Debbie says:
We humans are just so ridiculously good at telling each other what everybody should be doing, when we really mean, “Hey! I found out what I should be doing!”
Jill at Feministe provides the latest example. Holly Grigg-Spall, for whom birth control pills were A Bad Idea, has written a book called Sweetening the Pill: or How We Got Hooked on Hormonal Birth Control, in which she apparently argues that birth control pills (and other varieties of hormonal birth control, such as contraceptive implants) are a capitalist/patriarchal plot. Lindsay Beyerstein’s review in Slate describes Grigg-Spall’s argument as
… that the so-called liberating force of the pill has been illusory. She claims that the pill keeps women in the thrall of patriarchal capitalism and destroys their health in the process. The addiction allusion in the title is not a metaphor—Grigg-Spall is convinced that the pill is an addictive drug. …
You might assume that women take the birth control pill for, well, birth control, but Grigg-Spall thinks she sees a more sinister agenda. “Women do not choose … hormonal contraceptives because these things are necessary or convenient for them or because they consciously need or want to,” she asserts. Instead, according to the author, “Women are encouraged to suppress their monthly ovulatory cycle in order to not miss any days of work or so as they can remain sexually available or experience only one-note moods.”
Sweetening the Pill frames hormonal contraception as a societywide assault on ovulation and menstruation orchestrated by the capitalist system and its handmaidens in the medical establishment and feminism. Grigg-Spall ascribes the pill’s popularity to a misogynist culture that expresses its contempt for the female body by squelching its natural cycles with artificial hormones.
Beyerstein knows more than enough to put this claim into perspective, starting off with birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger‘s dream “of a ‘magic pill’ that would put women in charge of their own fertility.”
At Feministe, Jill relates her own dissatisfaction with the Pill and then says:
… one friend feels like she gets in her best shape by running, another by doing Barre classes and Pilates, whereas I prefer yoga. Shocking news: People are different, and our bodies work differently! The Pill works really well for a lot of women. It works less well for others. It’s intolerable for some.
Like Jill, I didn’t spend a lot of time on birth control pills, though I’ve never fully understood why I stopped. I just literally woke up one morning in my early 20s, saying, “I don’t take birth control pills any more,” with complete unshakable conviction. I’ve often wished I could make other decisions that clearly. I used barrier methods ever since, and of course, once the age of AIDS came along and the issue was not just preventing pregnancy, the pill became a single-use tool in a multi-need context.
Jill and Lindsay both make useful points about statistics, and the important role of doctors in health care decisions, but neither of them zeroes in on Grigg-Spall’s willingness to judge other women’s choices.
The world is chock-full of groups, forces, and movements that want to take agency away from women, want to take agency away from all marginalized groups, even want to take agency away from mainstream non-marginalized affluent white men. Some of them want to turn us into blind consumers, others into dutiful uncomplaining workers, others into followers of this or that or the other political/religious/cultural set of beliefs. Some of them overlap.
When she says “Women do not choose … hormonal contraceptives because these things are necessary or convenient for them or because they consciously need or want to,” Grigg-Spall is saying that women as a group do not know what’s good for us, that those of us who don’t see things her way are misguided tools of the capitalist system, the medical establishment, and misogynist culture.
Somehow Grigg-Spall differentiates her own recognition that the pill was doing her harm from another woman’s possible understanding that the pill offers her freedom, or makes her feel good, or is simply what she chooses to do. Grigg-Spall is, either unwittingly or uncaringly, dividing the world into Smart and Aware Women (who do not take the pill) and Blindly Following Women (who do). I find it fascinating that, at least in the discussion in the blogosphere, actual concerns regarding unwanted pregnancy take a back seat to conceptions of the role of women in the workplace, sexual availability, and libido.
As feminists, as supporters of agency in everyone, we undermine our work whenever we attribute a woman’s (a human’s) decision about their own body as caving to outside pressure. Like Lindsay and Jill, I wholly support Holly Grigg-Spall’s right not to take birth control pills–and to write about what she believes the dangers of hormonal birth control to be, and to share her fears with the widest possible audience. I only wish she would acknowledge that what’s right for her (and Jill and me) is not right for every woman; that we can make conscious, aware, informed choices that are not the same as the ones made by the woman next door, the woman in the next cubicle, let alone the woman in a different racial, socio-economic, or cultural group.
Have it your way, Ms. Grigg-Spall. Just, please, encourage everyone else to do the same.