Would You Love the Same Man On and Off the Pill? | Dr. Sarah Hill | EP 403

Research has been showing now for about 20 years that when women are in the point in the cycle when estrogen is high, that's associated with an increased preference for testosterone cues. And this, of course, begs the question: well, then, what happens if a woman is on hormonal birth control and is never in the estrogen-dominant phase of her cycle? Then what happens? Researchers have since asked that question, and what they tend to find is that women who are on hormonal birth control desire a somewhat less masculine male face and male voice. There's been some research even showing that if women choose their partners when they're on hormonal birth control, and then discontinue it, that this can lead to changes in how they perceive and how attracted they are to their partner.

Hello everyone watching and listening! Today, I'm speaking with researcher, professor, and author Dr. Sarah Hill. We discuss her new landmark book, "This Is Your Brain on Birth Control: The Surprising Science of Women's Hormones and the Law of Unintended Consequences." We break down and analyze sex-based differences in regret, competition, and academic striving, the balance between life exposure and safeguarding when raising a child, the practice of mate choice copying among women, and why our hormones are a foundational part not just of our physical makeup, but of who we are most deeply and who we have the potential to become.

So, Sarah, I thought for years that the 20th century would basically be remembered for three things: the hydrogen bomb, the transistor, the microchip, and the pill. I thought the pill was perhaps the most revolutionary of the three and that it was also equivalent to a speciation mutation—that's how profound it is. Now, the first chapter of your book, "This Is Your Brain on Birth Control," is titled "What Is a Woman?" and that's become a trope, a satirical cliché, and people laugh at the fact that it's even being posed. But actually, I don't think it's that funny because I think that with the advent of hypothetically 100% reliable birth control, the question of what is a woman actually becomes a real question. Because a woman who has voluntary control over reproductive function is not the same creature as a woman who doesn't—and not even a little bit.

So then the question is, imagine this, and then we can talk through the book. If sex is no longer tied to reproduction, then in principle, women's sexual behavior can become equivalent to men's sexual behavior because the risk is now the same. If women are acting like men sexually, then why aren't they men? How are they different? And then if sex is no longer tied to reproduction tightly, and women are free from involuntary child-rearing and childbearing, then how are they different from men in the broader labor market, and with regards to general productivity? The answer is we have absolutely no idea, and that's why the questions come up.

So I’d like to know, why did you start the book with this question, "What is a woman?" The way you open something is, obviously, to some degree, the way you frame it. So why did that phrase jump out at you?

Well, for me, it was really important because my background is in evolutionary biology, and I spent most of my career trying to understand behavior using the lens of Darwin's theory of evolution by selection. One of the big, sort of, paramounts of that theory, and something that's really a cornerstone to it, is the differences between the sexes, right? And that you have biological males and biological females. How do we define them? How do we define what is a male? What is a female? A male is the sex that has the smaller, mobile gametes and has less investment in offspring, while females have the metabolically expensive, immobile gametes and have a relatively large minimum investment. One of the big ways, and sort of the foundation of all reliably occurring sex differences in all sexually reproducing species, are these small differences. This doesn't seem like it would be that big of a deal—like, wow, your sex cells are smaller than my sex cells—like, who cares? But that actually turns out to be completely foundational in terms of setting the stage for different minimum levels of investment in offspring, which then sets the stage for the evolution of sex differences.

Okay, okay, so let's dive into that a little bit because people need to understand exactly what this means. You relate sex differences when you're trying to define a woman to the difference in size between the sperm and the egg. An egg is pretty small and it doesn't look like much of an investment, but a sperm is way smaller. The thing that's so interesting about that is that you could say that that difference is fractal in nature—that it's echoed at every single biological level all the way up the chain to overt behavior. So the definition of a woman, the definition of female, maybe even more broadly, female, is the sex that invests more, is compelled to invest more in sex and reproduction. This wouldn't be just sex; this is another thing that the narrower evolutionary biologists get wrong. I think it's one of the flaws in Dawkins' thinking, for example, is that you can reduce reproduction to sex, but that's foolish because human beings have a high investment strategy in relation to the propagation of their children. So reproduction for human beings doesn't end with sex, for mosquitoes it ends with sex; right? For human beings, it just starts with sex, and we have an 18-year investment. At least the first three years of that falls, I would say by necessity, more heavily on women and really heavily on women.

Right. I think they say among chimpanzee females, the chimpanzee mother carries its infant something like 500 miles clasped to its chest in the first year, right? And so a woman—not another issue maybe, too, is that—is a woman a single organism or is a woman a part of the mother-infant dyad, right?

Well, that’s a whole can of worms that we can open. I mean, there’s this whole theory: it's Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness, which is just this idea that your own fitness, just in terms of what your genetic representation in future generations is likely to be, is something that depends both on your own genes, but then also the genes of your relatives. For women, in particular, who have all of that, you know, invested in their offspring, this is an extension of yourself. Our relatives are an extension of ourselves, and there’s no relationship that is like that. Evolution is shaped in a way that favors just unmitigated investments in the relationship between mother and child, because there's certain 100% or certain 50% relatedness. Mothers always know that this is their child. You have mother's reproductive value, meaning the possibility that she could translate her energy into additional reproduction, that is decreasing while that of her infant is increasing. It’s essentially like passing the evolutionary baton from one generation to the next between these two individuals who have the highest levels of relatedness that's possible in nature outside of identical twins.

So I've wondered about this with regard to the transformation at puberty in female emotional response. The personality data indicates that boys and girls are approximately equivalent in terms of their sensitivity to negative emotion, but that changes at puberty, and that change seems permanent and it seems like it’s hormonally mediated. So I've been trying to understand what happens. At puberty, women become more sensitive to the entire panoply of negative emotions because they clump together. You might say, well, that's cultural, but it's not, because if you look at the societies that have advanced the farthest in terms of gender equality at the social and economic levels, the differences in trait neuroticism—so that’s that sensitivity to negative emotion—between men and women are larger than they are in less egalitarian societies. So when the society becomes egalitarian, the genetic difference is maximized rather than minimized.

Okay, so then the question is, well, why would women be more sensitive to negative emotion? Because that comes at a cost, and the cost is at minimum higher levels of depression and anxiety, but also higher general levels of unhappiness. So then you think, okay, they're more sensitive to threat. Why is that useful? Well, they're smaller than men at puberty, and so they should be more sensitive to physical combat, that threat, but they're sexually vulnerable, and that's a huge deal and not to be underestimated. Yes, and I mean, in most societies for most of human history, an unaccompanied woman was a target of attack.

