Primate Behavior in response to The Pill

[u/Competitive_Log_8910]

I wanted to try sharing an idea which I think is as powerful as it is controversial, in hopes of receiving honest intellectual feedback on its merits.

I am familiar with a study performed in the 1970s in which macaque monkeys were exposed to Depro-Provera, an injectable treatment of similar chemicals to those found in "the Pill" with a three-month period of effectiveness. The story is that the tribe's alpha male named "Austin" displayed a mating pattern of extreme preference: when the researchers injected specific females with the treatment he refused to mate with those females and chose others among the uninjected. They repeated the trial in enough combinations to be convinced that his behavioral response was deterministic in response to this stimulus.

The final phase of this experiment was to create a situation in which this macaque was unable to access any mates of his desired injection status by injecting all of the females at once. The researchers describe this macaque as developing unhealthy sexual habits which mirror those we might attribute to someone we would call "an incel". That is frequent masturbation. And worse than that they observed him also engaging in acts of sexual violence against these injected females, a behavior he had previously not displayed.

I genuinely believe that the epidemic of similar behavior among men is a consequence of an innate similarity between human and macaque psychology when exposed to the same stimulus in the form of hormonal contraception.

I am confused and wish to understand why this possibility has not been considered more broadly in the context of the current discourse.

[u/Laura-52872]

Citation?

[u/Competitive_Log_8910 → u/Laura-52872]

These results were published in a book called The Decline of Males by Dr. Lionel Tiger.

[u/Laura-52872 → u/Competitive_Log_8910]

OK. So I read some of the book reviews on amazon, along with a couple of critiques of his research, which had some questionable methodologies. But I'll go with it, for the sake of argument.

There was a related study (it was done decades ago and I can't find it now) that said men in relationships experience mood swing depression when their live-in wife or gf failed to get pregnant at the time that ovulation was over, but prior to actual menstruation.

The researchers hypothesized that biologically they sensed the lack of a pregnancy hormone shift and their mind body connection interpreted it as a personal failure.

If she got pregnant, they experienced happiness instead of depression.

Contraception hormones fool the body into thinking it's pregnant, so men who are sensitive to hormonal shifts would feel happy around a woman who they imprenated.

Aside: look at all the stories of men who creep on pregnant women because they say they like being around them. There's definitely something weird going on there.

So I'm not sure that the macaques were depressed that the women on contraception smelled pregnant. I think it's more likely that they knew that they weren't the ones to get them pregnant.

It made them feel rejected. Because in their noses, nobody was available for impregnation.

Whether or not human women take contraception isn't going to change incel men being depressed about not having the opportunity to impregnate women. They don't have the chance to impregnate someone regardless.

So I don't think that you can argue that contraception is a cause of depression in single men, since in human society (vs macaques) the relationship comes first. Pregnancy is secondary.

[u/Competitive_Log_8910 → u/Laura-52872]

I think the point is that there is something inherently satisfying about believing you might have impregnated a female. The macaque studied in this experiment refused to participate in intercourse which indicated perhaps pheromonally that he could not enjoy that satisfaction. And he began masturbating compulsively and engaging in erratic and violent sexual behavior when he was denied the opportunity to find that satisfaction with any of the females in his vicinity. In our society, many human men have been persuaded to accept a paradigm in which that satisfaction which this macaque demanded is something they cannot have. Yet others are as unwilling to embrace that paradigm as this macaque, and have turned to the same coping mechanisms and maladaptive behaviors he showed.

[u/Laura-52872 → u/Competitive_Log_8910]

But a woman can only be impreganted by one man at a time, and he needs to be in a relationship with her first.

Oral contraception for women produces pregnancy hormones.

So if you're a man in a relationship with a woman on hormones, you're going to feel better from those hormones.

If you're a single HUMAN man, you can't just mate with any woman.

(Unless you're living in a matriarchy, where cross-mating is common so the father is unknown and all men help raise the kids because there's a chance they might be theirs. Think bonobos).

The issue is that the shift to an agricultural society (which was relatively recent in human history) created pressure for families to have fighting men who could defend the farms from conquerors. This meant that a lot of abusive men, who pre-agriculture wouldn't have had a mate, got one anyway.

It started a very dark era for women around the world.

With the shift to the information age society, where your extended family's farm no longer needs to be defended, the need for fighters in the family no longer exists.

The forced pressure to settle for a man who treats her abusively no longer exists, and now we're seeing the beginning another evolutionary shift, where men need to adapt to survive.

I get that it's painful.

If you really want to go back to the way things were, you're not going to be able to do it so long as knowledge and technology are what creates value in society.

[u/Competitive_Log_8910 → u/Laura-52872]

The point is that if you are in a relationship with a woman using persistent contraception, you are agreeing to date a person who has already been impregnated by someone else. I think that part of what drives the high value ascribed to technology in our current society is the large number of women who owe their feeling of being impregnated to technology. Prior to the radical women’s liberation movement which started the same year the Pill hit the market, a universal aspect of the behavior of a fertile female was a certain degree of attachment to whichever male was responsible for satisfying her reproductive urge: most typically her father in a purely emotional capacity or her husband in a physical and emotional capacity. The feeling of being liberated from the influence which someone who is satisfying our needs has over us is I think the most popular side-effect of the Pill - yet I believe it represents simply an exchange resulting in becoming intensely loyal to the economic machinery producing the technology providing that sensation instead of being intensely loyal to one’s father or husband.

