Digby has a hell of a post up right now about the anti-sex underpinnings of the anti-choice movement. She quotes an anti-choice blogger who rips shit on a woman who aborted because she couldn’t afford to raise a third child. And I quote the anti-choicer:
Digby makes the wisecrack about her not having sex. I can only take from his comment, that he is like so many other’s of the same ilk who believe we’re all like jungle animals and have to hump when the mood strikes. Of course, that isn’t the case. People don’t walk down the street and just bump into each other and start screwing (unless it’s a Cinemax movie). We have the mental capacity to be able to take care of such business in private. We also have the ability to abstain. Nothing is going to happen to us if we don’t have sex.
That last sentence there made me nearly spit out my drink in astonishment. Nothing is going to happen? Nothing? I’m trying to imagine the average woman telling her husband or boyfriend that she’s done with sex now that she’s had as many children as she wants, and whether or not that would result in nothing happening.
The abstinence line of reasoning has always struck me as a fundamental indication that the anti-sex stance is mostly anti-female for this very reason. The line is pretty much, “Don’t want a baby, close your legs,” which has the appeal of being theorotically possible. And if you’re the sort who feels life-in-theory is good enough, then that will work for you. But “close your legs”, while arguably not a misogynist statement in theory is definitely one in practice.
Digby’s post is how “close your legs” isn’t going to work because sexual pleasure is part of life. I would add that “close your legs” then in anti-woman because it’s based on the notion that sexual pleasure for women is casting pearls before swine. Avedon also has a great post reminding everyone that the “close your legs” argument is not only degrading to women but also is a classist argument, because making abortion and even some kinds of birth control illegal mostly means they will be priced out of the hands of working class people. So the “close your legs” argument is based on the notion that sex is too fine a pleasure for women and lower class people to partake of it.
And my take on this entire situation is that even in the 21st century, even if women felt comfortable giving up sex itself, that’s not really an option for we members of the sex class. The prescribed life cycle of the human female from the anti-choice right wing would go something like this:
- Abstain until marriage
- Start having children straightaway when you marry
- If you have a job, quit it to raise your children like a good mommy
- When you’ve had as many children as you can handle, tell your husband that you won’t be having sex with him anymore.
- Nothing will happen to you when you do this. We swear. Certainly nothing like finding yourself trying to get a job for the first time in 20 years while your ex-husband tells his new girlfriend that you wouldn’t even have sex with him anymore.
The vast majority of the time we argue that telling people not to have sex isn’t workable, we pro-choicers argue up why women choose to have sex. But I think it’s important to note that abstinence isn’t a legitimate choice for most women in a patriarchy, so having conservatives even bring it up is fundamentally dishonest. I mean, even if there was a way for women to give up sex without having massive personal ramifications, I don’t think that’s a legitimate thing to demand, but it’s important to note that there’s not really an abstinence option in the wingnut model of gender relations that’s workable for most women. While I state repeatedly on this blog that anti-choice is about punishing women for sex, I’d actually therefore argue that it’s about punishing women for existing, really.
I went back to the blog Digby was responding to and saw the blogger’s response, and it was really interesting to me because he thinks he has a “gotcha” to Digby.
If sex is something so natural and such a fundamental part of life, then one of the by-products of that action is pregnancy. Isn’t then a woman who chooses to terminate that pregnancy interrupting and interfering with that very natural order of our humanity?
Few things reveal the underlying misogyny of the anti-choice position more than the “natural” argument. I’m hard-pressed to think of any male-specific medical practice that anyone’s agitating to ban on the theory that it’s unnatural. Heart attacks are the sometimes consequence of eating too much bacon, especially for men, and I don’t remember there being a huge political movement to ban open heart surgery because it meddles with the natural order. Sex is a natural good, unwanted pregnancy is a natural bad. Natural but bad things are usually eligible to be unnaturally fixed the way humans want them, unless of course those things affect only women. True, the conservative blogger in the first response said lung cancer and heart disease are natural “consequences” but I don’t recall where he supported laws banning chemotherapy and cholesterol controlling medications.
But what I found most fascinating about the response to Digby’s response was that once Digby stated a strong unwillingness to go without sex, the blogger, who assumes Digby is male, immediately agreed.
Ok, so I assumed and I was wrong. Point taken. Yes, sex is a part of life. And contrary to what some of the simpletons in his comments section say, I like almost anybody else, enjoys sex. In addition, I never said anything about the morality of it. Sex by itself is not immoral.
I hate to be suspicious–okay, I love it–but I have a weird feeling that part of the reason the blogger abandoned the “close your legs” argument so quickly is because he assumed that Digby is a member of the sex that doesn’t open their legs to fuck. Whether Digby is or isn’t doesn’t matter, though, because if Digby is male then he clearly understands why those who can’t get pregnant aren’t in the position to tell people that can that pregnancy is a perfectly acceptable “consequence” of sex. I’m not one to say that men shouldn’t be part of the abortion debate, but I’m inclined to think that if more men showed some decent humility in the face of the fact that they’re debating whether someone has a right to get out of a situation they could never actually be in, there wouldn’t be an abortion debate at all.
126 Responses to “Sex: Evil or just merely wicked?”
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if the abstinenece types weren’t anti-sex the line wouldn’t be “close your legs” it’d be “keep that pee-pee away from the magic clam!” and abstinenece only education would be all about how to have sex without V/P penetration.
Amanda is really onto something here, although it’s a pretty straightforward point that maybe should have been self-evident to me long ago.
Next time some guy pontificates about how women shouldn’t have sex if they’re not prepared to deal with the “consequences,” ask them if they’re perfectly happy to go through life not having sex with anyone at all other than women who are interested in having babies with them.
Some small minority of men will say yes, but this angle stands a real chance of driving the point home.
I know it’s (mostly) irrelevant to the discussion, but I like the typo “theorotically”, which in my mind equals “theoretically + erotic”. Erotic theories are things we need more of.
Amanda, putting conservatives’ expectations of women in a list like that was brilliant. Because you really can’t appreciate just how ridiculous their abortion rhetoric is without seeing how it fits in with their other rhetoric. IMO, to make the list complete, it needs something about how feminazis are frigid bitches and won’t have sex with their men, and a good conservative wife always will. Because that would put a big bright spotlight on the contradictory expectations for “good” women. You must have sex with your man or else you’re frigid! But you don’t have to have sex, oh no, and if you find yourself with too many children it’s your fault for having sex! The truth is, of course, that these conservatives don’t want women controlling their reproduction even through abstinence. The only “good” choice in their schema is to keep having sex with your man whenever he wants, and to carry every pregnancy to term whether it’s wanted or not.
Anti-choicers often say that since pregnancy is a consequence of sex, having sex is consenting to pregnancy. Since you took the risk of creating the fetus through sex, you are now responsible for the fetus’s wellbeing and must donate your body as an incubator. I would truly love to see this line of logic applied elsewhere. Death is often a consequence of driving in a car. Does a parent who puts their kid in a car deserve to be tried for murder, should the kid get in an accident? We could stretch this argument to even more horrifying proportions. If the anti-choicers really wanted to be consistent, they wouldn’t allow abortion even when the mother’s life was in danger. Because pregnancy is a possible consequence of sex, and death is a possible consequence of pregnancy, so a woman who has sex is consenting to death, and a pregnant woman whose life is in danger just needs to suck it up and take responsibility for her actions and have the baby even if it kills her.
Honestly, you’d think from a purely self-interested perspective men would realize that spreading these ideas about sex makes them way less likely to get laid.
Digby rocks. This blogger was originally responding to Digby’s “Sodomized Virgin” post that referred to a demented comment made by Mr. Napoli, a state senator from South Dakota. I was watching the NewsHour when that horrible South Dakota state Senator theorized about the “perfect” rape victim that could by-pass his no-exception-for rape bill.
As Atrios says…these people are fucked up.
Leslie J. Reagan wrote a excellent book titled When Abortion Was A Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973. It is available on line for free as an e-scholarship edition from the University of California Press.
Reagan shows the practical, social and legal consequences for women of illegal abortion. She also researched the personal and group forms of resistance to state criminalization of abortion.
Chapter 8 discusses how “Jane” a group of feminists, provided over 11,000 safe illegal abortions to women in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Her epilogue is scary, yet relevant and helpful reading for all concerned pro-choice Americans.
That’s where the female dependency comes in, though. You get the woman, keep her birthin’ until she has to stay home because it’s just too expensive to put all those kids in day care. Then, if she wanted to leave you, she couldn’t, because she’s dependent. Which means that she has to have sex with you whenever you say because she can’t really afford to piss you off when you hold all the cards.
