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]