00:00:27.180Yeah, neither did anybody else until about two years ago. Today, Adrian, we are talking about something that has taken over the algorithms of every woman in America. That's right. We are talking about birth control misinformation. So what do you know about this?0.67
00:01:29.260I think all of which on the market right now is for women, right?
00:01:33.060So we're talking about pills, implants, IUDs that prevent pregnancy by suppressing ovulation, thickening cervical mucus.
00:01:42.400And allegedly, although the science on this is unclear, also sometimes preventing implantation of embryos in the uterine lining.
00:01:51.740And we're talking about a very specific set of contraceptive products and medications that are available and which are used by something like over 90 percent of American women throughout the course of their reproductive years.
00:02:05.400So for all the rhythm method heads out there, we're not talking about you today.
00:04:19.060If you guys want us to taste the seeds to be able to make that trip to Erewhon and drop the, you know, $170 on nuts and seeds to regulate our menstrual cycles,
00:04:31.420subscribe to our Patreon so that we have the income for that kind of a thing.0.68
00:05:03.400And she's telling you to stop taking birth control, that it is bad for you, that she has, quote unquote, done her own research, right?
00:05:11.480And this is where I think it's important to make a pretty big disclaimer, right?
00:05:16.800Like people have very valid critiques of hormonal birth control.
00:05:20.140Some people have had bad experiences, right?
00:05:22.100So a lot of critiques of hormonal birth control come from a place that often these wellness influencers will start talking about experiences of like medical misogyny and like misogynist neglect at the hands of doctors, right?
00:05:35.940The sense that like there is insufficient research into like women's gynecological health and that hormonal birth control is offered as a sort of a catch-all that doesn't treat the underlying causes of a gynecological health complaint, but only really treats the symptoms.
00:05:57.980Hormonal birth control can also have legitimate side effects.
00:06:01.200A big reason people go off it is because side effects for the first couple months when you begin hormonal birth control can be, like, pretty extreme.
00:06:10.860We're talking about spotting, breast tenderness, cramping, like, a lot of period symptoms, basically.
00:06:17.980Like, those can go on for a while when you start on birth control.0.99
00:06:21.200And a lot of people are like, well, I went on this, and I immediately felt like shit.0.99
00:06:25.360And so I went off of it. When if you stay on that medication, those symptoms tend to resolve themselves. But that's hard to tell somebody who's like really uncomfortable or in pain. Right. Just like go ahead and keep on suffering for another two months. We promise it gets better. That's like not really a appealing message. Right. Yeah.
00:06:46.060There's also like legitimate social justice critiques of the historical uses of birth control, right?
00:06:51.640So everybody should probably read Dorothy Roberts' book, Killing the Black Body, which shows how birth control has been used as a tool of eugenics.
00:07:01.360Birth control was tested on non-consenting populations in Puerto Rico when it was coming to market.0.57
00:07:07.740Birth control was administered in a U.S. government-funded program to women in the Dominican Republic who were told that they were getting inoculations but were in fact being administered hormonal birth control shots.
00:07:20.020You know, this is something that has been used coercively in incarceration settings.
00:07:26.720It's been used coercively in sort of like welfare programs.
00:07:30.740There's like nasty ways to use hormonal birth control for eugenics purposes or for racist purposes, right?0.67
00:07:37.740And I don't think we need to apologize for any of that.0.96
00:07:42.300I think those are all legitimate critiques.
00:07:45.220It's not really what we're talking about here.
00:07:48.260What we're talking about here is a weaponization of women's sense of their own bodies being sort of out of control or foreign to them
00:07:57.240and of medical authorities being untrustworthy or neglectful or disinterested in their concerns
00:08:03.600and people taking those legitimate grievances and weaponizing them for ideological purposes.
00:08:09.740So in that sense, this episode reminded me a lot of our natural childbirth episode that we did,
00:08:15.680like, I think just like a month or two ago.
00:08:17.540Feels like eight years, but yes, I think that's about right.
00:09:23.980They were able to live lives independent of men and to marry and partner with men only because they wanted to and not because they had to because of hormonal contraception.
00:09:34.660In this way, the pill or, you know, the sort of umbrella of medications and treatments that we refer to as the pill, it unleashed these like untold amounts of human creativity and potential and thriving.
