The Cost of ‘Natural’ Womanhood

Supposedly, the menstrual cycle is a gift. It’s a product of good design. It’s a miraculous dance of hormones that can’t be contained. Such are the messages flooding the internet these days, courtesy of lifestyle influencers, crunchy moms, so-called hormone coaches, and all sorts of popular entertainers.

The menstrual cycle, according to these same voices, is also an emotional roller coaster, best ridden with the aid of bespoke products. Viral memes and TikTok trends play up women’s purportedly excessive spike in libido during ovulation and dramatic irrationality during menstruation and the luteal phase (the 14 days or so between ovulation and menstruation). The cycle-tracking app Belle Health has used Moana’s verdant mother goddess and her volcanic counterpart to illustrate the difference. The meal-kit company Hungry Root recommends ordering sweets during the luteal phase. Every stage of the cycle has its own skin serum. You can test your hormone levels at a boutique women’s clinic, or at home using a $100-plus device and a monthly app subscription. (Evidence for the efficacy of most of these tests, devices, and apps is mixed at best.)

Riding the hormonal highs and lows is supposed to be worth it in part because of ovulation, a purportedly glorious, clear-skinned moment that justifies all the cramps and that one influencer calls women’s “secret superpower.” Advocates for a “natural” menstrual cycle argue that modern medicine—especially birth control—has robbed women of this gift, and therefore their true selves. If reclaiming it comes with wild mood swings, well, that’s a small price to pay. But in the long term, buying into these stories about mood and biology could have a higher cost.   

Hormone shifts, of course, can exert some influence on mood. Progesterone, estrogen, and other hormones fluctuate throughout the menstrual cycle, and many people feel the effects of the sudden peaks and dips. Nearly all women report some mood changes and discomfort in the week prior to menstruation. Roughly 3 percent of premenopausal women likely experience premenstrual dysphoric disorder, which is characterized by severe mood swings related to one’s cycle. PCOS, fibroids, and endometriosis come with additional hormonal fluctuations, which can cause intense pain and bleeding, irregular periods, hair growth, and weight gain. Menstruation itself can be painful (not to mention annoying), which is unlikely to put anyone in a good mood. Menopause—and the hormonal changes that can last for years leading up to it—can also wreak physical and psychological havoc.

[Read: Women in menopause are getting short shrift]

But despite their use of scientific-sounding language like follicular and luteal, content creators severely exaggerate the influence of hormonal changes and the euphoria they can supposedly inspire. Hormones are not just powerful, they insist, but empowering, the ticket to health, harmony, and femininity. If your follicular phase doesn’t make you feel extra beautiful and sexual, or if you feel generally out of whack, something must be interfering with your hormones. Maybe that’s because you’re eating wrong, exercising wrong, too stressed, too caffeinated, or—God forbid—taking hormonal birth control.

Contraceptive pills, hormonal IUDs, birth-control implants, and Plan B all work by suppressing ovulation. And for that reason, hormonal contraception has in recent years been presented as a harmful disruptor of the natural joys of womanhood. “When you change your hormones, you change who you are,” Sarah Hill, an evolutionary psychologist at Texas Christian University and author of The Period Brain said in a 2024 interview. “If you want women to be feminine again, and soft again and beautiful,” the right-wing wellness podcaster Alex Clark declared last year, “women need to be ovulating.”

The only way to really get in touch with your body, according to this line of thinking, is to give your hormones free rein. In a Rolling Stone interview last year, the singer Lorde described how she stopped taking birth control before writing her most recent album. Her next ovulation, she said, was “one of the best drugs I’ve ever done.” (She chalked her decision to go off birth control up to right-wing influence, acknowledging a split from her usual politics.)

[Read: Why are so many women being told their hormones are out of whack?]

The promise of a “natural” approach to women’s health is seductive, in large part because of the ways that modern medicine has failed women. Women’s health is perennially understudied: In 2024, for instance, 6 percent of the annual National Institutes of Health budget went toward studying women’s health, and that was before the wave of scientific-grant terminations under the Trump administration. This could help explain why hormonal birth control is so often prescribed for dozens of ailments—including painful periods, fibroids, and PCOS—that have few other effective treatments. Plus, the side-effect profile of hormonal birth control can be brutal: It can cause weight gain, exacerbate some underlying mood disorders, and raise the risk of blood clots (but much less than pregnancy does), which in turn can increase the risk of stroke. It also increases the risk of certain types of cancers (while reducing the risk of other types).

But jettisoning hormonal treatments also means losing their benefits. Decades of research indicate that the hormones used in contraceptives, menopause care, and IVF are safe for the large majority of people. Hormonal IUDs and birth-control pills are highly effective, especially compared with more MAHA-aligned fertility-awareness methods. Hormones are also a lifeline for women who have uncomfortable-to-debilitating conditions such as endometriosis and premenstrual dysphoric disorder, as well as a range of autoimmune disorders that have nothing to do with reproduction. Hormonal infertility treatments have helped people safely create and expand families since the late 1970s.

Claiming that the menstrual cycle is mystical and powerful might sound feminist. But teaching women that they should naturally feel erratic at virtually every point in their cycle could lead women to downplay—and miss out on treatment for—actual mood or hormonal disorders. The attitude also has social consequences. Denigrating hormonal birth control when access to abortion is restricted could leave more women with unwanted pregnancies; it dovetails with some pronatalists’ argument that women should dedicate themselves to motherhood and the conservative push for women to embrace traditional gender roles. “Whenever we see a precipitous rise in hormones as an area of interest, it usually also indicates shifting ideas of gender and culture,” Alexander Borsa, a public-health researcher at Columbia University, told me. If women are susceptible to biologically driven instability, how could Americans possibly trust them to be equal to men? To hold political power? To run companies? (In fact, an essay arguing that women are fit to do no such things went viral last fall.)

[Read: No, women aren’t the problem]

Urging women to “balance” their hormones “naturally” perpetuates an insidious, age-old idea that women are especially close to nature and God. “There’s a long tradition of linking women to nature, men to culture,” Helen King, a historian and the author of Immaculate Forms, told me in an email. “In Ancient Greek medicine, women’s flesh was seen as more absorbent, as resembling a fleece, whereas men’s flesh was like a fabric garment. Women were closer to the natural product, the raw materials, men were superior as the finished product.”

At their most chilling, such beliefs are paired with arguments that women not only are especially natural, but also should stay that way—that modern medicine shouldn’t try to understand or interfere with women’s bodies. Many in the MAHA movement, for example, urge women of childbearing age to be as “natural” as possible—to embrace traditional gender roles while rejecting chemicals, vaccines, additives in foods, and of course birth control. The federal government has, to its credit, recently championed the use of estrogen to relieve symptoms of menopause. But at the same time, for women of childbearing age, it is promoting restorative reproductive medicine, a form of fertility treatment that eschews hormonal intervention and is not empirically backed.

The more people believe that women are ruled by their untameable hormones, the more women stand to lose actual power. Leaning into the supposed euphoria of ovulation is fun, sure—who wouldn’t want to try the best drug Lorde has ever taken? But that drug trip is fleeting. When it ends, what are women left with?