Leftism on the Brain

What's birth control doing to women's brains?

Last night I wrote an opinion piece for American Greatness about Britain’s “Angry Young Women,” and it got me thinking again about the relationship between biology and politics.

Here are the first couple of paragraphs of that piece, to give you a flavour of what I was writing about.

This week, Britain’s New Statesman introduced us to “the Angry Young Women,” an expanding coven of radical, unstable, men-hating activist women. This is maybe the first time a mainstream outlet in the UK has acknowledged the precipitous leftward drift of young women, and the major effects it’s having on British society: on politics, culture, relations between the sexes—pretty much everything you can think of, really.

Whether it’s Israel’s war in Gaza, the “Climate Crisis,” the Patriarchy and racism, or the prospect of a Reform government forcing them out of the workforce and back into the home, there to be tethered to the stove and the marital bed for the rest of their days, Britain’s Angry Young Women are “teetering on the edge of an anxiety attack” at any moment.

They talk about how their “bones ache” at the thought of all the suffering in the world. They use portentous, largely meaningless phrases like “the viscerality of the feminine wound” to describe the pain and “trauma” of being a woman today, which includes, prominently, dealing with men who value them only as sex objects and have repellent views about immigrants, carbon emissions and the rights of transgender people. The Angry Young Women say they want “revolution”: “systematic change.” Racked by chronic fatigue and endometriosis, they find satisfaction in protest, non-binary comedy evenings and pursuing “moral missions.” But even then, that satisfaction is fleeting. “You’ve got to be pessimistic,” one young woman says. The point isn’t to be happy: It’s about being angry and engaged.

It is, as the New Statesman puts it, “impossibly bleak.” Women aged 18-30 are head and shoulders the most progressive demographic in Britain today, and also the most downbeat about their future and everybody else’s. The objectively better a young woman’s circumstances—the higher her social class and earnings—the more likely she is to believe the odds are stacked against her. Young middle-class white women are more likely than minorities to believe British society is “systemically racist.”

My contention, in my new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, is that politics is built on a biological substrate, and that political changes mirror biological changes, and vice versa; politics and biology exist in feedback loops, influencing each other in a constant, dynamic manner.

The main focus of the book is the civilisational decline in testosterone that’s been taking place. The best studies, like the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, put it at about 1% years on year, and it’s been happening for decades. It’s becoming harder and harder for men to be men, just because they have less testosterone. The political implications of this are obvious. Or, at least, they should be. But we live in a profoundly misandrist society, one that devalues men and makes it impossible for basic masculine urges and instincts to be satisfied. Our society labels traditional forms of masculinity as “toxic” and testosterone itself, as the primary biological agent of masculinity, as a kind of “toxin” men—and everyone else—would be better off without.

Although the main focus of The Last Men is men and testosterone, I do also talk about women and their hormones, and how changes to the broader hormonal environment could be causing changes not just to women’s health, but also to their attitudes and political behaviour. Like, for example, driving women further and further away from the centre of politics towards the extreme left.

This is something that’s well substantiated by polling and research. Almost all of the polarisation that we’re seeing is actually a result of women becoming more left wing. Men’s political opinions, on the whole, haven’t changed all that much in the last 10-15 years. Women, however, are embracing ever-more-radical positions, displaying an alarming readiness to justify political violence and even murder of people who hold beliefs they don’t like, as recent research from Rutgers University has shown.

And it’s not just happening in the UK: it’s also happening in the US. It’s probably happening throughout the Western world, and I think it’s probably happening for the same reasons.

Broadly speaking, I think there are biological factors at work. Yes, I think the internet and social media are to blame, and women seem to be uniquely susceptible to their traps and snares, but there has to be more to it than that. Blaming Instagram and TikTok is the lazy option, especially since they’re blamed for pretty much everything these days.

Biological changes can’t be ignored. More specifically, I think hormonal birth control could be playing a big role.

This is something I say in The Last Men, and it’s also something I say fairly often on social media, including over the past week, when I’ve been baiting people with viral clips of an attractive young women hiking from Mexico to Canada, blaming her apparent lack of concern for her own safety on the effects of the Pill. (She actually appears to be using the hike to promote her OnlyFans account—which doesn’t really disprove my suggestion her brain is all f*cked up.)

But it’s true. There’s plenty of reason to believe hormonal birth control could be altering the structure of women’s brains in ways that alter their decision-making and self-control, in ways that conduce towards their becoming frothing, pink-haired, septum-pierced, man-hating leftists. Hormonal birth control is taken by tens of millions of women, often beginning in their teenage years, when they’re prescribed it against the risk of unwanted pregnancy, but also to treat skin conditions like acne. In the US, close to 20% of young women in their 20s are now on hormonal birth control. Given the scale of use, we should expect to see effects at the aggregate level, and across a wide variety of domains well beyond personal relationships.

One worrying study, discussed in The Last Men, shows hormonal birth control shrinks a region of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in fear processing and emotional regulation. MRI scans show a significant loss of thickness in the region by comparison with the brains of women who have never used hormonal birth control. There’s also a clear suggestion the effects could be permanent: that women who lose cortical thickness never regain it, even if they stop taking hormonal birth control.

Another study, from 2016, suggests that just three months of using hormonal birth control changes the structure and function of the amygdala, another region of the brain. The amygdala plays an important role in threat perception, among other things.

Leftists have been shown to have smaller amygdalas than conservatives. Indeed, it’s not too hard to see how altered fear processing, emotional regulation and threat perception—in basic terms: a collapse in executive function and decision-making capabilities—could drive women to make increasingly stupid personal choices, including becoming a radical leftist.

Talk of biology and politics makes people nervous, for reasons that aren’t hard to understand. Today’s ultra-liberal model of freedom is predicated on women’s complete liberation from slavery to their own biology; in particular, from the risk, however slight, of unwanted pregnancy. Without that liberation, all the gains of the last century or more are imperilled. Women are no longer equal. This is why any attempt to investigate the harmful side effects of hormonal contraception is greeted with such fury by feminists. It’s also why the investigation must continue regardless.

My hope for the immediate future is that scientists with a real desire to do radical, politically incorrect research will begin to look at this relationship in depth. One thing they’ll do is look explicitly at the relationship between political attitudes and things like use of hormonal birth control. Do women’s views change on and off the Pill? How? What could be the biological mechanisms driving that change?

I can hear the howling already.