00:09:49.680It elevated women to new heights of dignity by granting them these new levels of independence.
00:09:57.680When you say it like that, I'm starting to hear why conservatives are not going to care for this.0.95
00:10:01.960They're like, independence and dignity in this economy?1.00
00:10:05.520The things they hate for women to have.
00:10:07.380But also, for all of the valid critiques of gynecologists and obstetricians' over-reliance on hormonal birth control to deal with gynecological pain,
00:10:17.860Yeah. It's like also a useful intervention medically. So one of the big points made by
00:10:26.580critics of medical misogyny is that hormonal birth control is like sometimes the only available
00:10:30.280treatment for a lot of women's health conditions. And it's true that that could reflect a lack of
00:10:35.800interest or investment or funding of other kinds of treatment to women's health conditions. But
00:10:41.480it's also true that hormonal birth control is like really effective for treating the symptoms
00:10:47.180of a lot of gynecological conditions, right?
00:11:35.060But it has a much smaller rate of user error than other methods.
00:11:40.580Right. And a much smaller rate of user error than things like barrier methods or pulling out or the anti-birth control movements preferred contraceptive method, the rhythm method. The rhythm method and cycle tracking, these have incredibly high rates of user error. Hormonal birth control kind of doesn't, right?
00:12:00.900Right. You also don't have to interrupt sex to use hormonal birth control effectively. You can take that pill any time of day, as long as you take it roughly the same time of day every day. And then you don't have to be like, honey, hang on a second, which some people really find sort of prohibitive. But most crucially, and I really think I can't stress this enough, hormonal birth control is good because it is woman controlled.
00:12:26.080I was going to say, it's not just, honey, can you hold on a second? It's, honey, you did put it on, right?0.95
00:12:31.680You're not relying on someone else who may not have your best interests at heart to make a crucial decision in your own health.
00:12:39.120Yeah. If you're relying on the pill, you don't have to rely on men cooperating.
00:12:43.340You don't have to rely on men denying or delaying their own gratification, which they famously hate doing.
00:12:48.980And you don't have to rely on them telling you the truth.
00:12:52.420And it's like kind of bleak that this is not something that women can expect of their male partners, but it's often not.
00:12:58.420It's something that hormonal birth control puts into women's own hands so that the people who face the greatest consequences of unprotected sex also have the greatest control to avoid those consequences.
00:13:10.340So one of the things you encounter in discussions about hormonal birth control is like again in our natural childbirth episode is people really understand experience as a qualifier.
00:13:23.780So I'm just going to like lay my cards on the table.
00:13:26.640I do not have and never have had what are considered like pathological menstrual cycles, but I did have uncomfortable ones.
00:13:34.960I have been on hormonal birth control now for, God, like 12 years I've had an IUD.
00:13:46.760And crucially, it allows me to not menstruate.
00:13:49.420I haven't had like a period really since like 2015.
00:13:51.640But I was experiencing what are considered like common mid-range period symptoms when I was menstruating.
00:14:01.580So, like, really heavy cramping in my lower back and my lower belly, like, breast tenderness that made it, like, kind of painful and uncomfortable just to, like, get dressed, let alone, like, go for a jog.
00:14:13.960And, like, really heavy bleeding and just, like, exhaustion, like, crazy fatigue, right?
00:14:19.320This is all stuff that most women are dealing with, like, a week out of the month.
00:14:23.580If they're not on birth control, birth control took that all away from me.
00:14:26.200And I don't need it for pregnancy prevention.
00:14:29.640I don't have any debilitating gynecological health issues.
00:14:32.540I just thought, you know, this is an improvement to my quality of life.
00:17:01.180Studies examining perceived performance consistently report that female athletes identify their performance to be relatively worse during the early follicular and late luteal phases.
00:17:12.240Studies examining objective performance using anaerobic, aerobic, or strength-related tests do not report clear, consistent effects of the impact of menstrual cycle phase on physical performance.
00:17:23.040So they're saying you feel shittier and therefore think your performance is worse, but actually it doesn't have any impact?
00:17:30.580Yeah, so it's saying that women athletes are reporting that they don't feel like they're performing as well overall at two phases of their cycle, which is early follicular.
