Is your birth control pill controlling you?

•Studies have found that women on the Pill are attracted to men with lower testosterone levels and that its hormones can affect a woman’s memory.A new book has claimed that the Pill is in fact the tool of a capitalist patriarchy intent on altering and suppressing femininity.She adds that women’s unquestioning acceptance of such powerful […]

•Studies have found that women on the Pill are attracted to men with lower testosterone levels and that its hormones can affect a woman’s memory.A new book has claimed that the Pill is in fact the tool of a capitalist patriarchy intent on altering and suppressing femininity.
She adds that women’s unquestioning acceptance of such powerful medications is in some ways a submission to a culture steeped in hatred of the feminine.
Holly Grigg-Spall has written ‘Sweetening the Pill: Or How We Got Hooked on Hormonal Birth Control’. She believes that a number of studies proves her point that contraception is in fact controlling women
A book review by Vice magazine writer Kelly Bourdet reveals that while Ms Grigg-Spall was on birth control she felt a distance between herself and her ‘femaleness’.
Ms Grigg-Spall said: ‘Over the years [of being on the Pill] I felt no connection between myself and my body, between myself and the world around me, between my femaleness and myself.’
A 2011 study of women both on and off hormonal contraception found that the medication did affect a woman’s memory.
Both sets of women were shown photos and told a story about a car accident involving a young boy and his subsequent hospital visit.
Studies have shown that the Pill affects both women’s choice of partner and her memory
Women on the pill remembered more of the emotional aspects of the story – the boy being hurt, what happened to him at the hospital – while the women who were not on the Pill were more likely to recall the details of the scene – what things looked like and where they were placed.
Ms Grigg-Spall argues that if memory contextualises our past experiences and governs our future behaviour and understanding of the world, then a drug that alters it in even a slight way might have far-reaching consequences.
Indeed, the changing testosterone levels in a woman’s body has been shown to affect women’s choice of sexual partners and mates.
A 2012 study revealed that women on hormonal birth control – which suppresses naturally occurring testosterone – were attracted to men with lower testosterone levels.
However when women went off of the Pill, and their testosterone levels increased, their attraction to their feminine partners decreased.
Reviewer Kelly Bourdet agrees that the evidence does show that the hormonal contraception has powerful and life-altering side effects.
And she adds that it’s fair to wonder whether a drug that could alter our choice in long-term partners is ‘too powerful for comfort’.
But the reviewer says the anti-Pill activist’s argument has its flaws. She says that it presumes that a woman is ‘somehow entirely defined by her hormones, lack of hormones, or artificially achieved level of hormones.
‘That a woman couldn’t possibly use her brain to decide to alter her hormones and that the hormonal levels once believed to rule women’s behaviour in such a way to make her nervous, emotional, and hysterical, once suppressed, rule her in an entirely different way.’
The book is available in the U.S. from September 7 and in the UK from September 27.
Culled from dailymail.co.uk