Hooked on Hormones

KMO and Olga welcome Holly Grigg-Spall, author of Sweetening the Pill: How We Got Hooked on Hormonal Birth Control, to the C-Realm Podcast to talk about the psychopharmacology of the Pill. Guided by the mechanistic mentality of industrial culture, we imagine that drugs act on discrete components of our minds or bodies. We imagine that a pill can turn off our reproductive system without affecting our thoughts, our behaviors, our preferences or our understanding of who we are. Many feminists see the Pill as an icon of female liberation and cannot accept that a pro-choice feminist like Holly has good reason to scrutinize the pill and to ask whose needs it serves.

Music by Lindsay Katt.