00:17:40.940so right after your period, and late luteal, so right before your period.
00:17:45.680That kind of makes sense to me, right?
00:17:47.560The period, especially if it's unmedicated, can be uncomfortable.
00:17:52.700But it's also saying that when you actually objectively measure how well those athletes are doing, there's no change.
00:18:05.080It's also like really hard to isolate menstrual phase as a variable because all kinds of different things impact something like athletic performance and menstrual phase would be just one in terms of like diet, in terms of how well they're sleeping, in terms of like other stressors, in terms of injuries.
00:18:24.640You know, all these kinds of things are also at play.
00:18:27.840And this is just one variable that can't be very well isolated.
00:18:31.040And then in the conclusion, so it says a substantial proportion of female athletes believe their performance is impacted by menstrual cycle phase, but the research pertaining to objective measures of performance throughout the menstrual cycle does not provide a definitive indication of how performance may fluctuate throughout the menstrual cycle.
00:18:48.180Many studies have concluded that performance does not vary between menstrual cycle phases.
00:18:52.260So these are like really inconclusive results that overall seem to suggest that this isn't really a thing.
00:18:59.960Yeah. But the study is misrepresented online. Of course. Where it goes viral among fitness and wellness influencers who claim that it makes basically the exact opposite conclusion that it does. So these influencers begin suggesting that their followers curate their exercise regimens and then also their diets and their sleep schedules and then more and more of their lives around the menstrual phase.
00:19:24.340Yeah, just eat raw beef the entire time, eat, I don't know, bull testicles.0.93
00:19:29.180I mean, it's obvious why they do this.0.88
00:19:31.820Sure, we're going to get to the political dimension, but also health influencers are there to tell you that you can biohack your way out of just about everything.
00:19:40.440Like, do you guys know that if you drink things with like carbonation or like with more potassium or, you know, if you cut out red meat during your period, like it's something, right?
00:19:51.240You have to sell people on an intervention, on some kind of biohacking.
00:19:56.060And that's very clearly not what that original study or that initial review was suggesting.
00:20:02.600Yeah, like you can see why this kind of thing caught on for the fitness and wellness influencers,
00:20:07.340because it creates an easy way to sell something new in a sector that gets prone to stagnation, right?
00:20:13.980Where the actual good advice in health and wellness, as we know from our friends at maintenance phase,
00:20:19.700it's like kind of boring right it's like the actual good advice is like try to get enough sleep
00:20:24.380try to move if you can try to eat decently and enough and like that's kind of it and it's pretty
00:20:32.660repetitive right this gives them a new way in and it also sort of opens up a lot of opportunities to0.99
00:20:41.360sell stuff so i mentioned earlier this concept of seed cycling which is a notion that women can eat0.99
00:20:48.780different kinds of seeds during the different phases of their menstrual cycles in order to0.98
00:20:54.700like sort of promote menstrual health or like overall wellness. The kind of benefits you're
00:21:00.700supposed to be getting are sort of often kind of hard to measure. So it's like, okay, if you eat
00:21:05.120pumpkin seeds during one phase of your cycle, you'll have more energy. And if you eat sesame
00:21:11.920seeds during another phase of your cycle, you can, you know, reduce the chances of cramping or
00:21:17.680whatever. There's also a lot of sort of inconclusive, but widely touted advice about
00:21:27.880vitamins. So one of the things that the cycle syncing influencers will advocate for is this
00:21:34.020idea that different phases of your menstrual cycle deplete your nutrients and therefore you should
00:21:41.060buy and take various different supplements at various different points of the month.
00:21:45.160So there's a lot of, like, opportunity to sell stuff in this concept, right?
00:21:49.260It does seem like health influencers want to turn all men into vampires and all women into, like, gerbils.
00:21:57.820But, like, on the other side, this succeeds for ideological reasons, right?0.55
00:22:02.780It succeeds in part because it affirms something that a lot of people kind of already want to believe, which is that women are ruled by their hormones.0.52
00:22:11.520So the cycle-syncing trend generates growing interest in the menstrual cycle in online wellness communities, which are overwhelmingly centered around young women to begin with.
00:22:22.340So this fad generates a lot of its own misinformation about the menstrual cycle.
00:22:26.260We should probably just do that episode at another point.