It’s sort of weird initially that some men really hate it when women enjoy sex, but if you think about it, it does make sense from a certain perspective. A woman who really is getting into sex is probably not afraid of getting pregnant, and some men unfortunately view pregnancy as the way to secure female dependency and therefore all the sex they want. Therefore the woman having fun in bed now can be viewed as someone who has an “out”, and that’s threatening.
There’s also that winger blogger’s whole “consequences” rap. Like you say, one consequence of bacon is open-heart surgery. Another is dying. Another is giving up bacon because you don’t like the first two choices.
The whole “consequences” argument is pinned on the ridiculous notion that abortion is not a consequence! Lemme see, lemme see…Sunday afternoon…pedicure and foot massage, or abortion? Decisions, decisions.
Abortion is surgery. It’s day surgery, and as such procedures go, it’s pretty lightweight (lower risk than pregnancy). But it does involve anesthesia so it’s not without risks. It does involve discomfort and recovery.
The point is, when they go on about how women who have sex should take the consequences of their actions, the answer is, they are. As in the case of bacon, they have a choice of consequences. One is childbirth. One is abortion. One is giving up sex or giving up fertility, because you don’t like either choice. It all files under C for Consequences.
I only have one question- did Digby nail it?
Isn’t refusal to have sex something that can be counted as an aggravating factor in a divorce or something like that?
Notice that Digby’s responder is a microcosm of the whole issue: it’s a man telling women (all of them!) what to do. The true root of the republican party.
I’m old enough to remember when Pat Robertson and his KK-Kristian Coalition decided to rebrand the anti-abortion folks as “pro-life” because they thought it sounded better to be for something than against something. They’ve always been of the “punish those bad girls for tempting our good boys into sex” school of reactionary behavior. (I refuse to call it “thought.”)
I’m not sure how anyone fighting to bring those days back can call themselves “pro-life” with a straight face, even such hypocritical scum as Ralph “The Gambler” Reed and Pat “Assassinate Chavez” Robertson. I knew someone who was a doctor during the bad old days when abortion was illegal. He had any number of horror stories of the things women suffered when trying to self-terminate unwanted pregnancies. One woman gave herself a douche using drain cleaner - which ate through into the large intestine and caused her to die a terrible, painful death. One of my best friend’s great-aunts bled to death in a hospital emergency room while a crowd of doctors and nurses watched because it was a criminal offense to treat someone dying from an illegal abortion.
It isn’t about “life starts at conception” - that is just a marketing campaign. It was and is about punishing women for failing to prevent men for having sex with them. Rape, incest, or consensual - it doesn’t matter to these folks. KK-Kristians believe women bear 100% of the blame any time any man has sex with them. This is, of course, consistant with the KK-Kristian belief that they themselves are never responsible for anything caused by their actions - but that other people should always be held accountable for any actions causing harm and/or grief. (NOTE: Christians don’t share this philosophy because they follow Christ’s teachings. KK-Kristians are the anti-christ crowd advocating hatred and violence in the name of Christ. “K”rab isn’t real crab, and KK-Kristians aren’t real Christians…)
he assumed that Digby is a member of the sex that doesn’t open their legs to fuck. Whether Digby is or isn’t doesn’t matter, though
I have to say that I’m becoming more and more curious about this, though; tristero definitely has referred to Digby as “he,” but I have been assured that Digby is a woman. I guess that leaving it a mystery makes his/her writing all the more compelling, though.
Anti-choicers often say that since pregnancy is a consequence of sex, having sex is consenting to pregnancy.
Yeah, and I have never once consented to pregnancy, or at least to carrying a pregnancy to term. I was a toddler when Roe was decided, and I have no memory of living in a world without available birth control and legal abortion– I’m sure as hell not going to accept it now. Sex entails plenty of other risks– social, emotional, various diseases– and I accept them, but I have never lived in a world where parenthood is inevitably one of them, and I refuse to in the future.
One of my best friend’s great-aunts bled to death in a hospital emergency room while a crowd of doctors and nurses watched because it was a criminal offense to treat someone dying from an illegal abortion.
Dear God.
I didn’t even know that was the case. How horrifying, especially to think we’re headed in that direction.
is digby a man or a woman?
I’m surprised we don’t have this link posted more often:
http://www.armchairsubversive.com/
Conservatives are really mentally screwed up. There is just no way around it.
The thing is that these rich sons of bitches who go around telling people “No sex for you! do not apply this rule to themselves. They can have all the sex they want, because they have a lot of money. Even if they reside in a Taliban state like South Dakota, they can still get abortions - or arrange them for theiir wives, daughters, mistresses, etc. All they have to do is call up the travel agent, make a plane reservation and a hotel reservation, pop litlle Missy into a taxicab to the airport, and bingo! problem solved. It’s only the people who can’t afford a few thousand bucks for this kind of indulgence that they rail and legislate against.
melandell is digby a man or a woman?
Yes!
[…] First off, Amanda injects some realism into one particular vision of marriage. […]
Digby is a guy, fer chrissakes!
You don’t need to be a woman to make or understand his arguments.
is digby a man or a woman?
To that question, we have a very clear answer: yes.
You rock, Amanda, but so does Digby. I happen to believe Digby is a man, but I honestly don’t know for sure. It doesn’t matter, anyway, does it?
I’ve always said that the wingnut conservatives don’t want poor people to have sex at all. They don’t want any money to go to family planning services for low-income people (for the first exhibit of that you can see my home state of MO, which did away with all family planning money a couple of years ago), they want abortion to be completely illegal, yet once a woman is pregnant they don’t want her to be able to get welfare to live on, either, and they don’t want affordable childcare so that she can work at a job. So the only answer for poor women is “Don’t have sex”, even if you’re married!!! They’re definitely nuts IMHO.
Holy Crap Alan that list is amazing.
I always knew social conservatives were crazy bastards but damn they are some sick pups!
Amanda wrote
“It’s sort of weird initially that some men really hate it when women enjoy sex,”
I think the men who hate it when women enjoy sex are the kind of men who are lousy lays.
As for me, I love it when women enjoy sex.
True, the conservative blogger in the first response said lung cancer and heart disease are natural “consequences� but I don’t recall where he supported laws banning chemotherapy and cholesterol controlling medications.
Impotence is a natural ‘consequence’ of, among other things, lack of exercise and obesity…Â I don’t hear any misogy-nazis clamoring for the outlawing of Viagra.
Complete agreement with both Digby and Amanda. Meanwhile, I bet Crooks and Liars would pay good money for video of Pat Robertson or James Dobson saying, “Keep that pee-pee away from the magic clam.”
I’m all in favor of the Lesbian Option - all the sex you want, no worries.
-m
If I was a woman, I would remind theocratic men, who support reproductive slavery, that women have battery operated devices that make men expendable, and that men, don’t have a reciprocal type of pleasure inducing device.
The classist aspect of this reminds me of a very poignant part of Frank McCourt’s autobiography Angela’s Ashes. (Has anyone read it?)
Angela McCourt, the title character and mother of Frank, half-jokingly tells her husband that she was tired having children and that they were no longer going to have sex. The reason being was she was sick of being poor (this was 1930s Ireland) and watching her children die of tuberculosis. His response? He said: “A wife must submit to her husband”. That ended the debate. Women can’t win, can they? I’m sure women in third-world countries have had this debate many times, and lost. This is one of the reasons I distrust the anti-choice argument that control of reproduction should rest firmly on the woman. Often, women have no choice in the matter.
“Pro-Life” is no longer acceptable as a term to describe those who would run roughshod over a woman’s sovereign rights to run her own body. For thousands of years women have had various medicines and procedures (often “folk” medicine) to terminate unwanted pregnancies, but with the recent rise in theocratic behavior in the United States, only wealthy women will have access to safe abortions.
I suggest that we replace the phrase “Pro-Life” with “War On Women” i.e. replace “She/he is pro-life” with “She/he supports the War on Women.” When someone doesn’t really care about the life of the mother, or supports the Death Penalty, or supports our military being used to kill people who did not attack us, such a person is not pro-life. When we craft laws that prohibit women from running their bodies as they see fit, we are taking part in the War On Women.
+++
That armchair subversive link has me thinking.
There is so obviously a good deal of sexual disfunction amongst the social conservative crowd.
They are either afraid of sex or disgusted by it or in awe of it but never comfortable with it.
I think it is really unhealthy the way these right wing wackos are so hung-up about sex. I mean I like sex, I enjoy sex, I think I’m pretty good at it but I haven’t thought about it constantly since I left puberty. I never wonder what kind of sex my neighbors (or even my friends) are interested in. These right wingers just seem to have never left junior high school.
