Whiff the Wrong Man

By Amy Alkon — Advice Goddess

I admire that you often add research to your columns, so I thought I’d ask you about an article I read on birth control pills.

PMS can be a serious mood killer.

Apparently, taking the pill can cause the “wrong” man to smell good to you  — a man you might not be into once you’re off the pill. Unfortunately, I experience severe mood swings when I’m not taking the pill — uncontrollable rages for about one week a month. But, now I’m worried that I’ll choose a partner I’ll lose interest in reproducing with when I’m off the pill. Also, I wonder whether being on it is lying about who I am. Of course, if I can’t control my mood swings, it won’t matter, because I’ll scare every man away!
— Medicated

It seems those health class videos about getting your period — “You’re a woman now!” — were a tad incomplete. One week a month, you’re also Chuck Norris.

The cause of your rage probably isn’t all the people saying deeply offensive things to you like “Are you using that chair?” Dr. Emily Deans, a psychiatrist with the terrific blog “Evolutionary Psychiatry” on PsychologyToday.com, explains that your period gets launched by a drop in progesterone, “which can interfere a bit with the machinery that makes serotonin. This can lead to hunger, cravings, agitation, insomnia, irritability, and rage” or, to put it in relationship terms: “Someday, my prince will run.”

Birth control pills can affect your "scent of attraction."

Deans says the pill can help alleviate these symptoms, and certain variations seem especially helpful: the 24-day pill and the three-monther (meaning Auntie Flo visits only once every three months). The problem is the issue you brought up. The article you read references the research of Swiss biologist Claus Wedekind, who made a bunch of women sniff a bunch of men’s stinky T-shirts to study the pill’s effect on mate preferences. Women who weren’t on the pill went for the smell of men with dissimilar immune systems — men with whom they’d produce children with a broader set of immune defenses. Women on the pill preferred the smell of men with immune systems similar to theirs (the immunologically redundant), probably because the pill chemically mimics pregnancy and cues a genetic adaptation that leads women to seek out kin to protect them when they’re pregnant.

If that isn’t enough bad news for you, the pill’s pregnancy simulation seems to kill the attractiveness bump women get at ovulation, their most fertile time of the month, when their faces, scent, and other features become subtly more appealing to men. (It may also lead ovulating women to dress and act less provocatively than they otherwise would.) In a study by psychologist Geoffrey Miller, female lap dancers not on the pill earned an average of $276 a night whereas those on it brought in only $193, making pill-using lap dancers $80 less hot and sexy to men per night.

So, the answer for your mood swings is — count to 10 when you get angry (because it sometimes takes that long for your rocket-propelled grenade launcher to warm up). For a more peaceful alternative, Deans advises that some women’s PMS symptoms are alleviated by certain antidepressants (SSRIs, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, such as fluoxetine and sertraline) but notes their problematic downside: “Nothing kills sex drive like an SSRI!” Deans has had some success prescribing bupropion, a non-SSRI antidepressant she calls “unlikely” to be a sex drive killer, but observes that “it can be agitating and cause insomnia.”

As a possible non-drug alternative, Deans suggests magnesium malate supplementation: “Five hundred milligrams of magnesium malate at bedtime seems to help with anxiety, rage, and PMS symptoms such as cramps and headaches,” she says. “Magnesium is typically low in standard American diets and not found in large amounts in multivitamins and is generally safe if you have normal kidneys.” Deans adds that cycling from a low-carb diet to a higher-carb, low-protein diet three days to a week before starting your period can ease PMS symptoms, possibly by helping with serotonin uptake.

There is a prejudice that you’re a better person if you just try to meditate yourself out of your rage on those weeks when you find yourself in the mood for long walks on the beach followed by a home strangling. But fixing brain problems by taking a pill is really no different from taking insulin for diabetes to keep from going into a diabetic coma. You’re just taking a brain that’s slacking off in the neurochemical department and bringing it up to par. Especially once you’re in a relationship, a little “better living through chemistry” (or diet or vitamins) certainly seems preferable to doing “the little things” to keep your love alive — like sticking Post-its around the house with cute little messages like “Homicide comes with a stiff prison term.”