Anyone with a functioning cortex knew that Rush Limbaugh is a vile slug from the moment he uttered his first nasty lie. His recent comments about accomplished, brave law student Sandra Fluke are not surprising, nor is his stone-ignorant equation of contraception with frequency of intercourse: he must have confused responsible sex with his own frantic consumption of Vi*agra – now there’s unnaturally-induced sex on demand! However, Limbaugh is not the disease, merely its symptom. The belated, lukewarm bleatings and hedgings from the Republican “leadership” and from his advertisers are telling, as is their obfuscation of the fact that contraception is already covered by health insurance; the sole difference is the existence of a co-pay.
In the last year or so, we have seen exclusion of women from decisions that affect them almost exclusively, attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, to define miscarriage as murder, to add invasive, needless sonograms to the already enormous difficulties of getting an abortion. The freak show parade that is this year’s Republican presidential lineup is banging the tin drum of “returning to family values” — aka female poverty and powerlessness, probably because all of them have little knowledge of and interest in education, the environment, the economy, international diplomacy or anything of value to anyone beyond Ponzi-scheme millionaires who live in gated communities with private security. The US is going the way of Wahhabi Saudi Arabia – perhaps a fitting trajectory, since the country seems unwilling or unable to curb its fossil fuel consumption.
The open war on women declared by the Republican Party shows how the Teabaggers and Jesufascists have kidnapped rational, civil discourse in favor of a punitive primitivism that denies basic human decency and is steadily encroaching on hard-won women’s rights. It is no surprise that most foes of contraception are fundies of abrahamic religions, which are disasters for women in any case. However, make no mistake about it: contraception has nothing to do with freedom of religion. The kernel of this sickening backlash is the wish to deny women autonomy. Nothing changed the dynamics of gender interactions like contraception. For the first time in human history, women could reliably regulate the outcome of sexual congress. It removed the specter of unwanted pregnancy – and with that, women could enjoy sex as uninhibitedly as men, finally undoing the predator/prey equation so beloved of evo-psycho Tarzanists the world over.
Ironically, the exercise of contraception, which makes joyful sex possible, is uniquely human. The only partial exception may be our bonobo cousins, who use sex as social glue (often, note bene, initiated by the female members of the group). Contrary to the corrosive lies of benighted fundies, most animals do not choose sex. They go into heat and mate compulsively. In some cases, females exercise mate choice; in others, mating pairs form monogamous bonds. But only humans incorporate sex into their repertoire of chosen pleasures, whether they’re fertile or not. So contrary to the idiotic natterings that “sex on demand” is animal-like, exercising sexual choice is in fact the highest compliment for the activity. It transforms it from instinct, compulsion or random outcome solidly into something treasured, something freely chosen – which, again contrary to the fundies’ nonsense, makes it far more meaningful and powerful than the joyless autopilot version. It is the opposite of prostitution, which is undertaken as a profession and requires control and foregoing of spontaneous pleasure by its practitioners – not that Limbaugh et al are clear on complex concepts.
This is what contraception made possible, and what is at stake here. If people want human women to become truly animal-like, they should recall that most mammals do not recognize paternity, the most common family unit is a female with sub-adult offspring and female mammals routinely abort or kill offspring when they deem the circumstances unpropitious for raising a brood. And if they think that contraception is murder, they can return to the good old days when masturbation was in a similar category. However, all this hypocrisy and twisting of facts really attempts to cloud the core issue: women as equals. By targeting this, the Jesufascists and their ilk across all nations and religions are playing on the primitive fears of men, especially at times of instability and unrest, when it’s far easier to turn on Others than to act constructively for a better collective future. As James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon) famously had a protagonist state in The Women Men Don’t See:
“Women have no rights, except what men allow us. Men // run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like—like that smoke. We’ll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You’ll see.”
Contrary to Freud’s notorious question, the recurrent problem of civilization, as prevalent today as in ancient Sumer, is how to define male roles which satisfy male egos without wreaking terminal havoc. Women still have essentially no power – Tiptree’s dictum still obtains, even in the First World. I personally believe that our societal problems will persist as long as women are not treated as fully human, including the right to be sexual beings by choice. The resorting to medical excuses in support of available contraception, nice as it is, diverts the attention from the central, irreducible issue of women’s basic autonomy and fundamental rights as full humans. The various attempts to improve women’s status, ever subject to setbacks and backlashes, are our marks of successful struggle to attain our full species potential. If we cannot solve this thorny and persistent problem, we may still survive — we have thus far. However, I doubt that we’ll ever truly thrive, no matter what technological levels we achieve.
