A recent Google search under the topic “anti-choice legislation” (the collective umbrella under which restrictive abortion and birth control lie) reveals that America’s “War On Women” has certainly not ended so much as it has become unfashionable to speak on in the mainstream media once again. Michigan, Nebraska, Texas, Oklahoma…in these states and more, the debate rages on, reason and hysteria clashing again and again over exactly how much control a woman should have over her body. While I know most of you, especially the ladies, are tired of hearing one more (mostly) straight white guy tell you why this is either a good or bad idea, consider for a moment exactly what actual stake us menfolk have in this debate as well, and why it’s important.
All of the anti-choice legislation that is being flouted by the GOP today is designed not only to serve as a punishment to women, but also as a warning to men. For either gender, the message is clear: do NOT fuck under ANY circumstances other than that which is necessary: making babies. If you do it for any other reason, punishment will be swift and severe, and penance will be everlasting. Not only will women be forced to carry that child to term against their will no matter where it came from, but the idea of safe, non-committal sex is officially thrown under the bus, due to things like increased risk of exposure to STDs and astronomically higher odds of unwanted pregnancy. Let’s face it: most men, being the horny bastards that they are, are scared to death of both of these things, as monogamy is certainly NOT something that is well codified into our genetics.
So why would the GOP want to control men’s libidos as well, you ask? Because by controlling both, they have a direct handle on the sexual instinct itself. The people that push this legislation don’t want you to fuck, PERIOD. And there’s nothing moral about this, either. The truth of the matter is that energy is much better directed, in their eyes, towards the sort of myopic, hysteric, flag-sucking nationalism so critical to making the GOP’s larger platform the status quo.
“It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship…There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account.”
-George Orwell, “1984”
Being one of mankind’s most base and powerful instincts, the amount of energy devoted, whether consciously or otherwise, to the act of reproduction is tremendous. By instilling heaping amounts of fear and guilt upon the sexual act, usually through some sort of religiously dogmatic pulpit-pounding in both church AND state, you can cut people (especially the lesser-educated ones) away from the desire for sexual expression, which is one of the cornerstones of freedom itself. When you start to imagine the immense power that can be harnessed there to garner support greater and perhaps more insidious goals – such as perpetuating endless war-for-profit or the furthered concentration of wealth through monopoly and oligarchy – it becomes abundantly clear why legislation like this is so overwhelmingly favored by the Right: because it works. You can see it in the way your average fundie’s eyes glaze over and he or she assumes almost reverent tones when spouting talking points regarding issues like our supposed “War On Terror”, the protection of America’s “job creators”, and things like entitlement reform. The overwhelming majority of these same people also stand firmly behind anti-choice legislation, while in the same breath claiming to champion “freedom” and “liberty’ without the slightest trace of irony in a stunning example of collective doublethink. America’s Anti-Sex League has done its job well, supplanting sexytime with standing for the Pledge throughout vast swaths of our nation. Nineteen-Eighty-Four was written as a cautionary tale, not as a primer for empire-building. It’s clear that the Right long ago discovered the former; when will the proletariat discover the latter?