(Living in a sort of bubble with no friends or relatives who are social conservatives they really seem alien to me so I just have to speculate on their motivations.)
I always felt that the people who were most upset about Clinton’s private life were the kind of guys who have to pay hookers when they cheat on their wives. They were pissed that this guy was getting for free what they have to pay for.
I’m not one to say that men shouldn’t be part of the abortion debate, but I’m inclined to think that if more men showed some decent humility in the face of the fact that they’re debating whether someone has a right to get out of a situation they could never actually be in, there wouldn’t be an abortion debate at all.
I agree that the anti-choice crowd is mysoginist.
But I think you are creating just a bit of a false dichotomy here. The father is thrust into a similar situation as the mother in the case of unwanted pregnancy. Legally and financially, not to mention morally and ethically, he must provide for the child. If he complains, the common refrain is “keep it in your pants.” There’s a bit of anti-male bias in that as well.
And I don’t think it’s all that rare for a woman to become pregnant — through joint effort no doubt — and choose to have the child against the father’s wishes.
It’s just a bit more complicated than it seemed you were allowing for.
I am father to a child from a woman who did not fulfill her end of the (birth control) bargain. I felt forced to stay in a relationship with an emotionally “clingy” person who I was about to leave, but for her (surprise!) pregnancy. We are separated now, at an enormous emotional (and financial) cost to both of us. Luckily, the child was spared a messy separation process; she and I have reached an understanding and are amicably separated. In fact, at this point, we are allies (there is no other way as I see it) and I respect her as a human being.
But that hasn’t made the experience easy by any stretch of the imagination. I have suffered from depression and health ramifications, and am instantly a single parent. I think our child is handling it remarkably well but this is not the sort of family life I had hoped to have one day.
It’s hard for me to even say these things because I anticipate the flipside of Digby’s commenter: “you should have thought of that when you had sex with her.” The fact that she and I discussed birth control, that she argued strenuously in favor of her preferred form, and then “forgot” to take her pills, for several days running, is not germaine.
I never assumed the reason for any of that was anti-male. I just figured it had to be that way. I figured it was a way of shaming men into doing their duty — you got her pregnant, now you have to marry her.
Anyway, the point is simply this: that isn’t really something that women face. Getting a guy pregnant, a guy who they had wanted to get away from, finding out he didn’t use protection even though he had said he would, and then being tied to that person for the rest of her life.
I am tied to her, and she to me, for the rest of our lives. I don’t remember having the final say in whether this would be the case. She held most of the cards.
And I’m not sure it could or should be any different. I only know that I’m not a mysoginist and I’m not a rightwinger, I am pro-choice, but certainly the woman is not the only party affected by the possibility of childbirth.
That armchair subversive link has me thinking.
There is so obviously a good deal of sexual disfunction amongst the social conservative crowd.
They are either afraid of sex or disgusted by it or in awe of it but never comfortable with it.
I think it is really unhealthy the way these right wing wackos are so hung-up about sex. I mean I like sex, I enjoy sex, I think I’m pretty good at it but I haven’t thought about it constantly since I left puberty. I never wonder what kind of sex my neighbors (or even my friends) are interested in. These right wingers just seem to have never left junior high school.
(Living in a sort of bubble with no friends or relatives who are social conservatives they really seem alien to me so I just have to speculate on their motivations.)
I always felt that the people who were most upset about Clinton’s private life were the kind of guys who have to pay hookers when they cheat on their wives. They were pissed that this guy was getting for free what they have to pay for.
I happen to believe Digby is a man, but I honestly don’t know for sure. It doesn’t matter, anyway, does it?
It doesn’t matter at all. The statements in the post indicate an understanding that women are human, which is hardly something that requires being a woman to understand.
Because pregnancy is a possible consequence of sex, and death is a possible consequence of pregnancy, so a woman who has sex is consenting to death, and a pregnant woman whose life is in danger just needs to suck it up and take responsibility for her actions and have the baby even if it kills her.
But this is, of course, exactly what they do believe, as confirmed by the South Dakota statute. As Digby pointed out in another post (about those who do make an exception for rape/incest): the “baby” is innocent, the woman is not. And even in cases of rape or incest, the baby’s innocence and “right to life” are of paramount importance. They don’t come right out and say that even the rape or incest may be the woman’s fault, but you know a good percentage of them are thinking it.
what these men forget, is that if abortion is made illegal, men will have to step up to the plate and pay for the children resuling from these unwanted pregnencies.
we as a society will need to understand that we will have decide how we will pay for all of this.
republicans seem to lose interest in children once they are born.
if they want to ban abortion then they need to have a plan to deal with the aftermath. and doing othing is not a plan.
I must admit I never really gave much thought to whether Digby was a man or a woman. The screaming Hullaballo icon had me assuming a male writer but I must admit I have given more thought to Digby’s gender in the last 15 minutes than–well ever before.
So, um, has Digby never stated outright that s/he is a man? Until I read this post, I had no doubt whatsoever that Digby was a guy, but now I can’t seem to summon up any clear evidence for this position, suggesting that I have merely imbibed the inherent sexism of western society without realizing it, or something…
Does anyone have any clear evidence one way or the other on this. I’ve been looking through the archives, and have been totally unable to find anything dispositive.
Yeah, the Hullaballoo icon does give the impression that Digby is male. It goes with the quote below it, btw–both are from the movie Network , which I recommend to anyone who hasn’t seen it. Made in, I believe, 1975, it’s eerily prescient about the whole news-as-entertainment disease that has taken over television.
But I think you are creating just a bit of a false dichotomy here. The father is thrust into a similar situation as the mother in the case of unwanted pregnancy.
Really? Because I’ve known lots of men who’ve impregnated women and not a one got hugely fat and then had to push an 8 pound infant out of his genitals. Are you telling me they were hoodwinked? You’d think the “real” father would be easy to find–look for the pregnant dude!
People have a right to control their bodies. The law is ill-equipped to force women or men to behave towards their sex partners in the way those partners dictate. But the law can step in when there’s actual physical autonomy being threatened, which I’m afraid, “She won’t abort when I ask her to,” isn’t.
Using the law to commandeer a person’s body for someone else’s aims is what’s at stake here. Sorry your ex lied, but the truth of the matter is your personal autonomy isn’t threatened by a lie. We are so used to the notion that the law’s purpose is to force women to behave as men would like that the argument that lying to a man is the equivalent of forcing a woman to reorder their own body against her will. That’s insane.
Man, I used to think the argument that abortion bans were punishment eked out on women for daring have what men don’t–uteruses–was overblown, but after blogging for nearly two years on this issue, I think that is exactly what’s going on here.
Man, you don’t even have to open your legs for sex. Just make a W!
I had already read the Hullabaloo article. But the one thing I was startled by was that you seem to refer to Digby as a “she”. Color me sexist, but I had always pictured Digby as a man. Veddy intaresting.
Let me be clear–Digby’s sex is a mystery to me, too. But nowadays the universal pronoun is “she”, so that’s what I used.
Zac: Anyway, the point is simply this: that isn’t really something that women face. Getting a guy pregnant, a guy who they had wanted to get away from, finding out he didn’t use protection even though he had said he would, and then being tied to that person for the rest of her life.
….guh?
You’re describing exactly the situation that a woman would have found herself in before the Pill, before legal/safe abortion: if she was lucky, a man who had sex with her, whom she’d wanted to get away from, who didn’t use protection even though he had said he would… and being tied to that person for the rest of her life. (If she was unlucky, he’d abandon her to deal with the situation as best she could on her own, and if she died from an illegal/unsafe abortion, that was not his problem.)
The reason why this isn’t a common situation for an American or Western European woman to find herself in today, is because feminism (and contraceptive advances) made it possible for a woman to decide to use contraception without having to get the man’s permission/consent/cooperation, legal for a woman to choose to terminate an unwanted pregnancy or keep a wanted infant, mandatory for a man to provide child support whether or not he was married to the woman, and socially acceptable for a woman to have sex, have a baby whether or not she’s married, or have an abortion if that’s her choice.
That this means men are now deprived of a freedom they used to take for granted - the privilege of being able to decide whether or not to use protection; the privilege of being able to abandon a pregnant girlfriend - means that men have to take responsibility for contraception if they don’t want pregnancy to result from sex. They cannot simply abrogate their responsibility and expect the woman to take care of it and to hell with the consequences. The biological consequences of unprotected sex have always been inescapable for women; the legal consequences are now inescapable for men.
