Social Science: The Pill Isn’t Killing Your Sex Drive

The now-infamous Breitbart headline “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy” is often circulated as an example of how unhinged the alt-right “news” site is. It’s extreme, it’s ridiculous, but it’s actually not so far off from what more reputable sources have been telling us about birth control for years. It’s commonly accepted that the pill causes weight gain, mood changes and a decreased libido. So, birth control makes women fat, crazy and sexless. Great. But is any of it true?
A new study has seemingly disproved one of the most persistent myths: that birth control kills your sex drive. But that probably won’t be enough to convince people, as all of these negative associations have stuck around without scientific support pretty much since the origin of the pill.
The connection between hormonal birth control and weight gain is purely anecdotal, and even a medical news site that lists weight gain as a “common side effect” of birth control clarifies, “Clinical studies have found no consistent association between the use of birth control pills and weight fluctuations.” At most, the pill may cause some water retention around the breasts and hips.
Claims that the pill causes mood changes may have some more credibility to them, though in many cases those changes are positive, as birth control regulates hormones and can help manage the mood swings and depression that sometimes accompany PMS.
And then we have the commonly accepted wisdom that the pill will kill your sex drive—though the evidence for that only got as conclusive as “possible, but not likely,” according to WebMD. The explanation for this was speculative hormonal birth control works by suppressing the ovaries, which usually produce estrogen, progesterone and testosterone, but birth control only replaces the estrogen and progesterone. Without enough testosterone, the logic goes, your sex drive will be suppressed.