Right, right. But then the third thing that's most important, I think, I want to know what you think about this, is that, well, women are more attuned to threat because they're proxies for the vulnerability of their infant, and so women may pay a psychological cost for being more sensitive to threat, which is that they’re more unhappy and that they're more anxious, but the benefit of that is that they're more alert to any signs of danger or predation or threat in the environment, and they can alert—well, they're going to alert their husband generally speaking or the rest of the community to that. Now that also means they’re going to be more susceptible to false positives; they're going to respond to threat when there's none there. But if you're taking care of a dependent infant and you're over-responsive to threat, that's probably the right place to tune your errors, so—and that seems to me also a reflection of this increased investment by women. So they have an increased emotional investment in their offspring as well as an increased physiological investment, right?

So, okay, I'll start with the woman piece, but there's also some interesting things that happen with testosterone during puberty to men that turn that off, and so I would want to be able to return to that as well. But with women, I mean, absolutely, the thing that we need to remember is that the process of evolution by selection didn’t wire us to be happy or satisfied or anything. It has designed us to survive and to reproduce, and part of that means that we’re going to feel kind of terrible some of the time. Part of women's design—the design of our psychology—is such that it’s like a smoke detector; it’s tuned to picking up on even subtle cues of possible danger just because the potential cost associated with what would happen if that danger is real is much greater for women for a lot of different reasons, some of which you've touched upon. I mean, one is that women are mothers. It’s like, you know, it’s like you hear, like, you’re eating for two; you’re feeling danger for two. You know, you’re having to protect yourself and your offspring.

You're more physically vulnerable because, of course, physically, you know, women are smaller and have less upper body strength. Sexual vulnerability, for the reasons you talked about, I mean, unfortunately, sexual violence has been something that has been present as long as we've been around, and it’s certainly something we see in all species with choosy females. You’ll have males who want to override that choice, and there's a lot of reasons for that manipulation too. It's not merely that women are overpowered physically; it's that they're also susceptible to very devious manipulation on the part of men and psychopathic men, and they need to be alert to that—that form of deception as a threat as well, right?

As well. And yes, and even also with other females. The reason for this is that, you know, when you think about the cost for a woman if she's duped—so let’s just talk about sexual deception, right? If a woman is duped, she could end up pregnant—there’s a 9-month investment there. If you look especially at historical types of populations, like modern hunter-gatherer groups, if you have a woman who doesn't have a father investing in the child, the risk of infant mortality is like 80%. I mean, it's very high. The risk of death during childbirth even is very high, so women are putting their lives at risk every time they get pregnant and then to get pregnant and have a really high-risk infant that's not getting invested in, she's not getting—and the reputation too. Yeah, and the reputation. I mean, there are so many costs to that, and the costs just aren't that—you know, it's not symmetrical for men. The costs of those things aren't the same, and so our brains are wired to be differently sensitive to those kinds of cues because the consequences are so much more dire if you have a female body compared to if you have a male body.

Is there a literature on this? Okay, tell me if I've got this wrong. We talked about the different reproductive strategies, say, of mosquitoes and human beings. Mosquitoes have like a zero-investment strategy: you have a million offspring; all of them die, but like one, but that's okay because that's replacement, whereas human beings, it’s unbelievably heavy investment. Then you look within human beings, women invest more than men. Then you could look within men, and you could say there are men who invest less and men who invest more. The men who invest less, they’re the short-term mate types.

Now I've been looking into the personality predictors of short-term mating strategies, and they're not that positive. So the personality theorists who've been investigating the so-called dark tetrad, which is a group of you might say undesirable descriptors: psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism—which is manipulativeness—and sadism, because they had to add that to it—those traits are much more pronounced among men and women, but particularly among men who adopt a short-term mating strategy. Now, one of the things I'm wondering about is, it's related to that. So, men who adopt that short-term mating strategy, they love them and leave them. Right? There's little post-coital regret; there's no guilt or shame associated with short-term mating opportunities. Do you know if there’s a literature detailing the difference in response to short-term mating episodes between men and women? Are women more likely to evince regret in the aftermath of short-term mating episodes, one-night stands?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. There’s a rich literature on sexual regret, and exactly as you would expect. When you look at what people regret sexually, women regret more these short-term mating opportunities that they participated in. Men more often regret those that they didn’t participate in, so men’s sexual regret tends to sort of cluster around things that they wish they would have taken advantage of and they did not, whereas women’s tends to cluster more, "Oh, I really wish I wouldn’t have had sex with that idiot," right? Now, do you know is there a personality literature that’s looked at individual differences in post-short-term sex regret? So like, are women less likely to show regret also more likely to have dark tetrad personality traits? Like there’s got to be predictors of regret, right?

Now you'd expect neuroticism would be one because that would just predict negative emotion in general. I suspect agreeableness is another predictor, as the more agreeable, compassionate, polite women are more inclined to care, take, and bond. So I would suspect that it's the more feminine women who are most likely to show post-coital regret. I suspect the same thing would be true of men. I bet you the more feminine men are also more likely to manifest that pattern of regret.

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So, in the personality literature, and I'm aware of that, I only know that there was a dark triad, so sadism, they had to add sadism—that's real fun. Yeah, positive delight in the suffering of others. Wow, I wonder if he’s got a brother. Like, that's just a terrible—that's a terrible quality, that's for sure. So, no, I'm not—I'm not terrible. I'm familiar with that. When I think about things, I tend to think about, just because personality isn’t really my area, more the evolutionary area. I tend to think about the, like, you know, my prediction would be from an evolutionary perspective would be that we would see women experiencing more sexual regret when the costs are higher, right? So like, what are the costs associated with having made that decision that you made, right? Whether it's reputational costs—for example, a woman who has more to lose reputationally from having capitalized on that short-term mating strategy, I think that she would experience stronger sexual regret. I bet you could predict that by looking at the relative—and just imagine there’s a continuum of men with regards to the socioeconomic status markers of their potential as providers. I suspect that this might seem obvious, but it would be nice to see it demonstrated that the larger the gap between the woman and the man in terms of status, yes, the more regret.

Yes, no, I would think so, absolutely, because she sold herself short, and the risk of that is too high, right? Yes, no, absolutely, absolutely. And also, I mean, you know, even the things that would influence her biological cost, right? So for example, if we're talking about short—like immediate regret, a woman who's near high fertility in her cycle, where pregnancy is possible? I'm assuming that in her hormonal cycle, she would be predicted to be telling her, like, "Oh, that was terrible; why did you do that?" And I would also expect you’d see more sexual regret at peak fertility across the lifetime.

Now we have a perfect study design! We could look at personality-dark tetrad traits and number of days deviation from maximum fertility as predictors of short-term coital regret! Yes! And across a lifetime too! And we could spend three years getting that through an ethics committee, and then another three years trying to get it published! Right? Right? Right? Yeah!

So, back to "What is a woman?" So, okay, so what we've talked about so far is that what is the definition of female? Okay, and the female is the member of sexually reproducing species who invests more—at least at the level of the gamete. Do you want to explain to everybody what a gamete is just so they know?