I don’t remember having the final say in whether this would be the case. She held most of the cards.
You had a final say: you could have chosen either to use a condom, regardless of her opinion in the matter, or to refrain from penetrative sex. You were not forced not to use a condom, and nothing in your comment suggests you were forced to have penetrative sex. You chose to have unprotected sex: that was the point at which you had the final say, and your final say was “I don’t care if I get her pregnant: she said she was on the Pill.”
Somehow you seem to have talked yourself into believing that your decision to have unprotected sex with a woman with whom you did not want a long term relationship was not your fault. I can’t figure out how you can possibly think this - what, you tripped?
Oops! My bad; the quote isn’t there anymore. When did that change?
Colorado Dave sez:
I think the men who hate it when women enjoy sex are the kind of men who are lousy lays . . .
I say:
They are significantly creepier than just being bad in sexual arenas. They are quite twisted, and most, if not all, are likely to be into things that are illegal. It’s like people who kill small furry animals: there’s something just basically wrong with it. If a guy REALLY hates that his partner is having a good time sexually, then he might be hoping to be appointed to the FDA, however, so perhaps it’s an upside.
Aka Dad sez:
If I was a woman, I would remind theocratic men, who support reproductive slavery, that women have battery operated devices that make men expendable, and that men, don’t have a reciprocal type of pleasure inducing device.
I say:
Bill O’Reilly’s got a (w)hole different take on that one, Dad. Don’t let him borrow your water pik.
Digby must be a woman. No man could be that smart.
signed,
Jealous Guy
[…] Here Digby “has a hell of a post up.” Well, apparently it/she/he has a hell of a time nailing it too. Because nailing it is specifically NOT mentioned. […]
The ability to have sex freely is a new thing in the world, and is the result of technological and social progress. The birth control pill is only a few decades old, and cheap and reliable condoms haven’t existed much longer. While there have been techniques for abortion since prehistory, safe techniques for surgical abortion have only existed for about 150 years but were only legalized (in the US) in the 70s.
Simply put, people fuck more than they used to, and this is a good thing. Bringing new, good things into the world and changing the world, is what progress means, and destroying new, good things so they won’t change the world is what reaction means. (Sometimes I worry that liberals, and even radicals, are so used to arguing defensively that they’ve forgotten that new things can be good things.)
It’s only now, and it’s only been for a period of time shorter than I’ve been alive, that sexual freedom — including abstinence — have really been available as options to men and women. Culturally, we’re still grappling with this — I’m still not comfortable with the idea of casual sex, but for no rational reason, and this is common.
Truly enjoying our sexuality is new, and was unknown for most of human history. Having a perpetual sex drive has, until recently, been a source of misery; abstinence was, until recently, the only way to avoid pregnancy, and the only way to limit family size. That means, most married couples who didn’t have ten or more children avoided having ten children by not fucking. Some time ago, a few posters here mentioned family stories about how their grandmothers kicked their grandfathers out of the bedroom and out of the house, in order to avoid pregnancy.
So, I don’t think the best argument against a demand for abstinence is that it’s unnatural for people to be abstinent, because that’s pretty much been the norm. The trouble with abstinence is that until recently, abstinence was rarely a choice available to women. Women, legally and socially, were forced to marry, have sex, and get pregnant, at the will of men, regardless of their own will. Men could, and did, freely choose abstinence to avoid the obligations of raising a family, but this wasn’t an option for women.
If sex is something so natural and such a fundamental part of life, then one of the by-products of that action is pregnancy. Isn’t then a woman who chooses to terminate that pregnancy interrupting and interfering with that very natural order of our humanity?
I remember a Catholic expert on CROSSFIRE 15 years ago arguing against test-tube babies because “infertility is a challenge from God.” I shouted at the TV screen, “Before Jonas Salk, people said that polio was ‘a challenge from God.’ Does that make curing it a sin?!?”
What did Robin Williams say about men who thought they were “Sharing the experience” of a woman giving birth?
“I don’t thinks so!” “Not unless you’ve passed a bowling ball!”
“It’s sort of weird initially that some men really hate it when women enjoy sex�
Amanda, it’s the ultimate patriarchal view of women, isn’t it? I think Chaucer said (can’t find the reference right now) that men want their wives to be “Chaste in the market place and wanton in my bed.” If a woman enjoys sex too much, she might cheat on her husband. This is also why they harp on the dangers of sex and the consequences of sex–but only for women. They want women so afraid of STDs and pregnancy and rape that women can’t possibly enjoy sex.
Patriarchy’s perfect woman is one who doesn’t enjoy sex at all but submits to her husband…and her husband’s magic, magnificent cock and his brilliant skill with it makes her his love slave (see any James Bond movie for an perfect example of the superdick in action). Any woman who enjoys sex might judge him or have seen another penis to compare his to.
Geoduck2, thanks for recommending When Abortion Was A Crime. As it happens, the paperback is on sale if you order it online. You may want to read The Story of Jane by Laura Kaplan, an account of the Jane Collective by one of its members.
Digby is at least as much a man as James Tiptree, Jr. I mean, you can always tell.
Truly enjoying our sexuality is new, and was unknown for most of human history.
Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘truly.’ I think ‘true enjoyment’ is a utopian fantasy: but the pill and other forms of decent contraception do give us an end run around bad design I mean biology that makes pleasure so dangerous and giving birth so deadly.
Some people choose to remove themselves from the debate that is destroying this country by waving it off, “Well, I’m never having an abortion, so what do I care?”
For those of us who are not obviously affected by anti-abortion legislation, it matters a great deal. This is not just about the dominion of men over the “naughty bits” of women. Anti-labor legislation is not just about the dominion of the haves over the have nots. Anti-affirmative action legislation is not just about the dominion of white people over brown people. Rather, together they represent the culmination of a reactionary movement to return to the “good old days” when complete and unquestioned rule over all things great and small that did not possess the three necessary traits to have a voice in the world: white skin, a penis, and wealth.
Condaleeza Rice and Ken Blackwell are just house negroes to these people. Elizabeth Dole and Katherine Harris are similarly useful to show their “inclusiveness”. Toadies like Alberto Gonzales represent the “other minority” as far as the Republican Party is concerned. I think it would be naive of me to suggest that these people are not aware of their roles. For most Americans, however, I think there is an ignorance of how things really work. The best case in point is the photo-op of the “partial-birth abortion ban” signing. All giddy. All white. All men. All rich.
Some poor white men think the Republicans support them. Some rich black men think the Republicans support them. Some women think Republicans support them. You will never belong with them. Rather, you will belong to them.
No, she’s just illustrating another natural part of the fundamental order of things: if you have a doctor dilate your cervix and scrape out the contents of your uterus with curettes, you won’t be pregnant anymore.
Notice that in the “keep your legs closed” argument, only women are expected to pay a price for having sex, and then they are lambasted with criticism from all sides when they take steps to avoid these consequences that only affect them.
*snarl*
Owl writes:
“The ability to have sex freely is a new thing in the world”
Only true to a point. Sex was enjoyed quite freely in Classical Greece and Rome. The accounts of the first Europeans in the South Pacific, especially Bougainville and Cook in Tahiti, show they found a culture where sex was enjoyed quite freely. The existence of old Chinese pillow books (ie sex guides) shows that sex has been enjoyed for a long time in many cultures.
It seems as though historic cultures which value women have healthier attitudes about sex.
It also seems as though religions based on angry, jealous dessert gods (you know the ones who want you to prove your faith by knifing your son) hold woman in less value and have more sexual hang-ups.
melandell asks:
“is digby a man or a woman? ”
The answer is yes.
Are you all suggesting that Digby is too smart to be a man? Sexists!
..dessert gods?
Thou SHALT DIE if you don’t put the whipped-cream-with-the-sprinklies-and-the-nuts on top?
And DON’T FORGET THE CHERRY!
oops
Sorry about that I’m cooking dinner so my mind is kind of on menus.
And at the same time, make enough money to supply them with everything they need without going on welfare or anything similar, yet be a full-time stay-at-home mom, so, I guess you have to marry some man who’s capable of supporting all the babies God gives you, but if you marry a man for his money then you’re a gold-digging bitch.
Death penalty, sans judge, jury, or plea bargain? Plus, death by bleeding from painful wounds? Um, cruel and unusual punishment, anyone?
Yes, they do. It’s called “rape.” Complete with free 5% conviction rate out of the less than half that are even reported. I hate this world sometimes.
