{"id":21002,"date":"2024-06-20T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-20T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/naturalwomanhood.org\/?p=21002"},"modified":"2024-06-20T08:44:29","modified_gmt":"2024-06-20T13:44:29","slug":"anticonceptivos-libido-baja","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/naturalwomanhood.org\/es\/birth-control-low-libido\/","title":{"rendered":"Lo que The New York Times pasa por alto sobre la relaci\u00f3n entre anticonceptivos y libido baja"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cI am convinced birth control destroyed my sex drive\u201d says the title of a Reddit post<\/a> in r\/TwoXChromosomes, a women\u2019s issues forum. Hundreds of comments follow with women describing how being on the Pill has completely changed their sex drive\u2014and not for the better. \u201cWhen I was on hormonal BC, I completely lost my sex drive\u201d says one commenter. \u201c[Birth control] destroyed mine and took the better part of a year<\/strong> to come back so I could experience what a natural female sex drive felt like,\u201d says another.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But you don\u2019t have to go down Reddit rabbit holes to discover women who are pinpointing their birth control as the culprit behind their weak libidos. This woman on Tiktok<\/a> describes getting her libido back just days after going off the Pill, and there are a plethora of other videos describing how to fix low libido caused by birth control.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not just individual women on social media who are opening up about this touchy subject \u2014 even The New York Times<\/em> picked up on it. In a January 2024 article titled \u201cThe Link Between Birth Control and Sex Drive\u201d<\/a>, the author delves into what we know about how birth control can change your sex drive. While the NYT article gets a lot right, it ultimately misses the complete picture: birth control radically changes sex for every <\/em>woman who takes it, on top of its disastrous effects on sex drive for some.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why does birth control affect your libido?<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019ve found that birth control negatively affects your libido, you are clearly not alone. But how and why does this happen? It mostly comes down to the fact that taking hormonal birth control makes<\/a> your testosterone do a nosedive [1]. The synthetic hormones in the Pill suppress the testosterone your body produces, plus<\/em> they increase the production of a hormone that binds to existing testosterone in the bloodstream and makes it inactive\u2014a double whammy for your levels of testosterone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the surface, this might not seem like a big deal. Isn\u2019t testosterone the male hormone? <\/em>But it\u2019s actually a huge <\/em>deal for female libido. Testosterone peaks<\/a> in a normally cycling woman at the midpoint of her cycle, right around ovulation [2]. This surge in testosterone causes an increase in your sex drive, which is why you have increased libido<\/a> during ovulation (which is also when you\u2019re most likely to get pregnant!). In other words\u2026 the human body is designed to want <\/em>to reproduce.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019re not<\/em> naturally cycling and taking hormonal birth control instead, you not only miss out on this ovulatory testosterone surge. Your testosterone levels are also dampened for the remainder of the month, too. According to the NYT article on birth control and libido, some women will experience a more exaggerated drop in sex drive due to genetic differences that require more free testosterone levels to activate their hormone receptors. This explains why some women experience little effect on their libido when they\u2019re on the Pill, while others experience a complete deadening of their sexual desire.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n