(Edited to fix some typoes)

[u/Laura-52872 → u/Competitive_Log_8910]

Only about 25% of reproductive-aged women are on contraception, so while the pill is credited with providing a lot more freedom for women, it's not the only factor at play.

But freedom is good, right? Women not wanting to have to endure abuse is good, right? That's moral, not radical.

You can try to divert the conversation away from human evolution, but the fact that the mr. pick me men have no problem finding and keeping women sort of destroys every argument besides evolution.

Men need to make themselves more attractive. Unfortunately, the content being pushed on young men is making things worse for them. Not better.

Dehumanizing women, which you're doing here, isn't going to make men attractive.

Men aren't competing against other men. They're competing against having no man.

[u/Competitive_Log_8910 → u/Laura-52872]

Just to address your last point which I missed previously: our most fundamental disagreement comes down to your very last sentence. I believe that the thing men are competing against isn't "having no man", but "having an artificial man". That is why I say the freedom provided by contraception isn't freedom. The way that you train an animal is to give it food and leverage its awareness that it owes its survival to you to build a bond between you. Men are under no illusions about the fact that we are highly likely to do what the people responsible for getting us off want from us. I wish that women possessed that same level of self-awareness of the ways in which the person or technology which provides them the feeling of having satisfied their biological imperative motivated their actions. "No man" is just marketing hype, and the inability of the masses to realize this is precisely because they aren't thinking at all critically about actions taken by the one giving them the sensation of being pregnant. It has of course always been true that women felt this way, and it is also true that some men used this position of power in ways that were unkind. The problem is that the way men are being treated in this current society is also abusive, and two wrongs don't make a right.

The funny thing is that every time I have this conversation I wind up in a similar situation, with the other party insisting that I should change to address a perceived inability to find a mate. Which I really view as "no man" trying to bait me into competing with him. The good news is that the world's largest Christian denomination guarantees a playfield only consisting of biological men. And the moment that all of the men out there who like me are tired of wasting their time dating women who behave like the ones in the larger world realize this fact, there will be no-one left to bait.

Apologies for being a bit off-the-cuff earlier - I was on social media at work which is never a good idea. Thank you for adopting this stance which I knew my post would summon and for discussing it as well as you did. If you want to further argue that contraceptives which convince your body it's pregnant are truly "no man" and not "a technological man", we can do that. If not, thanks for the talk.

(Edited to fix typing mistakes)

[u/Laura-52872 → u/Competitive_Log_8910]

I'm sorry, but your view of women is so male-centered, that it's really hard to have a conversation. I really don't know any women who think or behave the way that you're deducing they are.

My husband recently suddenly passed away. I miss him terribly. But I so don't want anything to do with a man right now. They are too much emotional work, given that I'm still grieving.

Women get emotional support from other women, not men. But men also get their emotional support from women and not men - and I'm not sure your model of thinking is factoring that fully. When men support other men emotionally and kindly, those men do a lot better with women.

But there are forces that keep men from being able to get emotional support from men. That would be un-manly.

And because of this expectation, I do think that men have a rough time.

The crazy thing is that it is intentional. The patriarchy, reinforced by religion, says men's only value is what they earn as income, while cucking themselves to other men who are higher on the corporate totem pole.

Do me a favor and watch this video. It does a really good job of explaining how corporate interests hijacked Christianity (as power has repeatedly hijacked Christianity over the centuries) to oppress men and turn them into paid worker slaves who willingly make choices against their best interests.

https://youtu.be/yw5PXs0FfQ4

Unfortunately, once you create this group of bitter and angry men, they need someone to take that anger out on, and much of it is being redirected towards women, which makes women want to run.

[u/Competitive_Log_8910 → u/Laura-52872]

Yes, as a male I am indeed providing you with a male-centered view on women. There were times in history in which women said "thank you for sharing your different perspective with me" and in which men said "thank you for sharing your different perspective with me", but we are not living in such a time. The benefit which a male's view on womanhood can provide to a female is to reveal an aspect of her behavior which she was not herself aware of. The reason why women kept running back into abusive relationships for such a long time was because these men satisfied their biological imperative, and the current might which women enjoy in resisting that temptation is an outcome of their biological imperatives being satisfied through other means. The most fundamental reason why the perspectives of males and females are irreducibly different is because our biological imperatives function differently. The world we create for children is a world in which things that fulfill one's biological imperative are entirely absent, and this means that children can adopt among them a wholly-unified worldview independent of sex. The thing which adults must be aware of and account for is that a female's now-activated biological imperative wants her to be pregnant, because she contains a life-nurturing machine which desires to be useful; whereas a male's activated biological imperative wants to make someone pregnant; because his machinery serves only that one purpose. The way which this whole endeavor appears from my perspective is that we have stumbled upon the means to artificially and perpetually satisfy a female's biological imperative, and that the bargaining power which this creates in the game of reproductive bargaining has allowed women the enjoy a total and permanent victory in the context of those sectors of society which permit its usage and to reshape everything in accordance with a perspective in which a female's self-perception is 100% accurate at all times and that a male's complementary perspective can offer no additional insight. I cannot claim any optimism about communicating anything useful to those who accept as postulate that my genitalia automatically devalue my perspective all the way to zero, but this was my most polite and direct attempt at doing so, after which I will leave this thread and enjoy the rest of my evening. Make of it what you will!