Colorado Dave, while I agree that cultures with more respect for women also had healthier attitudes toward sexuality, you’re missing my main point in, “The ability to have sex freely is a new thing in the world.â€Â? It’s a new thing that we can have sex without worrying about pregnancy or having to care for children we don’t want. Some cultures have done a better job of arranging that children are cared for collectively, and so the mother need not avoid sex for fear of having children, but the problem of pregnancy still remained, and that’s not a trivial problem at all.
This has been on my mind partly because I was thinking about Frederick Engels’s The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State:
I was discussing this with a feminist, who pointed out that Engels completely ignores that women might want to avoid pregnancy entirely, not just avoid raising children — a blind spot for Engels (and unfortunately not his only blind spot revealed in an otherwise good book). I think that part of the reason that it’s a blind spot for Engels is that, since having sexual intercourse but avoiding pregnancy wasn’t a practical possibility in his era, he assumed that sexual activity inevitably meant pregnancy. I think there’s been a major shift in consciousness since that time, in large part because of the availability of contraception and abortion — and that shift in consciousness is part of what conservatives object to.
Er, Engels thought that having heterosexual intercourse inevitably meant pregnancy. His other blind spot was he didn’t accept homosexuality, and I should be careful not to leave that out.
Foolish Owl,
And I guess that ties in with the fact that the only thing that scares the hell out of conservatives more than sex is anything NEW.
Well…actually…most things scare the hell out of conservatives.
In r/e abstinence not really being an option because divorce/financial ruin may result, you overlook the other possible serious consequences–marital rape and/or other forms of violence, up to and including murder. That wouldn’t happen to every woman who tried a just-say-”no”-to-sex stance, but it would happen all too often, nonetheless.
It seems as though historic cultures which value women have healthier attitudes about sex.
You managed to cite some of the most misogynistic societies on earth, the classical greek invented the talibanical version of the SAHM, and mocked any other culture that allowed their women to wander about freely, and the chinese invented a horror that no one else on earth has ever thought to attempt: foot binding.
And most of the post-jesus abrahamic religions on their surface are pro-women, jesus had female disciples, and didn’t go in for slut shaming, and muhammed invented hijab as a way of allowing women to participate as equal members of society without being sexually objectified.
Now the dharmic faiths directly place women below men on the scale of karma, if you’re a bad man you’ll become a woman as punishment, a bad woman becomes a dog and a bad dog gets hit with a rolled up newspaper.
The trouble is that every religion inherently obsesses about how great the non-corporeal is compared to the physical , and from there it opens the way for some asexual to get in charge and personify all their disgust at the thought of sex in women, and the next thing you know the dogma says that women are the physical form of pure evil, which is sexual, and their vaginas end up with metaphysical teeth to rend the metaphorical penises of mens’ souls.
And I blame the patriarchy for those asexuals conflating “pure evil” and “women”.
Wow, could write 150 pages….
However, being as brevity is the soul of wit…
Conservative w/ repressed sexuality….
Improper potty training
Unresolved Oedipus / Electra complex
Anal Retentive
“Unclenliness” phobias
Unresolved desire / self-loathing dichotomies
err, only the first paragraph should be italiscised.
And someone has got to explain why the auto-mod picks up only my comments that aren’t positively dripping with fuck.
Now damnation but I can’t remember who said it, but this really settled the issue for me once and for all: “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” LOL How true.
Yeah, right, “close your legs.” To any man who says that, my response is “Go fuck yourself. Literally.”
i am sick and tired for all of the responsibility for this problem being dumped on women. Hey guys, we don’t spontaneously combust into pregnancy. If you would just start wearing condoms every time they have sex, the whole problem would go away.
Amanda, you’re imposing your own analysis of what you believe is the underlying psychological motivation for making that argument. Nowhere in his post do the words “close your legs” appear. Your phrasing it that way assumes your conclusion, that anybody who makes that argument is, at least implicitly, putting the onus on women.
Let’s take, for argument’s sake, the more extreme position that sex is morally wrong in all circumstances. Let’s pretend that everybody arguing for this position is intelligent enough to avoid the silly inconsistences that are all-too-easy to make fun of. Does this strike you as misogynist? Counter-intuative maybe, but not misogynist. The fact that someone supporting it affiliates with an ideology that you have other reasons for believing is anti-woman shouldn’t change that.
I told my (ex)husband, father of my 3 children, that I’d asked the OB/GYN about getting a tubal ligation. Asked….only asked the question….he said that was his decision… then the rape episodes began. O! that’s right…it’s not rape- I’m his property….
Leslie in CA: yeah, they do believe that women shouldn’t have abortions even to save their lives. But you’ll notice that most of them pretend to. Even the SD bill technically has a (very narrow) life exception. If they voiced this part of their beliefs out loud, people would laugh at them.
I’m all in favor of the Lesbian Option - all the sex you want, no worries.
Damn straight. No pun intended, seriously.
I’ve argued with some abstinence-only advocates who claim that they’re not religious zealots trying to impose their asinine views on the rest of us–they’re just advocating science, because abstinence is the only foolproof way of avoiding pregnancy. To which I say, universal lesbianism and masturbation would work just as well.
I’ve argued with some abstinence-only advocates who claim that they’re not religious zealots trying to impose their asinine views on the rest of us–they’re just advocating science, because abstinence is the only foolproof way of avoiding pregnancy. To which I say, universal lesbianism and masturbation would work just as well.
The flaw in your argument is that homosexual and autoerotic behaviors serve as “gateway” sexual practices to more dangerous heterosexual intercourse - a young person, after harmlessly experimenting sexually with members of the same gender may then come to believe that heterosexual intercourse is equally safe… with potentially disasterous consequences.
Lanoire - universal lesbianism and masturbation would work just as well.
Indeed–universal homosexuality, even. Since so many homophobic wingnuts, besides being generally uptight about sex, are horribly repressed self-hating gays, I think this should be pointed out to them as often as possible.
Next time some guy pontificates about how women shouldn’t have sex if they’re not prepared to deal with the “consequences,� ask them if they’re perfectly happy to go through life not having sex with anyone at all other than women who are interested in having babies with them.
Does the law require a man to support any child he fathers?
Thank you Foolish Owl. I want to read The Story of Jane. It seems particularly relevant right now.
Engels points out how women and their reproductive labor become part of the “capitol” owned by the husband.
The sexual independence of single women threatens this control. Likewise, a good social welfare system threatens the control of male-would-be-head-of-households.
Here’s some Reagan that dovetails with the discussion:
“The New Right expresses particular hostility toward sexually active teenage girls, whom they perceive as beyond parental, specifically paternal, control. This is a change; the plight of pregnant single women garnered the greatest sympathy at the turn of the century and evoked sympathy among many reformers in the 1960s. Single women were then preceived as victims; today’s antiabortion movement blames them for being sexual actors. Conservative attacks on “welfare” and abortion are related, for both seek to control women and their reproduction. The efforts to dismantle welfare and to require that minors notify their parents or obtain their consent for abortion are both intended to hurt young women and to punish them for their sexual behavior. In calling for an end to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), or for mandatory sterilization or contraception for poor women, conservatives attempt to stop one group of women (stereotyped as poor black women) from bearing children. In restricting abortion use, they attempt to force a different group (middle-class white women) to bear children.” p.248-249
Amanda,
The vast majority of the time we argue that telling people not to have sex isn’t workable, we pro-choicers argue up why women choose to have sex. But I think it’s important to note that abstinence isn’t a legitimate choice for most women in a patriarchy, so having conservatives even bring it up is fundamentally dishonest. I mean, even if there was a way for women to give up sex without having massive personal ramifications, I don’t think that’s a legitimate thing to demand, but it’s important to note that there’s not really an abstinence option in the wingnut model of gender relations that’s workable for most women. While I state repeatedly on this blog that anti-choice is about punishing women for sex, I’d actually therefore argue that it’s about punishing women for existing, really.
Thank God you pointed this out!!! This is my #1 pet peace with discussions that simplistically paint ‘pro-life’ people as anti-sex. They aren’t, they’re anti-woman. No one realistically believes that could actually just ‘close their legs.’ The real purpose is not to get women to be ‘chaste’ because they know that is never going to happen, nor would they support it if it did. The purpose is to socially compel reproduction from women without regard to their wills.
You want to know what ‘pro-lifers’ do that makes this glaringly obvious? The look on any feverent ‘pro-lifer’s’ face when they say that a woman should ‘keep her legs closed.’ You know that gleeful sneer that immediately acknowleged that what they really mean is that she will have sex but will be punished by having reproduction imposed on her.
dessert gods
Welcome to my religion. Just to be clear though, the dessert gods are neither angry nor jealous.