Yeah, so a gamete is a sex cell, and it's your egg or it's your sperm. It has 50% of your genetic material in it, and it fuses with a gamete of the other kind. If you make eggs, it fuses with sperm, and that is how we produce life. Yes, you know, the initial greater investment that women make is just the starting point of, as you said, it’s like fractal. It's exponential increased investment because selection continues to reinforce greater investment because of that large initial investment. It's like a hand of poker, right? If you put in crystal, that makes a diamond around it, right? Exactly! So if you put in $500 in the first round of betting, and we’re playing poker, and I put in a buck, you have more to lose if that hand goes sideways than I do. Right? And that echoes all the way up the biological ladder.

Okay, so that’s very interesting too because the people who claim that sexual identity is merely culturally constructed fail to take into account the fact that that difference in investment echoes at every single level of the biological ladder. It’s not merely something—it’s certainly not something that's reducible to chromosomal difference, which is another way of defining the difference between men and women. You didn’t pick that; you picked investment. Okay, so why did you pick investment?

It’s not just you. I know that that tends to be the biological stance, but would you say that the chromosomal difference, XX versus XY, is of lesser significance than the investment issue, or does it matter because they’re so tightly linked?

Well, they are so tightly linked, but I mean, honestly, if evolution by selection doesn’t see it, it doesn’t matter. Like, in a lot of ways, the gears and sprockets that create us, those pieces, like if you're trying to make predictions about behavior and sort of like, you know, what types of things have been reinforced by this process of inheriting traits that work—meaning that they promote survival and reproduction and those that don't—it's only what selection sees that matters, and it never sees our chromosomes. What it sees is investment, right? Those individuals who have this really large minimum investment and they're only able to produce X number of offspring instead of X prime number of offspring.

That those individuals, what the best way that they can increase the probability of continuing their genetic lineage is through a heavy investment strategy, and that's less true for this other sex. And so sex, you know, biological sex—and again, you know, starts off with these small differences in the size of our sex cells—but then, sort of recapitulates at every—imagine just for the sake of argument how that would recapitulate even cognitively. Yes? Right?

Now men, for example. Men understand that there’s a relationship between how successful they are and how attractive they are to women. And part of what motivates them is the game of that competition. So I worked with high-end lawyers for about 15 years, both men and women, and found some very interesting differences in that. But the men, even regarded the money they made in bonuses at the end of the year for outstanding performance. They weren't so interested in the money; they were interested in the money as a means of keeping score. It was a means of winning the competition.

You might say, “Well, competition for what?” and the answer to that is, well, let's call it competition not for status exactly, but for reputation. But the consequence of a stellar reputation is that—and men who have that are much more attractive to women. You might say, "Well, women go after wealth," but I think that’s nonsense, and I think that’s also belied by the relevant evolutionary biology theory because what it shows—and tell me if I’ve got this wrong—is that women use wealth as a marker for attractiveness because they use wealth as a marker for competence. What they're after is the ability to generate wealth and to share it and to be generous with it. It has to be both productivity and generosity, and a decent marker for the capacity to generate wealth is wealth, although it’s not the only criteria.

So women are looking for competence, and men—it’s a very strange thing about men—you know, they compete among themselves for competence-based reputation. Now, I’ve been trying to figure out why, because you can imagine a movie scenario where the quarterback of the football team wins a major championship and all the other men put him on his shoulders and bring him out of the stadium, and he sleeps with the cheerleader that night. You might ask yourself, well, why in the world would the men group together to elevate a given man to that sort of status if it means that he’s going to be the one that successfully reproduces? My suspicion is that men learned to value competence, probably as a consequence of hunting.

Any given hunter, no matter how good he is at hunting, is going to fail in most hunts. So now if men band together to hunt, then the collective success is much larger. And so what that means is that if you're going to be a hunter, that provides across hunting bouts. Your skill as a hunter is one determinant, but your interpersonal skill in negotiating and establishing relationships with the rest of the hunters is even more important. Among hunter-gatherers, for example, if you're the one who brings down the animal, it’s incumbent on you to downplay your contribution and distribute the best parts of the animal to other people. You’re doing that to foster your reputation as a generous person, and you’re doing that in part to ensure that there’s reciprocity in food distribution across multiple hunts.

Now the men are going to be willing to elevate the highest hunter to the highest position because I think it’s in their collective interest, it’s in their individual interest to be the followers of the best man. I think that’s so important in terms of their own reproductive fitness, which would be tied to the provision of food across hunts, that they’re willing to take the reproductive hit. What would you say—implicit in elevating any given man among all other men? You could think about that in terms of hunting, and you could think about that in terms of combat too. You know, if you put the most heroic warrior on your shoulders, you give him an evolutionary edge, but if you’re in his group, well then you’ve got the benefits of being with the greatest warrior and the greatest hunter.

And so I don't know if the evolutionary biologists have been able to calculate out the relationship between establishing a reciprocal relationship with a great hunter or great warrior versus the costs of men competing to elevate a given man to the highest possible position. It's a very weird thing that men do.

No, I think you hit the nail on the head, though. I mean, I think that the benefits of aligning yourself with somebody who's very powerful—that's important. I mean, think about it, if there's somebody and let's say he’s 1.0 and you’re sort of 1.1, and so there's somebody who’s a better performer than you, you could get your ass kicked if you keep trying to fight with this guy. There’s a big cost to you to trying to overturn this person, and there’s a lot of benefit of aligning with the person who’s also really competent. That’s especially true if it’s a Pareto distribution in terms of competence.

Right, exactly! And so it's like—I think that there are lots of benefits that come, especially to men, because of the hunting context of aligning with another man in that context. And there's also this tendency—this has been very well studied in non-human animals—but we see a very similar version of this in humans. Have you ever heard of lecking? Lecking behavior?

So a lek is a place where males within a species will gather to attract mates. It's almost like a club. It’s like the frogs—like frogs, for example, are a lecking species. The males will all go to this display area and they croak, right? And this is what attracts the females. The females will go toward where they hear the loudest, most impressive croak because that male generally is larger in body size and has higher levels of testosterone. So the louder male attracts all the females, and so the males all want to hang out with this guy because he’s attracting all the women.

The same is true for men aligning themselves with somebody who's a really high performer. I mean, if you go out for drinks with Tom Brady, it's not too bad to be Tom Brady 2.0. You’re going to be able to bask in the reflective glory. Bask in the reflective glory, right? Well, and the women would also assume that if the extraordinarily high-status male is hanging around with some character who looks like a dweeb on the surface, that there might be hidden depths and utility to his character or advantages in the mere fact that he’s proximal. Absolutely.