00:22:28.900But the short version is that, no, ladies, you're not incapable of work, rationality, or critical thought for three weeks out of every month.
00:22:37.040But for our purposes today, what you need to know is that the trend had a lot of emphasis on the cycle as determining your energy, your state of mind, your capacity.
00:22:47.020The claim was that everything you need to know about why you feel tired, angry, lonely, hungry, or energized can be answered by looking to what point of your menstrual cycle you're at.
00:22:59.540And crucially, I think one of the reasons this was kind of an appealing trend for a lot of people was that it emphasized the cycle as commanding rest.
00:23:10.480It created a permission structure for rest, right?0.56
00:23:14.420So you'll see in this kind of genre of online content, a white woman being like, women weren't meant to work all month and putting up like a pie chart about the menstrual cycle and being like, we're exhausted during our luteal phase.1.00
00:23:27.820And this is how you get some of the trad wife influencers involved.1.00
00:23:32.200But we do stand a lazy queen on this podcast.0.99
00:23:35.620Well, like, it sort of justifies rest.0.97
00:23:39.680It creates a medical permission structure, a quote-unquote medical permission structure for rest that is also evoking this, like, naturalized justification for the idea of women's unfitness for public life and for paid work.0.89
00:23:52.980Yeah. I mean, people who fall for this trend online probably are too young to remember that when Hillary Clinton ran for president, the idea that, like, she wouldn't be fit to be commander-in-chief for a certain time of the month was, like, something that people, like, would say into cameras with shocking regularity.
00:24:09.700People get paid to say things into cameras, not like some dude at a diner.0.96
00:24:13.580And now that's something that women are saying into cameras in their Lycra with their, you know, high ponies and their Botox faces.1.00
00:24:23.880Well, another thing that's kind of shocking about this trend is how many of the women who are really leaning hard on the word natural when they tell you to get off birth control have these faces that are just inflated with fillers.0.94
00:24:38.220And it's like, well, what's natural about that, right?0.84
00:24:40.520Some interventions into the body are acceptable and some aren't.
00:24:45.580And I'm going to give a little spoiler alert to our listeners that I think that that might be an ideological difference more than a medical one.
00:24:54.280God, I've been listening to this podcast for three years and you're still managing to surprise me.
00:25:00.900So the thing about hormonal birth control is that when you're on hormonal birth control, you don't have really a menstrual cycle, right?
00:25:10.660Hormonal birth control suppresses ovulation.
00:25:13.080You don't need to bleed at all on hormonal birth control.
00:25:16.440In fact, when the pill was introduced on the market in 1960, it had that packet of placebo pills at the end of every month, not because it was medically necessary, but because marketers thought that American women would be too freaked out if they just stopped menstruating altogether.
00:25:35.080And so it was meant to make the pill more socially acceptable to retain a rhythm of menstruation.
00:25:41.580So you can just be on hormonal birth control and not menstruate at all. When you're on hormonal birth control, you're not really in this sort of cycle merry-go-round. I think a lot of people who are not on hormonal birth control do not particularly understand their own energy or capacity or emotions to be so massively different and determined throughout the different cycles of the month or phases of the month.
00:26:08.720But this idea was that hormonal birth control, like, interrupted or corrupted this natural process, right?
00:26:18.500It posited this, like, dangerous, unnatural intervention in the authentic rhythms of the body and of the self.
00:26:26.880So this idea flourished almost as a matter of course.
00:26:30.380It followed both the ideological logic of the cycle-thinking fad as well as the influencer's own monetary incentives, right?
00:26:38.440If you really believe or are pretending for the sake of your social media following to believe that the menstrual cycle represents this essential rhythm of life that tells us something needed and necessary and true about, you know, female human beings,
00:26:59.280then not only are you going to dislike hormonal birth control for interrupting that truth,
00:27:07.740but you're also going to tell your followers to get off it so that they can more effectively,
00:27:13.740you know, buy your seed packet or whatever. So the major cycle syncing entrepreneurs
00:27:19.760began pushing anti-birth control content on their feeds. And the one I want to pay attention to
00:30:31.860This is clearly the landing page of the Sink Society, which has four tabs, Home, About Nicole, Guides, and Blog.
