Does the Pill influence the way that women assess male sexual attractiveness?

Note to self; Look for girls that are on the pill. May be more willing to sleep with you.

Well, in order to get pregnant, a woman would have to be off the pill for quite awhile usually (not always). So wouldn’t their choice of a mate at that point have nothing to do with the pill?

I’m curious to read the actual study but apparently all of this hubbub has arisen via news releases. I’m going to defer commentary until I see the study design and statistical analysis, since the study was very small (less than 100 subjects). Even if the results are close to what is described in the article (i.e. women who start the pill change their smell preferences), the inferences drawn from that are weak, at best.

All I know is that whenever I’ve ever heard women talking about ‘the pill’, or advertisements for ‘the pill,’ especially about it reducing the number of periods and whatnot, the same thing always goes through my mind: that can’t be healthy, can it?

@pete you’re right on….

Pete, they say that as long as a woman has 4 periods a year it doesn’t hurt her, but yeah, I also wonder about the long-term effects of the pill. For example, when the pill was first introduced they had women taking doses 10 times as high as today, and it was perfectly legal, everyone said it was safe at the time. Even 5 years ago, researchers realized the patch delivered the hormones completely differently from what they had been telling people, and that that different had given some people blot clots that killed them.This was while it was +already on the market_.

To answer the question, after reading the article, I’m not convinced that because someone thinks a dirty t-shirt smells good or not is a direct link to who they will marry. Choosing who to date even, is such a big decision with so many factors going into it, I can say I feel fairly confident that the way their dirty T-shirts smell is not a big part of it for me.

Allengreen, I’m a little confused about your quote. I didn’t see that text on the page you linked…

…and when my I smell my husband in his dirty t-shirt…..DAMN!! That man is just not safe…..

Rowenas, what?

@chica the quote came from the first comment following the article….thank you for your thoughtful reply.

I think the attraction to smells is somewhat unconscious and not like being turned on by a dirty tee shirt——-I have some dirty tees laying around if anyone wishes to conduct an experiment :)

I guess it’s not the first comment any more. Now it says there are 41, and it only shows the first three (the ones I did read) on the same page.

I know it’s not a conscious decision, I’m just saying I think intellectual, psychological, emotional, and (sight-based) physical attraction and compatibility are a lot stronger for me than some unconscious olfactory preferences that haven’t even been fully measured yet. They didn’t look at real people in real relationships (it sounds like). It sounds like they just gave some women some dirty T-shirts. To me, that just doesn’t even seem to be even close to suggesting something about real relationships between people.