Colorado Dave,
Only true to a point. Sex was enjoyed quite freely in Classical Greece and Rome. The accounts of the first Europeans in the South Pacific, especially Bougainville and Cook in Tahiti, show they found a culture where sex was enjoyed quite freely. The existence of old Chinese pillow books (ie sex guides) shows that sex has been enjoyed for a long time in many cultures.
It seems as though historic cultures which value women have healthier attitudes about sex.
It also seems as though religions based on angry, jealous dessert gods (you know the ones who want you to prove your faith by knifing your son) hold woman in less value and have more sexual hang-ups.
I guess you aren’t particularly familiar with the Classical Greek and Roman views of women? Neither valued women at all except instrumentally.
Dave,
Amanda, you’re imposing your own analysis of what you believe is the underlying psychological motivation for making that argument. Nowhere in his post do the words “close your legs� appear. Your phrasing it that way assumes your conclusion, that anybody who makes that argument is, at least implicitly, putting the onus on women.
Let’s take, for argument’s sake, the more extreme position that sex is morally wrong in all circumstances. Let’s pretend that everybody arguing for this position is intelligent enough to avoid the silly inconsistences that are all-too-easy to make fun of. Does this strike you as misogynist? Counter-intuative maybe, but not misogynist. The fact that someone supporting it affiliates with an ideology that you have other reasons for believing is anti-woman shouldn’t change that.
Is this supposed to be a joke? Applying this logic in the context of the real, actually existing world, is inherently and profoundly anti-woman, which was Amanda’s point.
Lorenzo, what part of my comment is anti-woman?
If I was a woman, I would remind theocratic men, who support reproductive slavery, that women have battery operated devices that make men expendable, and that men, don’t have a reciprocal type of pleasure inducing device.
Sure we do. We have two, actually, one at the end of each arm.
[…] digby’s insight on South Dakota’s draconian Abortion Ban (actually that’s the conservative’s standard); Responding To the Left’s response to digby’s insight; digby responded back; Tena responded to Responding To the Left’s comments; Avedon responsed to Responding To the Left’s comments; Amanda responsed to Responding To the Left’s comments; echidne responded to Responding To the Left’s comments. […]
I don’t have time right now, but I so want to post something about the Pope’s first encyclical, which was the German Pope’s answer to Nietsche’s claim that Christianity hates sex. His apology is weak, contradictory, and transparent. Very revealing. Fascinating.
Why do conservatives hate sex?
Amanda (hope I’m not being too informal),
I didn’t realize your comment was restricted to pregnancy when you said this:
“I’m inclined to think that if more men showed some decent humility in the face of the fact that they’re debating whether someone has a right to get out of a situation they could never actually be in, there wouldn’t be an abortion debate at all.”
I thought your reference to “situation” might encompass, for example, “oh no, I don’t want to have this guy’s kid — he’s a loser and I don’t want to be stuck with him for the rest of my days.”
If you had meant to include that aspect, then there is a parallel. Pregnancy cuts both ways in that sense — it draws both partners into a moral/ethical requirement of the dedication of the rest of their lives to the resulting life. If the woman chooses to bear the child.
I absolutely think that it is the woman’s choice. I’m not arguing that.
Maybe my comment is OT. If so, then I apologize.
zac
Amanda (if I may),
I got off on a tangent, my own experience, not too important in the scheme of things — personal stuff. (Since I brought it up — love my son, very, very much). I lost sight of what prompted Digby’s (and your) post — what the state rep said on that “News Hour” report — shocking, shocking misogyny.
I thought we were past the age when women who were raped were blamed for it. Doubly victimized — raped by the rapist, and then by society in the aftermath. I thought this was pretty well understood to be a sort of — almost a cliche of the subjugated position of women, that they could be found so guilty of being, well, sexual. Rape was their punishment, thus was not really considered a crime, in the bad old days. Rape went unreported and unprosecuted. The woman bore the shame and the guilt.
I guess that’s what made (makes) rape such an awful crime — it serves the purpose of oppressing women, “keeping them in their place.”
According to the explanation offered by the Missouri state representative, any woman who’d ever had sex could not by definition be found to have been raped — no matter what actually occurred.
Women’s sexuality is always a threat in a patriarchy. That’s a subtext for many of the objections to abortion (and even birth control).
The statement by the Missouri rep is something that one might expect from a patriarch from a very oppressive and theocratic society. That is the direction that these folks are determined to take this country in.
(I don’t think they’re going to succeed. I really don’t.)
It’s also kind of shocking the way the News Hour just kind of included the rep’s statement without comment. It’s helpful for us to hear what he said, so I don’t fault them for reproducing it. But I recall an age when a statement like that would have shocked people, and the reporter would have felt the need to offer an editorial comment. He would have questioned and challenged the state rep, maybe even badgered him. I don’t know, maybe my recollection is faulty, but I don’t think so.
You may be interested in Granny Bee’s commentary, “Abortion for Men.”
RealPlayer
http://makethemaccountable.com/gran/audio/Granny_Bee_060224_Abortion_for_Men.ram
.mp3
http://makethemaccountable.com/gran/audio/Granny_Bee_060224_Abortion_for_Men.mp3
Wikipedia: Ectopic Pregnancy
A case in England in August 2005 in which a fetus in an ectopic pregnancy was successfully carried to term and delivered by Caesarean section is an example of a very rare medical event, possible only when the site of implantation is outside the Fallopian tube - in this instance, the abdomen. The woman and the medical staff were unaware of her condition until she delivered. There are only a dozen or so known cases of this in the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ectopic_pregnancy
More Granny Bee
http://makethemaccountable.com/gran
Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com
Zac, I can accept you’re well-meaning. I can, but this blog gets trolled non-stop by men who think paying child support is the worst thing ever in the history of the world, a stance that indicates to women who are discussing forced pregnancy, rape, and millenia of injustice as about the most entitled thing any human could say. It does make us wonder if this is the first time most men have encountered what we call “paying bills”–the concept that most of your money goes to obligations instead of playtime.
Dave, being deliberately obtuse is not a way to get answered, I’m afraid. I know anything I say to you will be read as, “Saying what Dave doesn’t want to hear saying what Dave doesn’t want to hear,” so what’s the point?
One word I notice has not come up in this discussion (and certainly not in any of the blathering by the Coathanger Crusaders) is “vasectomy”. It’s a solution to preventing unwanted pregnancy that few people seem to be talking about. It’s a simple surgical procedure–certainly less complicated than an abortion–and AFAIK, there are no nutcase politicians trying to ban the procedure (yet).
What is Abstention? Two Angles……
The abortion debate carries a very large number of complex and difficult questions and controversies, but it very frequently revolves around the notion (from the pro-life side, mainly) that people women and infants should have to live with any negative…
Sex: Hell yes! Control of Others: Hell No!…
Read each and every one of these posts: Digby, Amanda, Avedon, Tena and Echidne. They chew up and spit out a daft person who argues that complete abstention is a woman’s only answer to unwanted pregnancy. Echidne, closes her fine piece with the follow…
You know, F&B Dave, the juxtaposition of the word “nutcase” with the word “vasectomy” was a tad jarring, just a tad.
“Keep your legs closed,” “Keep your knees together.” I have a good one: “Keep it zipped, pal!”
“Nothing is going to happen to us if we don’t have sex.”
Except possibly the extinction of the human race. Why do they hate humanity!
In his case, however, I’m all for it.
This guy must be perfect! Never makes a mistake, never succumbs to temptation. It’s like:
“Ooops, I just walked in front of a bus. I’d better refuse medical treatment because I screwed up! My bad, I’d better just lie here and bleed and live with the consequences of my actions!”
It’s like the ultimate Christian Scientist; no medical treatment, no lawyers, no remediation in anything, ever. Just live with it, sonny!
I think that yes, abstinence is not a legitimate option. However, to attribute that to a patriarchy is misguided. I can tell you as a straight man, my girlfriend would end our relationship in a split second if I went to her and told her that I wouldn’t be having sex with her anymore. She likes sex and that’s quite alright with me. I think most of the points made are really good, but I think that it is important to recognize that this goes both ways with both parties who are in a relationship having the ability to end it in many (but not all) situations if one party says, “Hey from now on it’s abstinence for me.”
Isn’t it ironic that the only body organ that was provided by the Creator solely for sexual pleasure is the female clitoris? No other physiological reason for its existence has been found. Its only mission is to bring erotic pleasure to the female of the species. That’s why Muslim fundamentalists in Africa and Asia force girls in puberty to undergo horrific clitorectomies (genital mutilation). If they were left intact, girls might find out that they were meant to have pleasure too, not just serve as vessels for embryos. Watch your crotches, ladies. That’s another element of female choice the psycho fundies may go after in the future.