So women use that a lot, and in fact, some of my very early research—this is like, this is going deep. This is when I was in graduate school—I studied this phenomenon in humans, mate choice copying, because this is another thing that you see in females of other species, but you also see it in us. And this is males tend to be a somewhat ambiguous stimulus package because most males, a lot of the qualities that women are looking for aren’t immediately available just based on physical appearance. So women have to kind of suss out, like, what is there about this guy? And so when women see a beautiful woman with kind of an average-looking guy, the first thing they think is, "Well, he must be rich" or "He must have some really amazing personality."

He must be really high in status, and I wonder is that magnified if he’s unattractive? Because one of the things you might expect is that if a very beautiful woman is with a man who's very nondescript, that there must be something about him that’s absolutely stellar. Absolutely, yes! And so the magnitude of the gap between how beautiful the woman is and then the appearance of the man sort of is linked with the degree to which women perceive that he has these amazing hidden qualities. That make him a desirable partner—the bigger the gap, the more amazing the qualities; the smaller the gap, the less amazing the qualities.

Oh that’s very funny! So the proper mating strategy is if you're a spectacularly under-endowed male is to hire a beautiful woman to go to clubs with you! Absolutely! And you would actually probably do better than a more attractive man with the same woman because people would think that you must really have something going on to have attracted her and look like that.

Right! Oh, that’s insanely complicated! That’s insanely comical! That’s insanely comical!

Alright, alright! So, okay, so what is a woman? So we’ve defined that as the sex that invests more. We pointed out that across all the way echoing up the biological ladder, from the cellular to the cognitive, women, females are the sex that invests more. Oh yeah!

The other thing about that was that, well, women are going to invest more too because—and you already pointed this out, but it’s worth making it clearer—because they have to. So I looked at one point, I looked up the world record for most children a woman ever had, and I think it was in the hundreds, actually. Maybe not. Maybe I’ve got that wrong; it doesn’t matter exactly because you could imagine if a woman had, you know, a set of triplets every year for 10 years, then that would give her 30 infants. So we could say the upper bound on female fertility with regards specifically to her children is going to be no more than 50, right?

Right! And that’s a generous estimate, whereas with men it’s like 10,000, 100,000; there’s no limit—there’s none! So women are going to invest more in their children too because every child—and you already pointed this out—is comparatively more valuable. Then you also said something interesting, which is that as a woman ages, her children actually become comparatively more valuable than she.

So does this mean—that’s a strange thing, though—is there evidence that women’s love for their children increases as their children age? Because women are so invested in infants, it’s hard to—maybe it’s like this. I don’t—I’ve not seen anything specifically that has addressed that very question, but they have done studies where they look at the difference between, for example, older mothers and younger mothers. It’s a world of difference! I mean, when you look at the amount of investment that goes on, like if you’re an older mother compared to a younger mother, older mothers invest more. They spend more time investing, and all of these things that you would expect given that their reproductive window is closing.

So it's like their—the opportunity cost of investing in that child are less than it would be if you’re a 20-year-old woman. Because if you’re a 20-year-old woman and investing in an existing child, there’s an opportunity cost that comes to you for not using that energy to have another child. Right? Right?

And so you’re not making that tradeoff when you’re an older mother.

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And so, think that—do you think there’s an optimum there that we don’t know? Because, you know, Haidt and Jonathan, Haidt wrote "The Coddling of the American Mind," okay? And I’ve been very interested in this rise of what I like to think of as the devouring mother. Is that the overinvested parent? Yes! Okay, so instead of putting that on the shoulders of the given parent, I’ve been trying to understand the cultural context that might make overinvestment more likely.

So, you can imagine, well, fewer children! Yes! So if you have 10 children, you’re obviously not going to invest in—you’re not going to attend to each of them as much. They're going to attend to each other more. So, more one-child families, okay? Older parents, yes, right? So they’re going to be more conservative to begin with because you get more conservative as you get older. But they’re also going to invest more in their children, right?

And so—so older and then also richer parents because if you’re older, you’re richer. And so part of the reason that children are coddled, as far as I can tell, to the degree that they are—and overprotected—is because mothers are not old enough to be grandmothers. They’re rich, and they only have one child. Right?

And too much time on their hands! Too much time on their hands! Also, because it’s like historically women would have been out gathering food all the time. And now, if you have women—and there are plenty of women who work and are still, you know, overindulging in their children, but a lot of times when you see this, it tends to happen more frequently and more sort of exaggeratedly in homes where women aren’t working outside.

So, you know, one of the things I’ve talked to my daughter and my daughter-in-law about when they’re trying to figure out how to optimally care for their young children is how they—and I talked to a lot of my clients too because they face the same problem—how do you balance, as a woman, how do you balance the needs of your children, especially under the age of three, for continuous intense maternal presence with the pursuit of your own interests?

My sense is that there’s an optimal balance there because one of the things that children should see is that adults, including women, have good things to do with their adult time, and so that’s a good thing to model, absolutely. But then also if you have your own pursuits as a woman, then you’re not going to interfere too much in your child’s life because you actually have a life.

And one of the things I think that protects children against that proclivity of maybe excessively neurotic women to overinvest is—this is historically unprecedented! You know through most of human history, no one was that rich!

Well, I mean, yeah. Women never—I mean, it was like we always played a role in subsistence. Even though women were also mothering, they were also finding food, and they were also tending to whatever the dwelling was, and having to maintain relationships, and having to go and get water.

And the children were having to go to work and help with these things, and so it was a very different situation, where now nobody is actually having to do anything to run the household because there’s staff. And you have children that aren’t, you know, having to work. You have parents who don’t have anything, you know, or mothers in particular who don’t have something else that’s sort of pulling their time away from just spending all their time thinking about, you know, Johnny and his—

It's also not diluting their insanity! You know, if you're in a tribal group, I mean, one of the advantages to having two parents is that the average of two parents is on average more sane than either of the individuals. Right?

That’s absolutely correct! Right? Right? Well, and partly what you do in a marriage is you keep each other sane. You see where your partner has a tendency towards excess and you rein that in, right? And you do that for each other, and hopefully you do that with each other’s best interests and the relationship—and the quality of the relationship firmly in mind.

You do that for the children as well, and in a more communal child-rearing environment, a child is going to have in some real way multiple mothers, like ants for sure. And in a tribal group, most people are kin anyhow, and so the role of mother is going to be distributed enough so that even if any given mother is a bit addled in her preoccupations, there are going to be other people to whom the child can turn.

In a narrow nuclear family where there's an overindulgent mother, let's say, who has far too much time on her hands, the child can be shielded from all other potential influences, which is also something that the more narcissistically overindulgent mother is likely to arrange.

So that’s interesting because what it suggests is that even though human beings are a high-investment species, and even though women are the higher-investing sex within that confine, there is a point where investment becomes a burden rather than an advantage.

