and she is attracted to him, and then they settle down to have kids, she goes off the pill, and suddenly he's not the one for her. I guess to confirm that we'd need research on how many divorces do and do not involve going off the pill, and with what sort of correlation.
But anyway, this is all very interesting, and may call for the modern woman to apply a technological test to see if she is in fact MHC compatible with the man of her choice. Or she can take a break from birth control in order to have a "Sniffing" date, but unfortunately none of the research reported how long a break someone would have to take for the instinctual attraction to reverse back to normal.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
How strongly did they really prefer one t-shirt over another? Would that still be true in the real world, where people wear deodorant and other stuff, and the local environment isn't controlled for smell? Would the preferences be consistent for the same person over time? Is it true for all people?
In real life, does the smell thing, which is only one factor, really matter that much? Or do people just say "I love him, but I make him shower before we make love because he can really reek"?
Wedekind's abstract doesn't over-claim (as far as I know), but the popular articles about it do, by implication. They imply a lot more weight than it should be given as a guide to real life. And all too often the concealed message of the popular media is one that reinforces traditional gender roles for women. Particularly having children.
no subject
I would certainly never argue that people should stop controlling their reproduction, but I also think it's important to try to understand how our biological systems work, as a whole. Whether or not it's all completely good news, politically speaking.
no subject
I would certainly never argue that people should stop controlling their reproduction, but I also think it's important to try to understand how our biological systems work, as a whole. Whether or not it's all completely good news, politically speaking.
I agree, but with a caveat: people like us who care about social justice should be VERY VERY sure of the evidence before propagating ideas that have horrible political or social implications. I put studies that say some variant of "taking the pill can screw up your life" right up there with claims like "there are racial differences in intelligence" as things we shouldn't be presenting as truth without extremely clear proof -- which does not exist for any of these claims at present.
no subject
I think your caveat is something that needs to be considered on a much larger scale, in general. I work in science, and feel i have a good understanding and respect for it, but also feel that -- on the massive scale -- people vastly overstate its application to day-to-day life.
In this case, i see a key point that is often forgotten about most studies and analytical results: they don't speak of absolutes, only probabilities. A study can prove that such-and-such holds true for the statistical majority of certain cases, but asserting that it's "true" makes people think that it's true for everyone, which is not what the study is saying.
As
no subject