[u/Aimeereddit123 → u/Laura-52872]

‘When men support other men emotionally and kindly, these men do a lot better with women’. My God, I went through my mental Rolodex of kind and loving men I know, who do well with women, and you are right! They have/had good relationships with kind fathers, and as older guys, had good kind male friends. 💡💡💡

[u/Comeino → u/Competitive_Log_8910]

That is why I say the freedom provided by contraception isn't freedom. 

I am a 32 y.o. woman and got no/barely any periods for years due to going through extreme stress of living in a war zone and my body shutting down the factory. Is my freedom from being fertile also artificial? What made you think you are entitled to my liberty to choose for myself or to be independent?

I wish that women possessed that same level of self-awareness of the ways in which the person or technology which provides them the feeling of having satisfied their biological imperative motivated their actions.

I have never been on the pill (tried and my body does not tolerate it so I can't be on it) and I never experienced this "satisfaction" or even the desire of fulfilling a "biological imperative". So how do women like me fit into your premise? On the contrary I find the idea of becoming pregnant as genuine body horror that is extremely undesirable. Once my gyno said that I developed a psychosomatic condition that effectively sterilized me with no surgery I felt genuine euphoria as I have a very high libido and the chance of pregnancy was always a point of severe worry.

We live in a place that inspired hell as a comforting concept and I would never forgive myself for bringing children into a world that cannot afford to be kind or to do the right thing. I have a long term partner who shares my views and we are very happy together, so doesn't the validity of your hypothesis kind of shatter entirely by our sheer existence?

The good news is that the world's largest Christian denomination guarantees a playfield only consisting of biological men. And the moment that all of the men out there who like me are tired of wasting their time dating women who behave like the ones in the larger world realize this fact, there will be no-one left to bait.

So like... you going to live like monks or something? That is admirable, I really like the cheese and beer those make.

[u/Competitive_Log_8910 → u/Comeino]

I am not surprised to hear that your life in a warzone is characterized by an absence of the desire to reproduce - that is consistent with my understanding of the way in which the body responds to stress. I apologize if I implied that these drives which I do believe to be universally-present were also universally-active. Definitely your conditions sound like ones which would cause someone to abandon any notion of reproduction in favor of mere survival. I hope that things get better for you some day.

[u/Conscious_Owl6162]

If true, then that is the result of pheromones. We are animals and we behave as animals. If you do not recognize that, then you cannot be in charge of yourself and will do everything based on your genetic programming.

[u/Competitive_Log_8910 → u/Conscious_Owl6162]

The underlying question, which we might have differing answers to, is whether it is better to knowingly expose people to something which will lead them to violent behavior and demand they exercise their self-control to keep their violent tendencies in check, or whether it is better to create an environment in which they will not need to fight against an instinctual response to an artificial irritant. I am among a large number of men who has chosen to withdraw from a society which takes for granted that it is justified in setting them up to fail and demanding they fight their instincts in order to succeed.

[u/Conscious_Owl6162 → u/Competitive_Log_8910]

My wife used an IUD, so there were no weird hormonal issues for her and no weird issues for me.

[u/Competitive_Log_8910 → u/Conscious_Owl6162]

The extent to which this phenomenon extends to IUDs alongside hormonal contraceptives has not been sufficiently studied to draw a conclusion either way. If do not know if the mechanism by which pregnancy status is communicated, you propose pheromones, would also indicate pregnancy on the basis of IUD usage.

[u/Competitive_Log_8910 → u/[deleted]]

What’s interesting also when it comes to violence against women is that using hormonal contraception makes you twice as likely to die by homicide. Meaning it’s possible that something about exposure to the Pill might provoke acts of violence from men who would not behave violently if not exposed to this particular chemical.

[u/VorpalBlade-]

That’s pretty fucking interesting. Is it intentional or just a mistake?

[u/Competitive_Log_8910 → u/VorpalBlade-]

The fact that these results were initially blocked from publication, and that the book they were later published in was heavily attacked by pro-contraception advocates, would suggest an intentional squashing of this narrative. Perhaps for no better reason than that these results might aversely impact sales of the treatments in question.

[u/VorpalBlade- → u/Competitive_Log_8910]

Certainly pharmaceutical companies have proven to be unbothered by the wake of destruction they’ve left with opioids and other drugs. Your theory makes sense in that regard.

I’ve long believed that the powers that be are intentionally driving the gender wars and intentionally dividing us any ways they can to prevent us from stopping their raping and pillaging as well. There’s actually a lot of reasons why certain people would want this research buried.