No, absolutely, absolutely! I mean, you can’t—if you don’t teach—if your children don’t have the opportunity to learn how to navigate the environment on their own, they have no navigation skills, and I think that that’s essentially what we’re seeing.

Why did you use the word navigation there?

I used the word navigation because life is a journey, right? I mean, we have to navigate our environment, and that means that we have to learn how to acquire resources. We have to learn how to manage other people. We have to learn how to get along with other people that we don’t like. We have to make—I mean, there are a lot of things we have to navigate through storms, yes. And so if your response to your child is, “There’ll be no storms in your life, right? Or I’ll clear all of your storms,” don’t worry. And then all of a sudden you put children out in the world, and they have skills?

Yeah, they don’t have any coping skills! And we see this a lot. You know, as a college professor, I see a lot of this, and in a private school with a very high price tag, where we’ll have students who come in and it’s really a wake-up call about what life is like because they’ve had, you know, parents who are very well-meaning. You know, I think that the parents who do this, they have the god-deserved us from well-meaning.

Yeah, I know. I think they think they’re doing the right thing, but it’s not. You know, if you carry somebody too long, they’re muscle atrophy!

And you can’t do that! I heard a good rule from, I think it was my brother-in-law, who told me this, and he had spent a lot of time caring for very elderly people. He said that the appropriate rule of thumb for elder care is never do anything for your client that they can do themselves. And the reason for that is that you facilitate—you devour their independence, right?

And so then, that—so there’s an interesting paradox here with regards to love, right? Because there’s the love that eradicates emotional distress in the moment, and then there’s the love that is devoted to fostering adaptive behavior over the medium to long run. Right?

And that’s a love that’s much more allied with judgment. So for example, if you call your child out on their misbehavior, you cause them short-term emotional distress. But the long-term benefit of that is that if they integrate the impulses that are making them, let’s say, unduly aggressive or reactive, then they’re going to be more acceptable to their peers and to the broader social community.

So you’ll allow them to be hurt in the short term for a long-term gain. Now, do you know if there are sex differences in that temporal focus? Because see, here’s the paradox as far as I’m concerned, and I watch women try to negotiate this with their children at about 12 months of age. The thing about infants, because they’re so dependent, is that the proper response of a mother to the distress of an infant 9 months and younger is “Fix that now! Regardless!”

Right? So you could say, in a sense, that the emotional distress of an infant is an omniscient signal that care has to be administered. But once the child starts to become somewhat autonomous—which starts to occur when they can start to crawl—then the mother has to make a transition from immediate reaction to emotional distress to allowing the child to dwell in that emotional distress or even sometimes causing it herself. And that's a very tricky transformation because the woman has become so attuned to the infant, and so bonded to that infant, and so responsive to its signals of distress that to pull back from...

I think most of the way women pull back from that historically was they just had another child!

I was just about to say that exact thing! I think that our interbirth ratios and the spacing between children has probably made that conflict, and we call it weaning conflict, in that science, has made that more difficult!

Exacerbated it! Yeah, because one would have a choice! You know, well, also, if you have a 13-month-old and no other children around, the 13-month-old is an infant, right? But if you have a 13-month-old and then you have an infant, the 13-month-old is now a child clearly, right?

And so, yeah, well, I saw this when we had our second child. Julian, Michaela was 18 months old, I think that’s about right. And, you know, she’s still pretty little, but compared to a newborn, she was an adult, right?

And that was also the point where she turned more to me, and you know, there seems to be something that’s apart from the interbirth interval, let’s say. There seems to be something that’s crucial about the role that men play in the facilitation of that longer-term orientation because men are less susceptible to the emotional distress of both infants and toddlers.

And along with that, I think it gives men the opportunity to be less affected by the emotional distress of children and, therefore, to prioritize medium- to long-term adaptive strategies over short-term gratification of emotional demands. I think that’s part of the cardinal role that men play.

Well, they are agents of the patriarchy, right? They're going to be socializing agents.

Well, but seriously, they’re going to be—they seem to me to be! Right? The women are oriented very strongly towards the primary care of infantile emotional distress, but that's not a good long-term strategy!

Okay, so I have a vicious question to ask. Okay? Alright? Alright! We talked a little bit at the very before we started this podcast about the corruption of the universities. Yes?

Okay? Now you write in your book a fair bit about what’s been the interpersonal and social consequences of women moving en masse into the workforce.

So I have a proposition for you. Alright? Let’s hear this!

The default moral ethos of women does not scale! It doesn't scale beyond the family!

So if you—now I'm perfectly willing to debate this because I’m horrified by the fact that it might be true. I’ve watched the universities transform themselves into holding pens for infants.

Mhm, yeah, no, that's a fact!

Okay? And I’ve watched them transform themselves into holding pens for infants as they’ve become dominated by women who don’t have children.

So let me say this! I was actually just having a very similar conversation with a colleague of mine. Here’s what I've noticed.

So here’s the part where I'm going to say something that's a little bit awful, okay?

Okay. Steal yourself, I'm like, “Oh Lord, I’m going to get myself in trouble with this!”

Okay! If you are—that's how you know it's probably true.

Yeah, I know, I know!

So what I’m seeing at universities is that there is a real bifurcation in the performers and the non-performers, and the people who are the performers are the women, and the people who aren’t the performers are men.

And I'm going to tell you why! If you are a man who wants all the things that men want—status and power—and you’re achievement-oriented and you’re bright and you're a go-getter, are you going to go into a job where you go to Oxford and make $60,000 a year?

Definitely not! No!

What types of men do you think are attracted to university jobs? You mean now? I mean ever?

You’re making $60,000 a year!

Yeah, but I think it’s changed.

So women who go into university jobs are generally women—and this isn’t en masse true, but it’s, it’s in my experience more true than it's not—are people who are very competent, driven, motivated, but also want flexibility because they have children.

I work 60 to 70 hours a week, but I get to pick the 60 and 70 hours a week I work. I love my job; I have two kids. I spend a lot of time doing things with them, and I like the flexibility.

And most of the really competent academics that I know who are just kicking ass and doing a really good job in terms of discovery are women.

Okay, okay, so, and so I think that—I think the university is like falling apart because there are a lot of people who are mediocre, and they’re generally old men who are trying to maintain the system that rewards mediocrity.

And then you have performers coming in, and there’s a lot of friction that’s being created.

Okay, okay, so there are two elements at play there: there’s this element of sex, and there’s an element of performance. Okay?

So let's take this apart a bit and see if we can get to the bottom of it.

Well, first of all, you can’t pathologize the behavior of one sex without pathologizing the behavior of both. Right?

Okay, so, so we’ll use that as an axiom. And then you asked me what sort of men were attracted to university jobs when I started my career? The answer to that was men.

