One would imagine that a quick skim through something like GLAMOUR.COM’s 50 Sexiest Men of 2010: The Results might be enough to kill an assertion that began with the words

A Canadian boy, at the age of sixteen, sells millions of albums and creates hysteria among throngs of female fans. He once almost created a riot of 6,000 screaming girls when he sat on the edge of the stage. His masculine good looks and street smart confidence makes him a heart throb of a generation. Wait…masculine good looks? OK, so I’m not talking about who you think I am. I am talking about an entirely different Canadian boy, singing sensation Paul Anka, who created a wake of screaming, fainting girls in 1957. Three years later the FDA approved the use of oral contraceptives in the US. Fast forward another fifty years: According to recent scientific research, half a century of widespread use of the pill may well have changed the preferences of young women away from masculine-looking men to those with more feminine features. Enter stage right… Justin Bieber.

This didn’t stop Big Think’s sex and economics blogger Marina Adshade from taking a stab at it anyway.

Good rule of thumb for writing speculative essays about science or economics research results? The words “may well have” generally have the exact same truth value as “probably hasn’t,” but editors almost never publish them when you say it that way. For instance “half a century of widespread use of the pill probably hasn’t changed the preferences of young women away from masculine-looking men to those with more feminine features.” Equally true and also more credible (especially in light of the overwhelming popularity among women of Clint Eastwood, earlier Mel Gibson, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Telly Sevalas, Patrick Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Hugh Jackman, or the men from that Glamor.com piece, over the last half century) but way less marketable.

But as long as we’re here let’s take a look.

First of all, well, sure, three years after Paul Anka was driving barely post-pubescent girls to riot the FDA approved the Pill. And just two years after that the baby-faced, apple-cheeked, and “girlishly” long-haired Beatles also drove barely post-pubescent girls to… riot. So Adshade must be on to something, right?

Oh wait, how many teenie-bopper Anka and Beatles fans back then (or, for that matter, Justin Beiber fans today) were candidates for The Pill? Doh! None? Because in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. most anti-contraception laws from earlier in the 20th Century were still in full force with the result that the Pill was mainly available to mostly older, mostly married women.

Well sure, you say, but what about later when use of the Pill did become more commonly available to among younger women? Fast forward a couple of years though, to the period between, say, 1965 and 1972. Who was still inducing young women to riot at rock concerts? Oh, that would be the Beatles again… the by-then heavily bearded, military-uniform-sporting post-Sargent-Pepper-album Beatles.

And who exactly was most likely to be taking the Pill back in the days before the correlations with stroke and other health impacts emerged? Why that would be women from the “counter-culture” with their almost universal preference for ever shaggier, rougher, more heavily-bearded, and even less-washed and thus more “manly” smelling men.

Then, around 1975 or 1976 the evidence about the pill’s side effects became overwhelming, women began dialing way, way back on the amounts they took (the first “mini-pills” where introduced around that time) and before you knew it the hottest riot-starters were the extraordinarily dweeby, non-manly-looking likes of Johnny Rotten, Boy George, and Elvis Costello.

So anyway, yeah, if we’re just ginning up random “may well have” scenarios you could as easily make the case that the Pill decreased interest in “feminine” men.

But let’s not do that either.