In all the excellent, rational discussion here, the line that has stuck with me most is from Papa zac:
I am father to a child from a woman who did not fulfill her end of the (birth control) bargain.
Why did he not wear a condom too? Perhaps it impaired his “experience” of penetrative sex. Perhaps he is allergic to latex and lambskin. But it was OK to allow/expect his partner to swallow a pricey chemical and hormone tablet every day that has proven links to a variety of long-term and potentially fatal maladies. Even if she hadn’t “cheated” and did take her pill every day, the method could still fail. What was his end of the bargain? Was it worth the consequence? Poor Papa zac has been forced to share just a little of the responsibility that resulted from HIS choice. Too bad he didn’t give her a venereal disease or a virus that causes cervical or ovarian cancer instead. Darn, it had to be one of those pesky spermies…
Just some random comments:
I have known of men who say they have had a vasectomy because they don’t like wearing condoms.
Yes, men are required to pay child support, although Republicans have recently cut funding for catching those who do not. I had a musician friend get a groupie pregnant she went to the welfare office for assistance and they wanted a list of all the potential fathers, he went down for a DNA test and it was his, he now pays child support. (he was listed as the bass player in x band - she didn’t even know his name and never saw him again). One of the things I so admire about this man, is that he never once thought it wasn’t his responsibility, and since this happened he is much more careful about his sexual partners.
To the man upset that his girlfriend didn’t take the pill and got pregnant leaving him stuck with someone he was planning to break up with. If you didn’t like her, and was planning to leave her, why were you still dipping your stick into her?
I think that there will be a day of reckoning for women who have supported the right wing in this country. They have been used by these misogynists to provide cover to their clearly anti-women ideals. I only hope these women wake up before it is too late.
Many young girls in America today refuse to call themselves feminist or to get involved with the women’s movement. In fact they act like being called a feminist is the equivalent of being called a bad name. Yet if you ask them, they expect equal pay, and equal opportunity. Older feminist have really got their work cut out for them, we must bring these girls into the cause – their youth, humor, and energy are needed. These girls have lived their entire life with reproductive, economic, and social freedoms unavailable to their mothers and grandmothers (who fought hard to get them for this generation). They assume it will always be this way, but clearly there is a percentage of the population of this country who would like to see all of these freedoms taken away.
One last thought – abstinence is a cruel joke that everyone knows is unworkable. The men who promote this can and do pay for abortions for their women, and will continue to do this even when it is no longer available to the masses.
Amanda -
email me, would ja? I’d like to talk about your subject here without flamethrowers at 10 paces.
-id.
[…] Sex: Evil or just merely wicked? at Pandagon […]
no in fact we argued about contraception and it was she who said she “hated” condoms and whenever I would try to wear one, she would object. Whatever else is said about our understanding, I could not be accused of being the one campaigning against the use of the condom.
I see that “Wild West” has made the “keep it in your pants” argument. My point was that there’s an echo of “she should not have had sex if she didn’t want to get pregnant” in that line of argument.
But none of this should perhaps have been brought up in the context of an unbelievably sexist and misogynyst comment by Rep Napoli of South Dakota. Not just the comment, but the bill. It’s a frankly neanderthal attitude towards women.
In light of the context, I guess I’ll be lambasted and cursed on this thread and I really can’t box my way out of it, because I used a bad time to discuss something that’s kind of a dicey matter anyway. Who the hell wants to hear about my personal life in the context of this issue? No one is threatening my own reproductive freedom under the law. So I’m sorry if my comment has upset anybody. I guess I’ll leave it at this: on a personal leval, man to woman, woman to man, we are all actors and I don’t think things always fit into neat and tidey ideological boxes for us. But, that’s probably a pretty mundane point, and not worth the sturn und drang that I may have caused here.
Forgive me, please.
P.S. Please don’t make fun of my fatherhood. If I’ve held myself up to ridicule, “daddy zac,” then I ask that you cut it now, I have repented. I take fatherhood seriously. I’m trying my best. I’m not at war with the child’s mother. She is my friend and I hers — we just can’t live with one another. It didn’t work out. It started rather badly. I felt trapped. I just wanted to throw that in there, but now I see it was a mistake. And with that big farewell speech, I’ll try and not come back to this thread because I have ruined everyone’s day and that was not my intention. Farewell.
Bunnie,
I lied. I re-read your comment and boy, do you make a lot of assumptions:
Why did he not wear a condom too? Perhaps it impaired his “experience� of penetrative sex. Perhaps he is allergic to latex and lambskin.
I have no allergies to latex and I would gladly have worn a condom. We discussed and argued and she preferred the pill.
But it was OK to allow/expect his partner to swallow a pricey chemical and hormone tablet every day that has proven links to a variety of long-term and potentially fatal maladies.
So now I’m an eco-terrorist? She was an adult, she was on the pill, she was against the condom. The decision to take the pill –no, the preference — was hers, not mine. I wasn’t aware that it was so harmful, but then, there were a lot of things going on in both of our lives. But it’s weird how all of a sudden I’m some caricature of a despoiling horrible defiling person, based on… my statement.
Even if she hadn’t “cheated� and did take her pill every day, the method could still fail.
That is absolutely true. But that’s not what happened.
What was his end of the bargain? Was it worth the consequence?
My end of the bargain? My end of the bargain? I’m now a father, I share custody and every single duty that accrues to that, child-rearing, teaching, diaper-changing, laughing, playing, losing sleep, have all been mine. Unfortunately for both parents, but I pray to as minimal an extent as possible for the child, neither of us live together, we have had to live with separation, hurt, mistrust, and all of the rest. We now have an understanding; always did, I guess, because we worked it out. There can be no happy resolution without trust.
Poor Papa zac has been forced to share just a little of the responsibility that resulted from HIS choice.
Hmm, just a little? How do you know that I’m only sharing a little of the responsibility?
And how is it now completely, 100% my choice that brought me into this? I accept full, 100% responsibility for my child, but I think that the mother had something to do with it too.
Too bad he didn’t give her a venereal disease or a virus that causes cervical or ovarian cancer instead. Darn, it had to be one of those pesky spermies…
Yup, I’m a murderous tyrant, you got me pegged.
Amanda,
You were very kind to say those things. I’m not being a troll but I realized that — I realized I was being a bit of an ass. You see, I was making a rather small point — right or wrong. Right or wrong, my point wasn’t really that big of a deal — compared with what prompted your post. And how quickly I went from considering this egregious bill in front of the state legislature of SD, to my own, I don’t know, pet peeve at best.
And once I realized I had done that, I realized I was being callow. And I thought about what it would be like if I were female, and they were passing such a bill, or attempting to. And the confirmation of Alito, and a hundred other things that I’ve seen over the past whatever amount of time.
It’s kind of easy to be dispassionate about it as a male. I shouldn’t be able to say that, but I think it’s kind of true, and it’s something I’ll have to watch for.
On the other hand — Bunnie: truce? I think you were unfair to me. Very. I don’t want to get into a flame war. My apology stands, to this thread, for the reason I just spelled out. Now please leave me alone — uncle. I said it, that means you have to put down the brass knuckles now, by all that is good and right and merciful within you. I may be guilty of a lot of things, but don’t paint me as a monster.
men who think paying child support is the worst thing ever in the history of the world, a stance that indicates to women who are discussing forced pregnancy, rape, and millenia of injustice as about the most entitled thing any human could say
You are right. You are absolutely right. It sounds like the entitlement of rich Republicans who chafe at paying taxes, crying and wailing as though it were the greatest injustice ever, even while men and women in the military are sent to fight and die — in a war by which these same folks (so often) profit by. Or even while they see a city consumed in floods with no help arriving.
Let me put a more human face to my struggle. After this happened with my former significant other (SO), I have had many travails. We struggle and work so hard for our son. Although we’ve separated, we are glad that he is not treated to a barrage of nightly fights — the kind we hear so often at the neighbor’s house. And he is very happy, our son, so I should probably shut up and thank god or goddess or whatever.
But it has been very hard for me to ever meet someone new, I feel like women now see me as a tossed out bit of garbage. Women friends tell me that many women do not feel that way, so maybe it is my own self-image. There is so little time to socialize or even think of ever meeting someone I could be happy with. It has been many many years now since she and I separated, and this makes me sad indeed.
Now you can all laugh, ha ha, look at the man, who didn’t keep it in his pants, who dipped his wick, ha ha. I don’t get it. Why villainize a person who goes through this? How sad for all of us that it could not turn out diifferently, that things had to be this way…
If a man has the blues over such a thing, that is just human. It doesn’t make me a troll.