The ones in the universities that were really working, I think my supervisor was a good example of that. He was a football player; he was a tough guy. He was extremely curious.

Right?

So he went into a university position because he wanted to do research. I was fortunate when I did my graduate training at McGill. I was surrounded mostly by professors who actually were oriented towards discovering the truth in the course of their research.

But I saw that over time deteriorate in favor of careerists. Yes! And I would put most university administrators in the bin of careerists.

Careerists are interested in the secondary benefits of their career maybe that is security and maybe it's status and not interested in the pursuit.

The only people I saw who pursued a university career who had justification for it, who were men, their justification was, “I’m so interested in pursuing, let's say, scientific truth and the expansion of knowledge that I can find my status through that.”

Now you brought up a couple of things there, and let me say that there are a lot of people who go into science for—I went into science because I love research and I love discovery, and I’m creative.

It's a perfect venue for a creative person to just think about things and then go test them! It’s so fun!

And I don’t think that what I was saying is characteristic of all people in all the motivational states. I’m saying on the whole it seems like that when we look at who are these careerists that go into this field—

And you know, because it’s low risk and you have this stability.

When you have men who are making that choice, it’s a very different car—it’s a very different phenotype than a woman.

Okay, so maybe we have a feedback loop.

Okay, so imagine this! Imagine that as the universities become comparatively lower-paying and more maternal in their orientation toward the students, they attract a larger and larger proportion of relatively dependent men who aren't adventurous enough to make it outside of that sheltered environment.

And that, and what that does in turn, because the men act out that pattern of dependency—is it reinforces the idea that the inappropriately maternally oriented women have what would you say, insufficient charges that they need to take care of?

So, like, things just spiral out of control when a positive feedback loop emerges, right?

So if you want to become an alcoholic, the best way to do that is to start to drink to cure your hangover, right? Because it works!

Right!

But it produces a worse hangover, and if you want to develop agoraphobia, have a panic attack and then avoid, right?

Right, right!

So many forms of serious psychopathology—if you want to become depressed, get sad and then isolate!

So most forms of serious psychopathology are positive feedback loops.

So we could imagine that when a social institution starts to spiral, there are multiple causal forces at work that are reinforcing each other.

Because that would also produce a rapid transformation.

But okay, so you countered my proposition that the universities are deteriorating because they’re being invaded by inappropriately maternally oriented women by saying, "Yes, but they're also inhabited by and I don’t want to put words in your mouth—by men who are looking for a dependent and less competitive niche." Is that a fair summary?

Yes! Do you think that’s in keeping with what you’re observing?

Yes, maybe the maternal side of it, I don't see. But you know, I’m a woman, and so it might be harder for me to, like, I don’t—I see it in the concern with microaggressions, with the concern with equity, with like the—all these.

Okay. But, and look, we have that! I mean, we have so much of that, and I was just telling one of my colleagues—for the very first time in my entire life—and I've been teaching for 15 years. This semester was the first time I didn’t just have unfettered enjoyment teaching my evolutionary psychology class, and it’s because I’m terrified.

Every day I go start that—2016 when I was teaching! Yeah, that I go into my class feeling terrified!

Like I’m talking about biological sex, and I have to spend a lot of time, you know, talking about what biological sex is, what gender is, and talking about—because the two things play into each other in really interesting ways actually, and so I spend time talking about that, and I’m thinking to myself, I’m going to get totally destroyed in my—

Because everything, you know, ultimately in evolutionary biology comes down to sex.

And the reason I started my book off with the chapter "What Is a Woman?" is that it’s so foundational, this idea that as a biological female, you invest more in offspring.

And what this means for you as a woman is it means that the costs of sex are higher. Right?

And this creates a completely—like a mating market where women essentially get to call the shots with sex, right? And men sort of do the things that they need to do in order to get chosen.

But then what happens when there’s no consequences for women’s sexual behavior?

I mean, you know, because the fact that women have consequential sexual behavior has set the stage for things like women being choosier about sex, men more competitive to be able to get access to the things that women want in partners.

When all of a sudden we make sex non-costly for women—which has been a huge achievement for women—but it has these huge consequences on everything. Because so much of who we are and our social behaviors and the types of things that motivate us are sort of built around this system of sex being costly for women.

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Do you think—has—okay, obviously the consequences of sex are extremely high for women and then secondarily for men clearly, and it is because we're a high-investment species and our children have an incredibly lengthy and costly dependency period, yes?

Okay, okay. So we’re not going to eradicate that! Now you could say, now, because you entitled your book interestingly the title—we should just point this out—is that this is your brain and birth control: the surprising science of women’s hormones and the law of unintended consequences.

Okay, let’s concentrate on that last part a bit: that law of unintended consequences. Because it isn’t obvious to me, and I think this is implicit in your book, if the birth control pill is a biological mutation that exceeds the development of the hydrogen bomb in terms of its explosive consequences, it could easily be that the unintended consequences will swamp the benefits.

Now the benefit—let’s investigate this as thoroughly as we can. The benefit is that women are no longer prey to the terrifying consequences of sexual interaction, right?

Okay, but also more so, and that sounds small right now, and in some ways it doesn’t sound small because—you know women not being prey to sexual behavior is obviously a big problem, and that’s great that women don’t have to worry about that—but more than anything, in my view, the thing that’s been most important and sort of groundbreaking about the birth control pill and having reliable contraception is that it’s allowed women to plan!

Okay, so let me ask you about that because I’m not so sure about that!

Okay, so—

So, well, it's not something I want to toss away because obviously the problem of birth control is a walloping problem! Yes?

Okay, so we’re not going to underestimate the complexity of that problem. It’s the complexity of reproduction, and so—but, so here’s a statistic.

Okay, now half of all 30-year-old women in the West are without children, okay? Half of them will never have a child.

So that’s 25% of women, and 90% of them will regret. So now we have a situation—now imagine this propagating across the decades—we have a situation now where one in five women will be involuntarily childless.

Right, and that means, that means from the time from 30 onward for 60 years alone. Right?

Right, okay, now that's a walloping cost for 20% of women—and they’re just the women who have it the worst. Now—now we can set that against the fact that women are much more educated and they’re much more autonomous, and the whole human race now has access to the intellectual capacity of women in a way that just wasn't possible, say, before the 1960s.

We know that women’s educational attainment is the best predictor of their children’s educational attainment after you factor in IQ. We know that the countries that prioritize women’s rights are the countries that are most likely to develop economically.

So there seems to be a huge benefit in the general emancipation of women, but the costs are overwhelming, and it looks to me like they're mounting. You know, because you also see, I think it’s now 30% of Japanese people under the age of 30 are virginal and the amount of sex that young people in the West are having, right?

At least actual sex is plummeting, and it's harder and harder for women to find a long-term relationship.

