If you’re a woman and you’ve been online in the last few years, you may have been victimised by Big Hormone. Every third post on social media seems to be about the impact of hormones on women or how to ‘optimise’ your life around them: some influencers peddle the idea of cycle-tracking and syncing your diets or workouts to your menstrual cycles, while others encourage women to give up birth control and take supplements to address ‘cortisol imbalances.’ At the same time, memes about going feral with horniness during ovulation, or being ugly during the luteal phase abound.

If the internet is to be believed, women’s hormones hold total sway over all their thoughts and feelings. But while it is true that hormones can – and do – impact our moods and overall health, there’s a risk that some of these discussions are simply regurgitating misogynistic narratives of yore – ones that said women were incapable of wielding political power because their periods made them too emotional, or that women embodied ‘passion’ and men ‘reason’. Plus, whether it’s the advice to do more strenuous exercise during the follicular phase or the idea of ‘post-ovulation clarity,’ the vast majority of the ideas about hormones going around are complete nonsense. 

For example, you might be more likely to feel hornier during ovulation or more irritable pre-menstruation, but this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. Hormones don’t affect everyone in the same way, nor do they affect a single person the same way every month, or on a completely regular schedule. This is why the trendy idea of cycle-syncing your workouts or meals to your hormonal fluctuations is a “gimmick,” Dr Jan Toledano, a doctor specialising in women’s hormones and the founder of the London Hormone Clinic, says. Plus, “lots of things can affect how we feel, as well as our hormones.”

Hormones do – obviously – have some impact on women’s physical and emotional health. But unless you have a hormonal condition like endometriosis, PMOS, or PMDD, these fluctuations shouldn’t be big enough to affect your functioning. “Women shouldn’t be at the behest of their cycle, or suffering through their menstrual cycles or peri/menopause,” Dr Toledano says.

We can’t blame women for turning to social media (or the internet, more broadly) for information about hormone health: in many cases, a do-it-yourself approach to health is a legitimate response to medical sexism and general lack of knowledge about women’s reproductive health. A lot of the impetus behind cycle-tracking, for example, comes out of “alternative spaces for women to attend to their health outside of received systems of medical knowledge, and a distrust of androcentric and sexist medicine,” says Sarah Richardson, professor of the history of science and studies of women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard University. Much of the thinking in these spaces, however, relies on “this mystical suggestion that there’s some untapped reservoir of knowledge in the menstrual cycle that will help women have better health and performance – but that’s not true,” Richardson says. Because we do, in fact, know how hormones function.

This is the thing: the narrative about hormones on the internet at the moment is simply old-fashioned. Chalking up women’s feelings and behaviours to their hormones rather than as legitimate responses to their circumstances, or suggesting that they need to change the way they are living in order to tend to their changeable and primitive hormones, plays into historical misogynistic ideas. “There was a long-standing idea that ovaries caused problems like wandering uteri and hysteria, and caused women to have ‘chimeric’ and ‘labile’ emotions and natures,” Richardson says. “The ovaries and the menstrual cycle have long been blamed for indiscernible, untreatable maladies in medicine.”

Women shouldn’t be at the behest of their cycle, or suffering through their menstrual cycles

Throughout history, women have been “expected to manage their hormones in order to be productive,” Richardson says, and this idea is still around in 2026 with a capitalist, technology-forward bent. “We think that technology can tell you something that you don’t know about yourself, and that hormones are really what’s in control. There’s a gaslighting aspect to this – your perception of your body is belied by what the computer tells you, and this leads to a reliance on a tool or technology marketed to women as the newest and best ‘solution,’” she says. 

This reappearance of antiquated, conservative ideas plays into the right-wing shift we’re seeing in politics at the moment. With political divides widening between men and women and anti-trans sentiment and policies on the rise, The Culture seems to be fully re-embracing the idea of the gender binary after a brief period of respite. The emphasis on hormones only reinforces this, solidifying the gender essentialist idea that men and women are inherently different because of women’s reproductive systems.

Believing that women’s intellectual and physical capabilities change massively across the month reduces women into bodily, emotional messes — re-justifying misogynist lines of thinking and undoing decades of work by feminists. Even if done in the name of empowerment, comedy, or wellness, making out that menstrual cycles have such an outsized impact on women’s mental and physical function suggests that they are less rational and capable than men. It also excludes trans women and women with hormonal disorders or reproductive conditions from the mainstream definition of womanhood. And all this sits in service of most populist right-wing movements, which utilise strict gender binaries and gender roles to promote traditional family structures. 

It will always be a good thing for women to better understand their hormones and bodies. “We need to understand what’s going on in our bodies across the month and in our different life phases, because then we know if something's going wrong and we can ask for help,” Dr Toledano says. But this needs to be based on real science and how we’re actually feeling, not generalised, biologically-essentialist drivel meant to sell us things or promote a return to more oppressive traditional values. As Richardson says: “Any time that we’re building a structure of recommendations for bodily comportment and health that is not based on empirical evidence, it’s harmful.”