00:30:39.040And then it is her in a gray tank top, living her best life on top of a beach, probably, I don't know, is this Costa del Sol or something like that?
00:30:55.060And she's like doing a kind of like end of a mental health commercial right after she's taken the blue, red, green or purple pill or whatever they're hawking.
00:32:03.700Anyway, so like one thing that I have noticed about these influencers is that they all say that hormonal birth control is bad, that it was bad for them, that they felt bad on it.
00:32:15.160But what harm it actually did to them is kind of hard to pin down, right?
00:32:21.140So as we mentioned, a lot of people have like real legitimate adverse side effects from birth control, like nausea, headaches, a lot of cramping, acne, but also a lot of people, ding, ding, ding, me among them.
00:32:33.700Take hormonal birth control and feel absolutely fine.
00:32:37.180There's another thing is that hormonal birth control, we refer to it as this one item, as if it is like just one medication.
00:32:45.820In fact, there's a lot of different kinds, both different ways to access or take it and also different combinations of the hormones.
00:33:28.620And yet, like, in the Maha movement, it's very clear that, like, no, they're all bad, and they're all bad for you.0.61
00:33:35.400And, like, the anecdotal evidence is always, like, I took this one, and it was bad.0.98
00:33:40.340And, like, I mean, I think that's even true for antibiotics.
00:33:43.460My mom had to go off a particular antibiotic and onto a different antibiotic.
00:33:46.920They're like, you're not reacting to this well.
00:33:48.220Like, it's something that doctors do all the time.
00:33:50.540But, yeah, the fact that we use it to the monolithic birth control is, like, kind of a tell already.
00:33:56.160Yeah, my mom is allergic to penicillin.
00:33:57.800Yeah. Which when she was born meant that she couldn't take antibiotics, but now there's other kinds. Right. So she doesn't have to die of a staph infection. Right. If you have a really bad reaction and just hate being on orthoprovera, that doesn't mean you can never use hormonal birth control. Right. You can try another one. Right. And for a lot of people, there's just no side effects. A lot of people do find one either immediately or through trial and error on which they feel good. And their main side effect is that they are not pregnant. Right.
00:34:25.700But what you do get in these videos is a lot of women first emphasizing medical misogyny and distrust of doctors, that's usually how they open, and then they describe their own symptoms in very vague terms, right?
00:34:40.880So they're talking about stuff that sounds like it could be a cold or an autoimmune disorder or mental health issues or just like staring at a screen for too long.
00:34:50.700It's like, God, I was on hormonal birth control and then I started developing a very mild headache.
00:34:56.040You know, like it's content that's designed to make you think like, oh, God, am I starting to feel that right now?
00:35:02.900So they talk about birth control as inducing like brain fog or depression.
00:35:07.860But the most common phrase I kept encountered was I didn't feel like myself.
00:35:20.700And then they contrast that bad feeling on birth control with a better way they say they felt after they stopped taking it, which was also in similar imprecise terms depicted very positively, right?
00:35:34.580Like I felt good, I felt healthy, I felt rejuvenated, I felt natural, that's a big one, and I felt like myself.
00:35:41.240So do we know whether Nicole Bendeian developed this theory of not taking birth control before or after she moved to Valencia?
00:35:49.540Because I was going to say, maybe you just felt more like yourself because you're in a pretty great place with amazing food.
00:35:58.240Yeah, she moved from, I'm sorry, but Nebraska to like Valencia, Spain.
00:36:01.840It's like, yeah, you're going to get a little bit of a pick-me-up there, my friend.
00:36:07.280But like, this is all to say that the issue of birth control is often pitched kind of less as one of health per se or like physical health than almost as like a spiritual matter, right?
00:36:18.860It's like going off the pill is depicted as like this metaphysical quest for a more authentic self.
00:36:25.420So the Times, the New York Times, did a big piece last year on birth control misinformation online.
00:36:30.820And they quoted one woman who stopped taking the pill after seeing all this anti-birth control content as wondering, quote, who am I without birth control?
00:37:21.560They like had talked about how they weren't ready to have a kid, but she wanted to go off birth control.0.95
00:37:27.300And then she got pregnant within like four months and had a baby.0.94
00:37:31.700And now they are like pretty clearly lost navigating new parenthood, which is this like identity mind fuck in which you're underslept and don't know who you are.0.98
00:37:40.560Yeah. And can't afford anything. And now she's back on birth control because she doesn't want this to happen to her again.