So, so, what do you believe? Do you believe overall that, or do you even believe that the benefits of the pill have outweighed the costs?

Um, I don’t know that I believe that!

I don’t, I mean, honestly, I think that this is one of those things where we can't make—I don’t think that I can make a blanket statement about that for everyone, do you know what I mean? Like, to me, that’s a blank, that’s an individual-level decision.

Yes, exactly!

So for me—right? Using birth control for the number of years that I did—absolutely the benefits outweighed the costs because of how I played things.

I mean, it allowed me to get my degrees and, you know, start my research lab, and I had my kids when I wanted to.

How many kids do you have?

I have two. I have a daughter, and a son.

Was that enough?

And a son, yeah. I was done. That was good for you! I was comfortable with that. I felt good about that.

So you managed all that!

I did.

And I think that there are many women who do! There are some women who don’t!

And so I think that the question of whether or not the cost outweigh the benefit is something that’s best answered at the individual basis.

Which is why I think the best thing that we can do for people is to educate them about what the trade-offs are that you're making and what the risks and benefits are. Because, like you said, I mean I think that there is a—you know—women are taught almost nothing about their fertility!

Like nothing! Well, they're taught lies!

Well, yeah, I mean I have women coming into my class talking about how so-and-so had a baby at 40, I’m saying to my—I’m saying like, "No, like here’s the fertility curve."

Tell me. Describe the fertility curve.

The fertility curve peaks at 25, and then it begins to decline. So women are at their most fertile at 25 years of age, and then it begins to decline.

It declines very precipitously after 35, and the probability of getting pregnant from the general act of sex is much, much lower than it is when you’re in your 20s.

And this is a really hard thing for women to wrestle with because, of course, that’s for sure. I mean, you know, I look at myself and I had you; I was in graduate school when I had my first child.

And I had to make the decision: am I going to, you know, incur the cost to my career to go ahead and try to have a baby now?

And I know that it’ll be relatively easy biologically at 28, right?

Right! So you were already, by historical standards, old.

Yeah!

But I wanted to go ahead and get—why did you take the risk?

I took the risk because I study women’s fertility, and I knew exactly what was going to happen if I wait. And that wasn’t a chance that I wanted to take!

I think that if we do things like educate women on what the costs are that they’re, you know, sort of facing if they choose to restrict their fertility for all of these years—like what is the outcome?

So first of all, they should at least know what the facts are!

Yeah, I don’t think that—we're educating about—not about the trade-offs.

No! We lied! There’s no one who’s lied to more than 19-year-old women!

They're lied to in all sorts of ways!

The first lie is there’ll be nothing more important to you in your life than your career.

Is that—I think that’s a lie! Because I know almost no one for whom that is true, whether they’re male or female.

Like, I think on average for men, career is more important than it is on average for women.

But, having said that, men who have a successful family and a successful career are much more likely to value their family over their careers!

So—and I think that’s even more true for women.

And part of the reason I think that you can tell me what you think about this—these lawyers I worked with as part of my clinical practice—so I worked with partners of law firms in big law firms in Toronto.

And so we have Bay Street in Toronto, which is kind of the equivalent of Wall Street on a Canadian scale.

And there are large law firms there that are internationally competitive, especially in the world of finance because Canada bats above its weight on the financial side, partly because of our banks.

So I worked with these—so the deal we put forward to the law firms—this little company I was working with was you send us your best people, and we will endeavor to make them even more productive than they are now!

In any law firm, there’s a small proportion of lawyers who are hyper-competent at law, but also hyper-competent at generating business.

Yes!

And they’re unbelievably valuable because they feed all the lawyers in the law firm who can do law but can’t generate business!

Right?

Now some of them are men, and some of them are women, and the law firms are hyper-motivated to keep those women, and they can’t—

All the women quit!

You bet! Between 28 and 32!

So what happens is they’re hyper-conscientious and brilliant, and they’re usually attractive as well, and so they do extremely well in high school, they do extremely well in college and university, they do extremely well in law school; like they’re on a track—a high-achieving track.

They climb all the way up this track until they’re senior partners and they’re working like 70 hours a week! And often by this time—but not always—they’re married, and usually to someone who has a high income.

And they look around, having hit the pinnacle, and they think, why the hell am I working 70 hours a week?

Now the male answer to that is to win the contest, right? And we know that winning the contest makes men sexually attractive. But that isn’t the case at all for women.

And so what the women do invariably is bail out and take a job that gives them more flexibility in shorter hours and pay because they want to have a family.

Right?

Well, no, absolutely! I mean, this is something that—and people don’t talk about it very frequently, but I mean, you hit the nail on the head. That’s exactly what happens.

I mean, women generally want to have more work-life balance than men do, and it’s just because the reward structure is very different for male and female-brain of winning the contest as you say.

And for men, there’s a real reward that comes from that, and historically and evolutionarily, there isn’t anything more important than there’s, and for women, it’s about, you know, it’s like we like to win the competition, but we also value investing in our family and in our relationships and that sort of thing to a greater extent than men do.

And most women that I know, even women who are really high achievers and have, you know, high-performing jobs, also value their family time, and a lot of them aren’t willing to make those costs.

I know more people that are women who have foregone, you know, really big promotions and opportunities to sit on this board or that board and saying no to it, even though it’s an amazing opportunity, just because they don’t want to compromise their time with their children and their families.

And this is—a real thing for women!

Okay, it’s a real thing for women!

Okay, so let me ask you a question about that too—tell me what you think about this. So my observation of people who practice as scientists is that one in 100 is an actual scientist.

Right?

Okay, so then if one in 100 is an actual scientist, and all the scientific progress depends on that one in a hundred—which is also what you’d conclude if you looked at both publication rates and impact of publications, same Pareto distribution problem, and men are more likely to hyperfocus on their careers, what happens if we take the men out of those positions and we substitute in women?

Are we going to attenuate the productivity of the highest performers at the highest level of performance?

Well, so I don’t think that—I think that when you look at the distributions of, like, let’s just say, like, super-geniuses, so let’s assume that scientists are super-geniuses, okay?

And when we look at things like IQ and we look at the, you know, the distribution of IQ between men and women, we know that women have a more clustered-around-the-mean type of a distribution.

There’s less variability, and for men, there’s more variability, which means that with men’s IQ distribution, you have fatter tails, meaning you have more—

You’re terrified about getting into trouble. That’s pretty much what killed Larry Summers!

Well, I know! I know, and I talk about this in my class, and this is something that no, nobody has problems with the fact that, you know, if you go to an institution, like an institution for people who are profoundly cognitively, you know challenged that you—the sex ratio there is like 2 to 1 male, 3 to 1 male.

And we know that more males have profound cognitive disabilities relative to women. On the side of super-geniuses, it’s the same thing, and we see more male super-geniuses than we do female super-geniuses.

