We’ve come to expect less for and from ourselves, and for and from one another. In part, it’s the fruit of the contraceptive pill. New York magazine recently observed in a cover feature: “The pill is so ingrained in our culture today that girls go on it in college, even high school, and stay on it for five, 10, 15, even 20 years.” That, of course, has had all kinds of fallout: a false sense of freedom, security. And it has ravaged women’s fertility, as it seeks to mute exactly what women’s reproductive power is all about. – Kathryn Lopez
WASHINGTON — Close your legs, girls.
Guard your fertility.
It’s your power.
Phyllis Schlafly must be so proud.
Kathryn Lopez is using progress against women, because it fits the fiscal insanity moment we’re all living in, but comes with a bonus: blasting the “contraceptive culture.” Yeah, because the back alley abortion culture was so good for us all.
Lopez’s post on Sunday provides a perfect foundation for the extremist fundamentalists in Ohio trying to prove a fetus can testify. It’s the latest attempt by the Right to claim freedom is only for men.
Women’s sexual freedom wasn’t really about either, according to Lopez and her ilk. It was a false sense of freedom and security, as she hallucinates history, because — wait for it — it “ravaged women’s fertility.” Get the collective horror we’re all living there? Try selling that in Africa where HIV is the norm. The Right’s anti-feminists don’t believe We Are the World. They’re America-centric in the 21st century of rolling revolution.
Lopez argues that the fight to defund Planned Parenthood, which can’t use one dime for abortion services, is really all because the evils of contraception, which quiets pregnancy by snuffing it out. According to Lopez, the goal of the sexual revolution and contraception was actually a conspiracy to “mute exactly what women’s reproductive power is all about.”
Oh, and just for good measure, in case you didn’t get the message, Townhall used a picture of Hillary Clinton next to Lopez’s ramblings.
Writing under “contraception is not the solution,” she huffs and puffs really hard to try to make the point that… No, wait. She actually says birth control isn’t the solution to a problem that women don’t have and never did.
Modern women are organically aware of our biology from puberty and no pill can mute the power of our fertility, which society still promotes as the primary essence of a woman’s being. What Lopez can’t bring herself to accept is that each woman can now make the decision herself as to whether she thinks that is actually true for her.
The crux of the issue is that the Right doesn’t believe women’s choices are their true power. They still think the vagina is the magic entry into controlling men and the place where fertility secretly lies that females are avoiding through the wickedness of contraception, because of some make believe uncontrollable clitoral climate.
Pleasure is not a pursuit in and of itself for 20th century women like Lopez, whether sexual or economic.
Because it’s unavoidable, Lopez admits she wants to take us all backward.
That’s why I want to turn back the clock — to a time when we valued love and marriage and didn’t expect, support and even encourage promiscuity. Life and history don’t work that way, obviously, there is no actual rewind. But we do have opportunities to learn from our mistakes.
The spending fight over Planned Parenthood in Congress is about a number of things. It’s primarily about good stewardship, as so much of the spending debate is. But beyond legislation, beyond anything Congress can or should do, it is a call to arms for a new sexual revolution. It’s about wanting more for ourselves and for those whom we love. It’s about ending the surrender to a contraceptive mentality that treats human sexuality as just another commercial transaction.
As someone who spent quite a few years traversing the world of relationships and sexuality, any woman in the modern era who doesn’t think courting doesn’t begin as a “commercial transaction,” to use her words, is going to find herself with the fuzzy end of the lollypop for life.
The “Leave it to Beaver” era is long gone and it’s not coming back.
There are few things more dangerous than amateurs talking about sexuality, but what’s worse is a charlatan selling a world to women on the guise of history’s failings.
Modern women aren’t stupid.
We’re not sluts.
We have choices.
Contraception is one of the things that gave them to us.
Condoms don’t “ravage women’s fertility,” venereal disease does, and promiscuity isn’t a prerequisite for using birth control. Serial monogamy in a world where people live to be 90 is reality. It doesn’t mean you’re a whore.
Making a choice to delay pregnancy doesn’t “mute exactly what women’s reproductive power is all about.” It puts motherhood on pause and there isn’t one modern woman who in the 21st century doesn’t know what that means.
Next we’re going to hear that contraception causes unemployment, because if the bitch was at home birthin’ babies she wouldn’t be takin’ the man’s job in the first place.
Taylor Marsh is a political analyst, writer and commentator on national politics. A veteran national politics writer, Taylor’s been writing on the web since 1996. She has reported from the White House, been profiled in the Washington Post, The New Republic, and has been seen on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic, as well as on radio across the dial and on satellite, including the BBC. Marsh lives in the Washington, D.C. area. This column is cross posted from her blog.