00:37:45.680Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the description of, like, coming back to yourself, it feels like that's how people talk to me who've just, like, discovered mindfulness or whatever.
00:37:55.200Like, it really, it comes out of a mental health space or out of, like, out of self-care space rather than, like, a medical space, which, like, this very much is.
00:38:04.020it reminds me of like you know everybody knows that one guy who like like went to brazil and0.94
00:38:10.940did ayahuasca you know what i mean like and then he comes back and he's just so fucking smug0.98
00:38:14.820uh it's like uh you're still you're still the same douchebag you were three months ago before0.99
00:38:20.080you did this like little imperialist adventure to the jungle and took drugs or the person who0.96
00:38:24.120goes to like a silent retreat at a buddhist monastery and then paradoxically enough can0.88
00:38:28.400shut the fuck up about the retreat you're like why don't you make like the buddhist like you did0.96
00:39:10.220So every one of these like right wing propaganda outlets has a couple of like young women who are trying to be the part of that institution that can hold up like the female side of the market.1.00
00:39:25.660right? Their audiences are skewing male, but they always have a couple of token hot girls1.00
00:39:31.020who are there to try and talk to young women and bring them over to the side of conservatism. And1.00
00:39:37.420those girls went hard against birth control over the past couple of years. So you hear about places0.72
00:39:45.200like Turning Points USA, the group of the now dead Charlie Kirk, and the Daily Wire, headed by the
00:39:51.080still alive, Ben Shapiro, they saw their young women on-camera talent start pushing this anti-birth
00:39:57.500control misinformation to their audiences, which are largely female. Which is so ironic because
00:40:03.040if there is one kind of birth control that is more effective than hormonal birth control,1.00
00:40:09.220it is Ben Shapiro's fucking face. And voice. Awesome voice. Remember when he was like,1.00
00:40:14.680wet-ass pussy is a terrible song because my wife says that that's not supposed to happen?1.00
00:40:19.900yeah yeah that was beautiful i mean i don't think i've ever recovered from that1.00
00:40:24.140i mean he read the entire wap lyrics out i said certified freak seven days a week0.98
00:40:30.140wet ass p word make that pull out game week yeah you effing with some wet ass p word p word is1.00
00:40:37.380female genitalia bring a bucket and a mop for this wet the amount of libido in the world went1.00
00:40:43.480down by like 15 while he was reciting this like oh i don't think the sex thing is for me anymore0.99
00:40:48.380Alex Clark, who is a podcaster and influencer affiliated with Turning Point USA,0.59
00:40:56.380she hosts the right-wing wellness show Culture Apothecary.
00:41:45.000It has 170 likes. It has 763 retweets. And I'm going to go out on a limb and be like, these are probably quote tweets of the Dunkage variety and 347 replies. Yeah.
00:41:58.800But this is actually a claim that gets taken up a lot. Yeah.
00:42:02.020Brett Cooper of The Daily Wire, she's another one of these girls. She looks like Ben Shapiro and that she's got like very intense eyebrows, but I don't think they're related.
00:42:10.900She also said in a viral TikTok that garnered about a quarter of a million likes before it was taken down that birth control causes women to, one, gain weight.
00:42:21.080And this is honestly a subtext of a lot of complaints about birth control online, particularly in like wellness spaces.
00:42:29.200It's like, oh, this is bad for us because it's going to make us fat, right?
00:42:33.400She also claimed, like Alex Clark, that hormonal birth control can alter who women are attracted to.
00:42:38.980I mean, which is kind of a funny way of, like, medicalizing the social impact you were describing.
00:42:44.300It does influence who women end up with because it's harder to trick them into, like, basically staying with their deadbeat boyfriends, right?
00:42:52.960Like, they're naming something real, but they're making it medical when it's social.
00:42:57.100If you take birth control, you are, in fact, probably not going to wind up marrying your high school boyfriend just because he trapped you with a baby by getting pregnant when you were 18.
00:43:06.460And that might indeed result in you maturing and dating a different kind of guy who has talents beyond, I don't know, doing a kickflip or whatever.