Next thing you know, someone’s going to tell me George Eliot was a woman.
Zac, you stumbled on a site that gets trolled constantly by men who claim paying child support is worse than rape or forced pregnancy or having your ex get to tell you who to socialize with and you stepped into an audience that’s not gonna hear it. Regardless–sorry your ex lied. I’ve had exes lie to me about EVERYTHING. Luckily, it never occured to me the law was obliged to step in and do something or that being lied to was comparable to state-mandated procreation.
It sucks that your legal control over your sperm ends when you give it to someone else. It also sucks that my ex has legal control over photographs of me, gifts I gave him, etc. We have a legal right to what is ours, not what we gave away. You gave your ex your sperm, gave it freely. Luckily, there’s no law stating that you have to give your sperm to someone against your will. Unfortunately now in South Dakota there’s a law that women have to give our bodies over to grow fetuses for the state whether we like it or not. That’s real discrimination right there.
Didja ever notice that often times the people you see on the news that take fertility drugs and end up having septuplets always seem to be wingers? And it’s ‘God’s will’ that they had the septuplets. I figured it mighta been God’s will that they were infertile. So much for the ‘natural’ argument….
Zac, it is your own self-image. Women who think that a single dad, involved with his child, is ‘trash’ are women you would not want to touch with a ten meter pole.
This ‘keep your legs closed’ argument suggests to me that the wingnuts are really not all that creative in bed. It’s entirely possible to have vaginal intercourse with legs closed. I mean, duh.
These girls have lived their entire life with reproductive, economic, and social freedoms unavailable to their mothers and grandmothers (who fought hard to get them for this generation). They assume it will always be this way, but clearly there is a percentage of the population of this country who would like to see all of these freedoms taken away.
Their male counterparts have made these assumptions as well, and they need to start waking up (and I don’t mean that in just a cynical “If these folks get their way, you won’t be getting much” kind of way).
As I remember it, a biography I read of Margaret Sanger opened with several pages about Sanger’s mother’s exhausting life of more-or-less perpetual pregnancy. I was struck by the sense that her father knew he was essentially killing her mother, but that his right to sex was more important than her right to life. This attitude was, of course, de rigeur. Couldn’t rape your wife, and all that sort of thinking.
The Shaker religion was also founded (in 1700s England) because its female founder lived in a one-room house as a child and uh, wanted an alternative (celibacy) to the “man has sex with wife whenever he wants and wife has children whether she likes it or not” model.
I give men enough credit to assume that the majority would not wish to return to that sort of life: In the same biography, it was heartbreaking to read stories of the husbands and wives (the luckier wives, as opposed to the ones whose husbands penetrated them anyway) who couldn’t express their love physically as they really wanted to because they could not afford another pregnancy, either financially or physically. It’s hard for us to grasp that these days.
Of course, the wingnuts think it’s wrong for anyone to have “consequence-free sex,” (some like Dawn Eden even seem to have a fetish for lack of contraception) but I would imagine that most young men of today disagree, and furthermore would like to make such decisions for themselves.
Digby at Firedoglake
I just realized that those nuts in South Dakota might be having an unanticipated effect. I am working today and this guy said to me over lunch, “I can’t believe that these people are really serious.” He’s a bit of a putz and he admitted that he’d believed women were exaggerating the threat. I said “I hope you’re ready to be daddies, boys. Last time abortion was illegal they didn’t have DNA testing” and they all looked stunned.
http://firedoglake.blogspot.com/2006_03_05_firedoglake_archive.html#114169525352013380
Atrios
It’s time for more men to understand that getting rid of legal abortion increases by quite a lot the chance that one drunk evening will lead to 18 years of child support payments [see above].
Alternatively, it decreases the chance that they’ll get laid.
http://atrios.blogspot.com/2006_03_05_atrios_archive.html#114170756083506421
Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com
South Dakota…
I have nothing useful to say. Fortunately, there are smarter people than me on the internets. News video in which we find out that, previous to this law, there has been only one place to get an abortion in SD,……
Heh. Excellent, Carolyn.
Dear zac,
Thanks for the details of your parental relationship. Perhaps if you had shared that commentary up front in your first post we might all have nodded in agreement that unintended parenthood is awash with difficulties for all participants. That’s one facet of this choice thing.
Where can I read more about the reaction of South Dakotans to this decision?
I can’t imagine that men would want to be burdened with more children than they can care for anymore than women would be. Albeit for entirely different reasons.
Anne, that’s what struck me about the stories of women worn out by constant childbearing.
Zac: The right to reproductive choice has almost zip to do with whether a person wants to be a parent. It has just about everything to do with whether a *woman* wants her body used as a life support machine.
There is no biological equivalent for men, although there are medical equivalents, such as blood and organ donation. In every single case a man must opt-in and consent before his body is used to such ends. He may withdraw consent at any time until the procedure is completed (blood put into another person, etc.).
The right to contraception and abortion for women is about the right of women to own our own bodies, to not support other people’s bodies with our own until and unless we consent to same.
I’m sorry you feel bad about being a single parent but the truth is, even when one wishes to be a parent, the experience rarely turns out as planned. Your experience has nada to do with whether a woman has the right to consent to a pregnancy.
MJ:
These people don’t believe the rules apply to THEM. It’s OTHER PEOPLE who have abortions willy-nilly and who have to be kept from having them. The ones in favor of this bill will just come to Illinois or go to California to get THEIR abortions.
They haven’t even thought about why there are no penalties for women in this bill, only for doctors. See the video.
http://www.atcenternetwork.com/?p=64
Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com
I said “I hope you’re ready to be daddies, boys. Last time abortion was illegal they didn’t have DNA testing� and they all looked stunned.
Houston, the clue has landed.
The more I hear about this debate. The more I hear about horrible parents who let their children starve to death, abuse their children, or shake their babies to death. (This usually happens when the parents are ridiculously young and don’t know better.) Then, the more I’m convinced that abortion is the responsible choice. Irresponsible women and girls aren’t vigilant about birth control, get pregnant, don’t really think about the real consequences of parenthood, have the baby, and then don’t take care of the child properly. I’m much more judgmental of women who get pregnant and figure “well, might as well have it,” than women who are aware of the responsibilities of parenthood and acknowledge that they can’t handle it.
This seems as good a thread as any to ask this question (I honestly thought this thread was dead).
Does anyone know of any research being done in regards to male contraceptives?
Currently, as far as I know, we have two options vasectomy and condoms, neither is ideal. Vasectomies are permanent and condoms often break and most women I know dislike them almost as much as men.
I would be happy to take a shot, pill or patch to temporarily halt production of my little fishies until such time as I wanted some fishies. I would love to give my wife a break from having to use a shot, patch or pill and since I have a better memory in regards taking daily vitamins I’m actually the more logical one to have to do so.
I recall some years ago reading a report about this subject which stated that even if there were such a thing the majority of women would not trust their partners when the guy says “I’m on the pill.”
I can understand this sentiment from single women but I wonder how many married women would trust their husbands in this matter. If any of the women on this site are still following this thread I would be interested in knowing your feelings about this.
(As an aside sorry about my misspelling earlier If I were to believe in any deity that wasn’t pasta based it would be dessert based, specifically chocolate. Desert Gods however need to join Zeus and Ra in oblivion.)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/315659.stm
Its been around for a while. The trick would be if you can get access to it.
D
Thanks for the info. That article was dated in 1998 which is probably about the time I heard of the report.
The article didn’t include a name for this contraceptive other than being a combination of a progesterone pill and a testosterone patch.
I wonder what ever became of this…hmmm I see googling in my future.
I’m a single woman on the pill, and I would be happy if there were male contraceptives, but it wouldn’t stop me from taking mine. Most women who are actively trying to avoid pregnancy do double-duty contraceptives anyway - condoms and the pill, for example. I can’t help but think the risk would be so much lower if both the man and the woman were on contraceptives.
I am a 67 yrs old male and will never understand why there is a question about abortion.On some issues I am to the right of Attila the Hun and others to the left of Teddy Kennedy.On abortions,leave it legal.No other person in this world really knows how the woman feels about having an abortion.She has enough on her plate without hearing from men who can never become pregnant.The folks opposed to abortion have too much time on their hands.They need to get involved with useful things.I could list a thousand things to keep these folks buzy,BUT,it would never get them on T.V.Or their names in the newspapers.Oh well, life would be so dull without the folks who try and make everyone else as miserable as they are.The Capt.
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