But I think what that sometimes—where things get, you know, upset about that when which I don’t think is necessary is that, not saying that there aren’t female super-geniuses, and it doesn’t make predictions about any individual, one case, because patterns aren’t good at making predictions about what happens with you or with you or with you.

Yeah, so we know that’s true. There are gazillions of publications that have been published to that effect, whether we want it to be true or not, it is.

And what this means is that when you get to the upper echelons of any type of career that requires a lot of G or a lot of intellectual power, you do tend to see that there is a little bit of a sex ratio with men to women.

This being said, there’s a lot of, like, really valuable jobs that don’t require as much G that play to some of women’s intellectual strengths.

So, for example, things like science and medicine are becoming more female because those are things that women are really good at.

Yeah, well at those—well, okay, so at those very high levels of achievement, you’re going to require the intersection of rare traits.

So imagine in engineering. Okay, so first of all, you have to be more interested in things than people.

Yes, okay? So that’s going to skew it male right away. Then you have to be super bright.

Yes, okay? Now at the highest echelons, there’s also going to be a bit of a male skew there, and then you might also hypothesize that you also have to be either hyper-dedicated, so that would be conscientious, or hyper-competitive, or both.

And for the—so we could be in a perverse situation where, well, let’s play out the extreme case. On average, women will make better scientists than men, but the best scientists will be men.

We could! We could be in a situation where we’d have to balance that—that those probabilities! So I wouldn’t say the best scientists are men because to me that’s like making predictions about individual cases based on pattern.

So I would say on average, right, we should expect to see that in the pool of best scientists, that is a male bias sex ratio.

I would agree with that statement.

Okay, okay, so let’s clarify! The absolute best scientist could actually be a woman, and that wouldn’t violate the patterns of—and I'm not saying that, said it more precisely, but yes.

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Now, okay, so let—all right, so let’s move on to another issue. We talked about what is a woman, and that took a long time, and you wouldn’t think so because you would think that would be obvious, and it is because people can perceive the difference between male and female at a second.

You are your hormones, and you in the time of fertility—those are the two of the first three chapters.

So what do you mean you are your hormones?

What I mean is a lot of times, especially culturally, and in the U.S., I don’t know whether or not this is true elsewhere; I just know my experiences here. We have a tendency to talk about our hormones like there’s something external to us, like there’s our sort of hormone-free rational self, and then there’s us under the control of hormones.

And that’s just simply not the way that it works. Our hormones are part of the signaling machinery that our brain uses to create the experience of being the person we are.

Right? So they’re like neurotransmitters or anything else. When we consider the fact that there’s a bunch of gears and sprockets that all work together to make us the sort of person that we are, with our restaurant preferences and personalities and likes and dislikes, our hormones play a role in that. That’s like part of the machinery.

It’s like, so that shouldn’t be segregated off.

That’s right, exactly! Right? It’s this thing that happens to us!

Right!

Yeah, and so I think that this is something that on the one hand is really obvious because it’s like I don’t think if you tell that to somebody, they would say, “Well, yeah, of course it is.” But then what happens? We change people’s hormones.

Yeah, right. Well testosterone is another great test case where, you know, here we have a testosterone clinic on every corner these days.

So people are changing their hormonal profile, thinking about what it’s going to do to this thing or that thing. So for example, if a man is taking testosterone, thinking like, “Oh, I’ll get my upper body strength back” or “Maybe it’ll improve my libido,” or women go on birth control pills thinking, “Oh, I won’t have to get my, you know, I won’t ovulate and I won’t get pregnant,” without thinking about the fact that you’re actually shutting down your body’s ability to produce its own hormones.

You’re taking a daily dose of the synthetic hormone, and when you change hormones because hormones are literally a part of what your brain uses to create you, it changes you.

And so that whole chapter is just really trying to orient people: "Okay, so you’re trying to bring people back into their body in some way."

BR back into their body! Well, you can understand why people have a problem with this because imagine you get angry, yeah? You know?

And then later you regret it. You’re going to feel like the anger overtook you, like it was an alien force in some ways, you know?

And the—it seems to me that the part of us that we identify with is something like the integrated self, right? And then that integrated self can fall under the sway of impulses that are more neurologically primordial, and we do feel that as a defeat.

We do feel that as a subordination or even as a possession, and so you can see why people have that hesitancy to identify with their hormonally driven impulses, right?

But by the same token, those elements of you that might be excessive when isolated are a part of you and have to be integrated, and they also have benefits that, yeah, in all likelihood far outweigh their costs!

Okay, so what do you think the costs are? Now you talked about hormonal substitution in women with the birth control pill.

Now there’s maybe—there’s two aspects to that. One is that the consequence of the suppression per se, and we definitely need to talk about that.

And then there's also the fact that what the normal hormonal regimen is being substituted for—that what the substitution for that is— isn’t the same hormonal profile, right?

Because it’s not the same chemical, okay? So let’s start with the consequences of the hormonal transformation. What has that done to women, and what does it do to the relationship between men and women?

Yeah, really great questions! I mean, our hormones—we have them for a reason! Like, evolution by selection doesn’t select for costly traits, and hormones are expensive.

You know, they’re metabolically expensive; they make our brain reorganize themselves every month. None of that stuff would go on if it wasn't doing something to promote survival or reproduction.

And so, by eliminating that, by decreasing or, you know, sort of minimizing women’s exposure to cyclicity in their hormonal profiles, you’re essentially changing a lot of the things that are fundamental to being a woman.

So just to give some examples of this. You know, for a naturally cycling woman—which is what we’ll call a woman who's not on the pill—right? Because she's naturally cycling between her two hormones.

Hormones go through two different states across the state of a cycle. It starts off in with hormone levels, really low when a woman gets her period, which is the first day of her cycle. Then estrogen levels begin to increase as her egg follicles are being stimulated and as they’re beginning to mature.

That releases high levels of estrogen, and when estrogen increases because it’s nearing the time when women are able to conceive in the cycle, it tends to cause a lot of biological, physiological, and psychological changes that make women primed for sex.

So it makes women smell better to men. It makes women look more attractive to men because their skin becomes more vascularized, their cheeks become rosier—they just look more—they just look sexier, they smell sexier, they move sexier, their voices are sexier.

There’s all of this research that's been showing that when estrogen levels are rising in the cycle, that it's associated—

Get more tips!

Strippers get more tips! Yeah, they earn more tip money; I mean, it’s a real phenomenon!

And this, you know, this happens right as women are...

So why not flatten that? Why isn’t that just annoying for women and to so they can replace that with a more regulated emotional light and one that’s less unpredictable?

Right, but yeah—that’s like equating—that’s like equating normal and predictable with the male pattern!

That's correct.

Much that’s not true! It’s like—that’s normal for males and predictable for males,