00:43:33.680He went on Joe Rogan's podcast to denounce birth control, and his argument, and this kind of stood out to me, his argument was that pharmaceutical companies push birth control because it gets them lifelong customers, right?
00:43:47.400Women are on birth control for a long time.
00:43:49.580And what did this remind you of, Adrienne?
00:43:51.680That's what they say about hormones for trans kids. This is a very common kind of transphobic talking point that sort of tries to sound like it's a critique of the medical establishment, but really is only just like barely hidden transphobia.
00:44:07.540There's like all kinds of drugs actually that you take for the rest of your life.
00:44:10.780Like the most commonly prescribed drug in America is Lipitor, which is a high cholesterol drug.
00:44:15.900And nobody is like the evil big pharma lobby is trying to get us all on statins so that we can not have our like natural God-given heart attacks.
00:44:26.480You know, it's just like it's not a consistent critique.
00:44:37.080So they make like a bunch of claims about birth control, and I'm just going to run through them.
00:44:42.780One is like the kind of classic that like a lot of kinds of hormonal birth control and like kind of only the really effective woman controlled kinds of birth control are actually abortifacients.
00:44:52.960This is like an ideological anti-choice lie that relies on the dubious and sort of like really genuinely unclear idea that some kinds of hormonal birth control can prevent implantation of a fertilized egg.1.00
00:45:06.900If you believe that a fertilized egg is equivalent to the human life of a baby or a human woman, you are a stupid, morally unserious person.0.86
00:45:18.100But also the idea is that then that that fertilized egg has a human right to implant in somebody else's uterus and that a drug that might theoretically at some point maybe also work by preventing that from happening is functionally an abortion.0.96
00:45:33.440Yeah, I mean, like, if you're trying to trade off the rights of the woman compared to the rights of what you've just described, like, what do you think of women?
00:45:40.460If you're like, yeah, it could under certain circumstances, and I mean, it's maybe not a child, maybe it is a child, right?
00:45:46.240Well, it seems like you just don't like women very much.0.99
00:45:48.760I mean, also, like, the primary way that hormonal birth control actually works is by suppressing ovulation, right?
00:45:53.820So there's no egg there to get fertilized.
00:45:56.000So it's really like a highly contingent fantasy.
00:45:59.280Yeah, if it happens at the wrong time, if it doesn't function as intended and then does function as intended, yeah.
00:46:05.020Trying to make it make sense almost doesn't work because what it really is is like a convenient ideological pretext for banning birth control, which they want to do because they don't like its social results, right?
00:46:18.220And they frequently point to a study that finds a correlation between birth control, hormonal birth control use, and SSRI prescriptions among women.
00:46:28.740Right. This is yet another correlation causation confusion. It's a little bit like RFK's sense that like, oh, well, you know, once we started vaccinating kids, a lot more of them got autism. It's like, yeah, well, a lot more of them were being screened for autism.
00:46:43.960A lot more of the women who are being able to see a gynecologist and get a birth control prescription are also being able to get referred out for psych, right? It's just a matter of who's getting access to medical care.
00:47:15.260And in fact, that is the point and the idea and something that we're doing on purpose.0.97
00:47:19.620But, you know, they will point to this idea that women who are on birth control have fewer babies overall, to which I would like to say yes.0.98
00:47:27.320That's actually kind of the idea. Hormonal birth control is fully reversible. Most people's fertility will be restored in three months. For some people, it's more like six months, but the rate is back to about 100% after 12 months of cessation.
00:47:42.680But this is like where they really sort of they're intersecting with people's like deep anxieties and fears in this really malicious way, isn't it?
00:47:50.100I mean, I do know a lot of people who go off hormonal birth control when they decide to have a child and then are kind of freaked out when it takes a little while.
00:47:56.500And it's like maybe that's an after effect of the birth control.
00:48:00.000The research doesn't seem to suggest that.
00:48:01.880What it probably is, is that you're now quite a bit older than when you had your last pregnancy scare, you know, in college or whatever.
00:48:07.720Right. And like your body needs a little time.
00:48:09.600But it is this weird thing where like the idea that you're being punished for something, you didn't do what you were supposed to do and therefore you're getting punished for it somehow.
