The Pill: beer goggles for women

 

 

According to researchers at Florida State University, women who were on the Pill when they met their husbands experienced a changed view of their relationship once they stopped taking it. Once they ditched the daily Permanent Bitch Hormone, women with hot husbands found them really hot, and women with less than hot husbands were pissed.

 

With men whose faces did not conform to objective measures of attractiveness, the women became less satisfied with their relationship when they stopped using oral contraception.

 

What I find really interesting in this study is that when you ask women what makes a relationship satisfying, or what makes it work he needs to be really fucking hot hardly ever makes the list. According to this study, there are 12 key dimensions that impact how happy and fulfilling and long-term a marriage will be:

 

1. Positive thoughts about your partner
2. Thinking about your partner when you’re apart
3. Can’t think about anything else when you are thinking about your partner
4. Enjoying novel and challenging activities
5. Spending time together
6. Expressing affection
7. Being turned on by your partner
8. Having sex
9. Feeling happy
10. Wanting to know where your partner is at all times
11. Obsessively thinking about your partner
12. Having a passion for life

 

Seriously, it reads like a list put together by 13 year old girls drunk on hot chocolate at a sleepover. Looks like I’m in for a rough ride. I’m not really the jealous, insecure, stalkerish type and I generally have no idea where my husband is or what he is doing when he leaves the house, unless he is doing something specific like taking the kids to dance or picking up groceries. He is either at work, at a meeting, at a site, having lunch with friends, having lunch with colleagues, or …. I don’t know. I don’t really care either, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. I care about what he is doing at any specific moment as much as he cares what I am doing. Laundry? Am I at the library? Chatting at the neighbor’s? Who cares?

 

I have very positive thoughts about my husband, but no I don’t think about him obsessively and I can have a generally positive outlook about him and us and our family and our marriage and still manage to have other thoughts in my head, too. I’m pretty sure that is a two way street. I cringe at the thought of obsessive thinking. It doesn’t sound fun at all.

 

6, 7 and 8 seem to be getting closer to the heart of the matter, but they are still very much side-stepping what appears to be an absolutely central component of how happy a woman is with her relationship: being physically attracted is essential.

 

For women.

 

God forbid a man express any unhappiness with his relationship based on his wife’s physical appearance. The shallow, disgusting misogynist pig. Any man that cares about physical attraction clearly hates women and can’t handle normal human diversity! He should be scorned and shunned and it should be illegal to call a woman “fat” or any other disparaging term.

 

Women would never be so shallow as to evaluate an entire relationship based on whether her husband is conventionally attractive. Beauty and the Beast and all that, right? Women love personality and not something as arbitrary and superficial as bone structure.

Look! Here are 8 Qualities that Define a Great Man

1. Polite, respectful, considerate and attentive to a woman’s needs
2. Direct
3. Faithful
4. Has integrity
5. Honest
6. Mature
7. Confident
8. Has a positive attitude

See? Handsome is nowhere on the list! Women do not evaluate men based on their physical assets and they certainly don’t perceive relationships differently based on how good-looking a man happens to be.

 

Except, whoops, they do.

 

The findings suggest hormonal contraceptives can interfere with the way women assess male attractiveness and so how satisfied they are with their partner. While relationships are usually built on a range of traits, the researchers warn that contraceptives can have an unexpected influence on what women look for in a partner.

 

The researchers followed 118 newlywed couples over four years, with the women completing regular surveys on their level of satisfaction with their relationship and their use of contraceptives. The researchers, whose work is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also used “trained observers” to rate the men’s facial attractiveness.

 

They found that women who had been using the pill when they met their husbands and later stopped taking the contraceptives saw a change in how they rated their relationship. Those with attractive husbands became more satisfied while those with less attractive husbands became less satisfied.

 

Trained observers to rate men’s attractiveness. Hmmm. That sounds like some interesting training. Sign me up!

 

 

I actually don’t really have any problem with this but I do object to the cultural denial that somehow it is only men who evaluate relationship satisfaction based on their partner’s appearance, and that this somehow proves men are shallow, thoughtless creeps deserving of scorn and mockery. This is particularly true of feminist women. How many times has Jezebel mocked and derided and hated on men who are open about specific physical characteristics they desire in partners? See here, here and here for examples.

 

 

And really, which group is pulling the bait and switch? Men who are open about what they want, or women taking powerful hormones that control their personalities and then blowing up their relationships when they ditch the meds?

 

 

And if artificial hormones designed to suppress women’s reproductive capabilities can have this sort of effect on how they evaluate their satisfaction with long term partners, what other effects are they having? We know that the pill affects women’s abilities to detect male pheromones.

 

 

 

How might that play out in the workplace? In a nightclub? In an elevator when a man asks a woman if she would like to have coffee *cough* Rebecca Watson *cough*.

 

 

Feminists have an overwhelming need to deny differences between men and women (it’s all just socialization!) but when differences are ready and apparent, they are almost always trotted out as proof that men suck. And even when it turns out that women are just as likely to engage in objectification of men, they are at the helm to deny it matters in any way.

 

Male objectification isn’t about making men feel bad. It’s about not caring how men feel.

 

 

So writes Kat Stoeffel unapologetically in New York Mag.

 

 

And that, ladies who call yourselves feminists, is the problem.

 

 

Perhaps a solution to all the feminist insanity is to get those ladies off the Pill? Take off the beer goggles. Join the human race.

 

 

It’s kind of cool, seeing the world with your eyes open.

 

 

 

Feminists should try it.

 

 

Lots of love,

 

 

JB