This week, we'd like to discuss the effect that Birth Control has over our endocrine and nervous systems specifically. We've all heard about pheromones, a chemical released through our sweat and picked up by specialized glands in our noses. Smell is sexy, and our culture knows it! Why else would we spare so much time and effort to shower with fancy smelling soaps, use perfumes and colognes, and do the "superstar" sniff to make sure we're not too... ripe. However, we often fail to realize the importance of those smells which we give off naturally. Pheromones themselves do not have an actual "smell" but by sniffing them into the nasal canal, there is a chemical reaction picked up by the specialized gland up there and in this way, each time we meet a member of the opposite sex, our body makes an original physical distinction between "good" pheromones (of people who have desireable genes and personality traits that are genetic, as well as people who are genetically compatible with us as individuals) and "not so good" ones. In the studies this week, researchers discuss the effect that hormonal Birth Control plays in blocking our natural ability to distinguish pheromones. The effects of not being able to properly distinguish pheromones can be disasterous in relationships, even between good people. Someone you may be attracted to naturally, birth control will scramble up that signal and make it more difficult for you to decifer it. And perhaps you're already on birth control and in a happy relationship. What happens when you go off the drug and suddenly find yourself no longer attracted to your boyfriend? For just this reason, the pill has been called the "divorce pill" and linked dramatically to the increase in divorce within the first few years of marriage. The scenario is a woman who falls head over heals in love with a man while she is on the pill. They get serious, get engaged and get married. Then comes the point in their life that they are ready to become pregnant, so she stops taking the pill! Her hormones jump back into wake, and her pheromone receptors wake up and suddenly she doesn't feel as attracted to her husband as she was before. Perhaps she still loves him, pheromones can't change that, but attraction is immensely important in any serious relationship.
Don't let this sad story happen to you. Don't let mainstream society dupe you into believing their lie that birth control will make your relationship better in any way at all! The truth is that it will simply make it worse. And the killer is that you won't even know it while it's happening!
5 comments:
Hello. I've seen your posts around campus at mary washington so i visited your blog. I'm curious about what your underlying goals are. What are you seeking to accomplish and to what end?
Also, I don't know if your argument that birth control ends marriages doesn't qualify as a slippery slope fallacy. It takes a lot of jumps to go from getting married while the woman is on the pill to getting divorced because suddenly people don't smell right. Relating love and attraction most fundamentally to smell, and labeling the pill "The Divorce Pill" as a result, is going further than any mainstream researcher would be willing to go, I think.
Hence my curiosity: What do want you to achieve with this campaign, and to what end? Are you feminists? Members of the conservative right? I am genuinely curious. I'll check back here for your response.
Hi! Sorry this has taken so long. I'm sure you'll understand, we're students too and with it being the week before break and all there was much work to be done.
Our only "Underlying goal" is to educate the campus of Mary Washington about some of the negative effects of birth control. Too often our generation is told that this little pill or device is the "wonder pill" to cure all ills. Advertisements, companies and even our physicians are stuffing thes meds down our throats and most of us don't think twice about just what it is we are putting into our bodies. Now, we will conceed that the hormonal contraceptive pill, and others like it, has it's place in helping to cure certain diseases and treat certain disorders, but we hold that it is used way too often and for the wrong reasons in our society. In fact, we hold that many of the ills of our society, physical, emotional, psychological, and otherwise, can be directly linked to the increased use of this pill and other contraceptive measures.
Second, the "Divorce Pill" arguement is not our own, but simply re-published from several sources. The most notable mention of this phenomena was in 2005 by NBC. Unfortunately all the links to this video seem to be dead (online) but as soon as I find a live one I will post it. Also, it follows logically and does not qualify as any form of fallacy IF in fact the biological facts behind it are in fact true. As biology, and all sciences, are constantly searching for the truth, we hope they will get closer and closer. Right now, this is one theory that is being held in strong agreement amoung many scientific communities.
Finally, we strive to achieve an enlightenment amoung college students as to the truth of contraception so that they can make a truly informed decision about what chemicals they put in their bodies. We are simply a group of student with nothing more in common than this simple goal. Our supporters come from all walks of life: guys and girls, feminists and not-so-feminists (although we all support the notion of equality amoung the sexes, and this is a major tenent of our goal), religous and non-religous, democrat and republican and neither. We represent all people because we believe it is not just one "personality" that should be working towards this goal, but all, because this is a human issue and it effects all humans.
I hope this was helpful!
Thanks for the clarification on your goals.
As far as the statement about it being a slippery slope fallacy, that comes from the reasoning the going off the pill causes divorce. It is far too much of a simplification to say that divorce is the result of getting off the pill. This is because while there may be proof that pheromones cause attraction, it would completely off base to say that pheromones cause love. This is because pheromones are intended to cause sex, to procreate species, a biological function of any organism. But love is a human emotion, and not only that but a particularly western emotion - it is not a human universal.
The point of calling it a slippery slope is that you come dangerously close to equating the attraction that pheromones foment with the source of love upon which individuals make the decision to marry. This purely biological explanation for love sidesteps the many, many, many social insitutions, norms, taboos, and individual tastes that simply do not find their source in human physiology.
That is why I have no problem saying to a biologist, or anyone else, who might blame divorce on the pill, that her argument is a slippery slope.
To speak to the "divorce pill" notion. Is it possible that the divorce is due to an increased strain on the marriage caused by the addition of children to the equation? Children tend to be a side effect of sex without contraception. Perhaps that could explain the divorce better than the fact that someone's pheremone smell changed. It makes more sense if you think about why a couple of years into a marriage a woman would stop taking her birth control. Usually that's a sign that a couple is trying to have children and that is what could lead to divorce. When two people have children they often lose sight of romance and of caring not only for the children but for eachother. That seems to be a much more logical explanation.
As a married woman, and UMW student, who has been on and off the pill during NINE years of marriage - the Pill doesn't do anything to the attraction I feel for my husband. Attraction is based on many things, not just pheremones. I understand that you are using information from another source, but I think all this does is convince people that anti-pill campaigners are irrational.
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