(no subject)

[andrewducker]

Just in case you thought you had, y'know, any kind of free will:

Pill changes women's taste in men

I'd like to see more tests done here - they may, after all, be highlighting differences between those people who are more likely/less likely to take the pill rather than people affected by the pill. Still, interesting result.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Studies of behaviour versus testosterone levels, for instance, have consistently shown that higher testosterone levels equate to a higher tendency towards violence and aggression.

Actually not from what I've seen, the only clear cases are for people taking steroids. Given that most steroids are derived from horses and not humans and are taken in doses about 20x higher than any normal human (which is why they are so lethal) behavioral abnormalities are unsurprising. From what I've read, higher testosterone correlations and much like the false correlations found with XYY males, results that were either not reproducible or which ended up being traceable to other causes.

Take a look at Anne Fausto-Sterling's excellent book Sexing the Body for interesting discussions of this and similar issues. She's both a biology professor who has taken a far more critical look at these issues than most people.

[andrewducker]

The instance I remember most clearly was looking at the different behaviour patterns of children who had unusual levels of testosterone - the girls who had high levels insisted on violent play, the boys with low levels tended towards more social, less violent play. The programme (part of a BBC science series about human development) was on people who tried to raise their children in unusual ways.

But cheers for the reference, I'll add it to the reading list.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but usually there's a reason why people secrete different amounts of different hormones, so, again, if you're a girl with a brain that lends you to produce more testosterone, perhaps there's a parallel, rather that causal, link with aggression? Or, indeed, the fact that being a girl with high testosterone levels can make your appearance unorthodox, maybe you'd just be really pissed off about the teasing.

It's par for the course, naturally, that there are no women in the study who don't have a taste in men at all...

Ready for an overshare, though? I kind of buy the results, in that I tend to fancy men more (like, some rather than none) at times of the month that I could get pregnant. That could, definitely, be a psychological effect, but it's interesting, and not unique to me...

[andrewducker]

I've seen reports of similar studies before that showed that taste in men varied according to time in the menstrual cycle affecting hormone levels.

And I don't think testosterone levels are affected by the brain. The cases they looked at were genetic in nature - there's a "switch" which causes unusually high testosterone levels.