Zula of A Submissive With Claws says (emphasis mine.)

According to the BBC, a new study shows that women physically suffer disproportionately in strained (heterosexual) marriages. Whereas men and women both showed signs of depression in unhappy marriages, only women showed elevated levels of hypertension, heart disease, etc.

According to some random counselor quoted in the article, “The gender difference could be partly due to the fact that women’s hormonal profile is more complex than men’s. Women also tend to worry more about their health than men.”

Oh, of course! We women are just walking bags of hormones and neuroses! It couldn’t possibly be because gender roles in marriage are far from equal and women get the short end of the stick more often than not. headdesk headdesk headdesk

I nicked the whole post from here because… what could you cut?.

Yeah, gee, hypertension huh? That doesn’t come from, oh, say, perpetually suppressing your autonomy, intelligence, agency, and sexuality, as some people — like educated professional writer and lecturer Martha Peace — say to this day

It’s common for a young Christian wife to rebel against home life as her primary ministry, Peace writes in Becoming a Titus 2 Woman, which lays out the principles of her ministry model. It’s the role of older women to help her understand her priorities.

Those priorities may include rising early to feed the family, being available anytime to satisfy a husband’s desires (barring a few “ungodly” or “homosexual” acts), seeking his approval regarding work, appearance, and leisure, and accepting that he has the “burden” of final say in arguments. After a wife has respectfully appealed her spouse’s decision—a privilege she should not abuse—she must accept his final answer as “God’s will for her at that time,” Peace advises. The godly wife must also suppress selfish desires (for romance, a career, an equitable marriage), practice addressing her spouse in soothing tones, and maintain a private log of bitter thoughts to guide her repentance. “If you disobey your husband,” Peace admonishes in The Excellent Wife, “you are indirectly shaking your fist at God.”

Source: Mother Jones Magazine via Echidne.

Nope, must be them hormones. (And not your husband, lord, master, and undivorcable conduit to Christ saying, for the 1000th time despite your “respectful appeal” because he thought it was funny the previous 999, “hormones huh? Yuknow how to make a whore moan…?”)

Oh, and, y’know, every day I wake up thinking my lucky stars that men are steady, stable, and completely uninfluenced by our hormones, which, if we had any, would be uncomplicated and never unexpectedly spike in ways that compel us to, oh, say, make impulse decisions we later regret.

Commons
Photo “Drue checks Heather’s pheromones” by Flickr user Brouhaha (Jonathan). Used under a Creative Commons license.

Oh Noes! Teh Pill! It affects Woemenz Nozez! ZOMG!**

Because you know what windup little smell-driven automatons women are. Because without that nasty Pill bollixing your nostrils you’d all go back to sticking with your partners no matter how big an asshole they turned out to be. Better outlaw them pills then.

Whatevs.

Actually, I heard about the study, or maybe something along the same lines, some time last Winter, before it got picked up and politicized as some kind of reason women shouldn’t be allowed to take the pill. Instead fellow classmate brought it up during her student research presentation on the effect of scent on sexual arousal.

The way she told it was that non-pregnant women are often more attracted to the smell of men who are genetically unlike them, but when they are they prefer the scent of men they’re more closely related to. She said that since hormonal birth control simulates pregnancy that going on the pill can alter one’s preference for the scent of one’s partner.

That actually made sense, and a number of women in the class nodded and said they’d noticed something like that when going on or off the pill during a relationship.

But here’s the deal: neither the presenter nor anyone who nodded their heads indicated it was a particularly big deal.

Which suggests, as with the stupid oxytocin-burnout argument for (only women, naturally) avoiding multiple partners***, the scent-preference-altering phenomenon, even if it does exist, can’t be all that strong, right? I mean think about how the ‘winger vision’s supposed to go

A) Non-pregnant women like the way unrelated men smell, so
B) They form lifelong, abstinenet-till-marriage, monogamous-afterwards relationships with these unrelated men, and
C) Become pregnant, whereupon according to these theories
D) Their scent preferences just as they would during pill-induced artificial preference change meaning… what?
E) While they lose interest in these genetically heterodox-scented partner for the duration of their pregnancies?

Except, well
F) I don’t think it works that way. Or
G) If it does it’s not a very strong effect, because
H) Pregnant women would always avoid their genetically heterodox-scented husbands and hang out with their genetically “homodox”-scented male relatives, which
I) We don’t, um, actually see because
J) Scent isn’t the only attraction criteria in the first place, nor
K) Even if scent was the only criteria items A-I suggest it couldn’t be terribly determinative because, y’know, most people stay together
L) Whether they’re pregnant, or on the pill, or not

[** In other words a lot of people have been commenting on the peculiar conclusion anti-contraceptive types have drawn about a very small, not-even-all-that-recent study about hormonal contraception and scent. —fl]

[** The claim is that repeated oxytocin release with multiple partners causes women to burn out on romance. The fly in that ointment is that pregnancy releases a gazillion times more oxytocin and yet after birth most women a) continue to harbor romantic feelings after birth and b) consider having additional children. Part b being, for me, the bigger deal breaker. If a little too much oxytocin is supposed to make one unable to form romantic attachments ever again then lots more of the same stuff ought to make women disinclined to get pregnant again or, especially, disinclined to love subsequent children. And not to put too fine a point on it, in most cases where we encounter women burning out on romance or childbearing the reasons tend to be a lot more clear cut than hormone-receptor exhaustion. But I digress… —fl]