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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

I know someone with a theory that the rise of "the pill" is a factor in male-typical gender role behaviors. Essentially, the pill is only 91% effective over a year in practice, the mother doesn't know she's pregnant, continues taking estrogen pills during the first trimester, and this impacts the development of the fetus. In the US, it wasn't really widely available to around 1970, so it lines up somewhat with increased rates of homosexuality.

No idea if it's true, but the timeline and mechanism of action seem plausible. The rise of the pill also happened around a time of greater LGBT awareness, so overall awareness is also a factor.

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You have to take "rates of homosexuality" with a huge amount of skepticism considering it was often illegal until recently and could even get you killed. You have to assume any data from the 70s or earlier is severely under-reported. Any research into the subject was also taboo, frowned upon, or even actively discouraged, or outright disallowed.

> so it lines up somewhat with increased rates of homosexuality

... but isn't it really hard to distinguish _actual_ rates of homosexuality from visible homosexuality? As public acceptance for LGBT people has increased, more people can feel safe coming out or identifying as gay.

Further, if the pill became widely available around 1970, and if this were an impactful factor, wouldn't you expect to see the corresponding change beginning in at least the mid 80s, as those kids grow up?

LGBT rates among zoomers is shockingly high to me. 20%, double that of millenials. Millenials are double that of Gen X. I tend to believe there’s a genuine biological phenomenon going on here. The next generation should be just starting to establish their sexual orientations. The data should be interesting…

The increase is almost entirely in bisexuality. I think the biological argument is strong.

We have records showing male male sex was common in ancient Greece.

Yeah, mostly rich older dudes fucking young boys. Greece was not some idyllic free love society. It was just that being a top was super manly and being a bottom was not. You didn’t have wealthy men in openly gay equal relationships with other men.

Pretty sure poor people weren't being allowed into the most elite unit in the Greek world (since you had to buy your armor!)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Band_of_Thebes

From your own source

> According to Plutarch, the 300 hand-picked men were chosen by Gorgidas purely for ability and merit, regardless of social class.[18] It was composed of 150 male couples,[15] each pair consisting of an older erastês (ἐραστής, "lover") and a younger erômenos (ἐρώμενος, "beloved").

Older dudes with their designated younger bottoms.

I’ll also recommend https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_ancient_Gre...

Over a niche historical anecdote

> During Plato's time there were some people who were of the opinion that homosexual sex was shameful in any circumstances. Indeed, Plato himself eventually came to hold this view. At one time he had written that same-sex lovers were far more blessed than ordinary mortals. He even gave them a headstart in the great race to get back to heaven, their mutual love refeathering their mottled wings. Later he seemed to contradict himself. In his ideal city, he says in his last, posthumously published work known as The Laws, homosexual sex will be treated the same way as incest. It is something contrary to nature, he insists, calling it "utterly unholy, odious-to-the-gods and ugliest of ugly things".[31]

I'm not saying nothing genuinely biological is happening, and it's totally plausible, but I am saying one has to be careful about the available evidence and how it's interpreted.

The only thing we can really measure is what people say about themselves, often in a poll/survey/study context. More people are identifying as LGBT in the younger generations. We have no way of knowing how many people in each generation are some form of closeted. But people's increased rates of _identifying_ as LGBT have occurred in an environment where both cultural and chemical/biological factors have shifted. How could you disentangle their effects?

I think there's a risk when making claims about anything that has stigma attached to it. How prevalent has sexual assault been, over time? How many kids are raised with corporal punishment? If you expect that both their prevalence, and the willingness of people to report or talk about it changes over time, how could you know when rates go up or down?

Pick a Bayesian prior and roll with it. 20% of Gen Z is identifying as LGBT. Seems high to me. If we see another doubling for the next generation then something would seem to be obviously different. One doesn’t need to disentangle the effects per se

> LGBT rates among zoomers is shockingly high to me. 20%, double that of millenials

I would argue that double of zoomers are more comfortable assuming they are homosexuals, or even, zoomers are less afraid to explore and discover their sexuality instead of "I'm not doing X because I'm obviously not gay, I'm macho" kinda of thinking, and are happier for that.

The pill is probably responsible for a bunch of crap at the societal level just like any other group of hormone changing medications taken by such a wide chunk of the population would be. But it probably has little to do with homosexuality since we have good historical record of prevalence varying inversely with persecution.

>prevalence varying inversely with persecution

No, we don't because before we didn't even count. It is possible that

1. there were fewer homosexual men in the past

2. increase in the number of homosexual men is due to less persecution

are both contemporarily true.

Oh, I've wondered about the societal effects of birth control pills for a couple of decades. Stuff like the above theory, effects on difficulty conceiving when women get off of it finally.

Talk to a doctor sometime about the volume of 30+ year old women who are on some type of daily anxiety medication. My understanding is that it's approaching 50% or higher.

Was that level of anxiety among women common before birth control?

IMO there are a whole lot of questions that come from it.

You spotted a social phenomena, but you have no reason to blame the borth control pill- it could bechemical pollution, tefllon, etc.

There’s certainly plausible reason to wonder about it. Consider how many women take it, for many many years. Many women go through multiple different types of pills due to the effects certain pills will have on their body, from weight gain to period frequency.

You do that for 5, 10, 15…20 years…it’s reasonable to wonder what it will do longer term.

At the same time, as you age and have older friend groups it’s hard not to notice a correlation between the friends you have who never took birth control or minimally took it who also have no anxiety issues and those that don’t.

Maybe it could be something else but IMO it warrants further study.

It seems plausible. During the first section of this talk on transgender medical care Dr. Will Powers touches on exactly what you're talking about except in his example it was a highly potent estrogen prescribed to mothers who had had miscarriages to take during pregnancy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fefu33e8O-0

That, and guys tend to medicate their hormones too these days (finasteride). Yes, DHT is "just" a parallel path -- but when is biology ever that cut and dry, especially when there's so much money to be made?

Does anyone actually start taking finasteride before the emergence of sexuality, though? As far as I'm aware, treatment is usually initiated at age 21 or later. In that case, changes in sexuality should be very hard to miss, and we'd know by now.

Yeah, it's after puberty -- but are you so sure it would be hard to miss? Small effects with lots of confounding variables and an enormous profit incentive to miss seem easy to miss.

In order to do due diligence for this reply, I typed "finasteride" into Google Scholar, and the first suggestion was "finasteride side effects", which brings up 20,500 results, including highly cited papers dealing specifically with sexual side effects:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S174360951...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17436...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15579883145384...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001502821...

I think that in that context, it would be hard to miss!

As I once read, the contraceptive is not eliminated by the body, so it gets washed out by the kidneys and ends up via sewers in water everywhere. No idea how long-lived it is though. I guess it would break down naturally?

If true, that sounds like something that should have worried and concerned those that "certified" those pills safe for human consumption.

That might also fit with the fact that the youngest is usually the homosexual one. Mom started taking the pill to prevent anymore kids, but one slipped through.

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