00:48:19.060Yeah, it's definitely like understood as karmic when really what it is, is like if you have a fertility issue, you're not likely to understand that issue or notice that issue until you're trying to get pregnant.
00:48:54.700There is some evidence that women who stop taking birth control experience a temporary spike in their testosterone production, which will probably make them feel a little hornier.
00:49:27.740I'm not doing sex in line with a plan that has been laid out by God or evolution or whichever sort of author of destiny that you're relying on outside of yourself, right?
00:49:41.320It's this idea that there's something incorrect about sexuality that is conducted by people who are on birth control.
00:50:56.280So what these influencers are really saying, I think, is that birth control makes women noncompliant with heterosexuality as they imagine heterosexuality and aspire to live it, right?
00:51:06.820And that's a vision of sexuality in which, like, sexual dimorphism and difference is really, like, maximized and valorized.0.56
00:51:15.000Like, women are like this, and nature made women like this, and they are the opposite of men in every way, and that is, you know, good.0.83
00:51:23.100It's one in which women's sexuality is subordinated to reproductivity.0.85
00:51:26.840The other thing they say is that if you're off birth control, you'll be really horny, like uncontrollably, but kind of only when you're ovulating.
00:51:34.920So it's this idea, it's fake, it's like not true, but it's this idea that like in the quote unquote natural cycle, women's sexuality is all about making babies and not about like their pleasure.
00:51:46.080And it's one in which, crucially, men's status and men's masculinity is proven literally, like, by their virility, right?
00:51:53.680Because what makes a man, quote-unquote, feminine in this imagination is not really that he's got, like, softer facial features based on some weird phrenology measure.
00:52:03.520It's that his partner is able to decide not to have his baby, right?
00:52:07.820That's what's feminizing in his condition.
00:52:11.060So if these are people who have an ideological objection to birth control kind of disguised as a health concern, what is it that they propose instead, right?
00:52:19.580What is their idea of like a good cycle?
00:52:22.640And this is where we come to this world's claims about unmedicated cycles.
00:52:29.440And that brings us back, Adrian, to cycle syncing.
00:52:32.960So I have put in a convenient pie chart from a menstrual tracking app called Femia, which, by the way, has terrible reviews on the App Store.
00:54:04.340But, like, what this is claiming is that women's energy, cognitive capacity, sexual desire, and physical strength vary tremendously throughout the month based on the phase of her cycle.
00:54:15.980And, in fact, she should not be trusted for about a third of the month, yeah.0.93
00:54:19.680Right. Yeah. Like they tend to assert that women are high energy, competent and desirous during only the first early phases of their cycle. So like the one week or so follicular and ovulation combined phases. But then they're low energy, low cognitive capacity, emotionally dysregulated, like crazy idiots who are physically weak during the much longer three week period comprising the luteal and menstrual phases.
00:55:09.840And this is what kind of drives me crazy about the appeal of this stuff is that it's like women are doing race science against themselves, right?0.90
00:55:17.140It's like they're looking to explain the vagaries of their own emotions, energy, mental health, cognition, personhood, not with like an inward look at their characters that might promote some kind of self-improvement or an outward look at their circumstances that might, you know, lead to some sort of political engagement.0.87
00:55:39.800but with this kind of like faux scientific gender essentialism
00:55:43.540that deprives them of both individuality and also like responsibility.
00:55:47.640It's saying, I can't be held responsible for my own life.
00:56:36.700There's like the homeopathy tradition of opposition to like most medical interventions that I think is like getting stronger and stronger as our institutions of medical authority kind of collapse and lose all their credibility.
00:56:49.500But then really, this is, I think, mostly about the ideology of heterosexuality and trying to like reverse engineer the body so that it is designed for like a socially constructed system about like what sex is and what it means.
00:57:06.200And also, I think this stuff has a political utility, right?
00:58:00.900And that brings me back to Alex Clark.1.00
00:58:03.460She of Birth Control Will Make You Bisexual fame, who worked for Charlie Kirk before his death.
00:58:10.860And she was asked about whether her anti-birth control messaging had anything to do with Turning Point's pronatalist message.
00:58:18.840And Adrienne, I would like you to read what she said.
00:58:21.420Ms. Clark insists that her anti-birth control discussions aren't connected to the pronatalist messaging of Turning Point USA or her boss there.