The BBC has this fascinating test to determine what sex your brain is. My overall score ended up being exactly the average score for all women, but on the individual sub-tests I scored either excessively feminine or excessively masculine.
One of the sub-tests showed me two slightly different pictures of the same man, and I had to pick which one I found more attractive. (There is also the option to be shown pictures of women, but you had to pick gender or the other so I picked men.) When I got my results for this sub-test, it explained that one of each set of photos had been altered to make the man in the picture either appear more masculine (i.e. having physical features that suggest a higher testosterone level) or more feminine (i.e. having physical features that suggest a lower testosterone level). It turned out that in every case, I picked the picture that suggested a lower testosterone level.
According to the information on the BBC website, women tend to be attracted to more masculine features while ovulating. This would explain my reaction; I have been taking chemical measures to prevent ovulation for years, and, unless someone went terribly wrong without my noticing, I have not ovulated once during my entire adult life.
This all got me thinking. In general, I consciously tend to find physical features that suggest high levels of testosterone unattractive. I also tend to find behaviour, attitudes, etc. that suggest high levels of testosterone unattractive. And by "unattractive" in this paragraph, I don't mean just sexually unattractive, but generally unpleasant and something to be avoided if at all possible. Would I find it more attractive (or at least less unattractive) if I were ovulating? Who knows? I'm certainly not going to risk ovulating to find out!
Then it occurred to me that they should do a study on this. I don't know where they'd get enough willing volunteers, but if they could they'd need to find women who would be willing to spend several months with a normal, fertile menstrual cycle, and several months without ovulating at all by taking estrogen every day. Then they should test their reactions to high-testosterone images or situations during every week of their fertile cycles, and during every week of their infertile cycles. Obviously, if the information provided by the BBC is corret, we'd expect the attractiveness of testosterone to peak at ovulation. But how would the attractiveness of testosterone compare at an infertile time in an unregulated cycle, and during an estrogen-regulated cycle?
But then there's also the fact that birth control pills (which are essentially estrogen) work by making the body think that it has already ovulated. I don't actually know whether this gives your brain the same hormonal level as peak fertility or the same hormonal level as low fertility. Peak fertility might make sense because if you've already ovulated and haven't menstruated yet, you've got an egg floating around in there, so the part of your brain that's driven by a primal reproductive urge would want you to seek out providers of sperm, which, according to the BBC, your brain manifests as high-testosterone men. But low fertility would also make sense, because the purpose of birth control is to make you infertile. So if it's low fertility, that would explain my dislike of testosterone. If it's peak fertility, I guess that means I'm just not into testosterone, and perhaps my brain is hard-wired not to breed, which would be convenient.
Further research is required.
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