The present age…prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence…for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane. – Ludwig Feuerbach
I’m doing a regular Q & A column tomorrow, but every so often I get a question whose answer is complex enough (and general enough) to justify a full column; this is one of those times. The author also very cleverly flattered me, ensuring a thorough answer.
I was wondering why you have not mentioned the birth control and Planned Parenthood controversy that has been going on, specifically the GOP attacks on its existence and availability. I realize that it has been widely covered, but I would be (selfishly) interested in your thoughts, since they are usually quite logical and minus any hysteria or posturing. I’m also pretty alarmed by where the GOP is heading with their pronouncements–if all the career girls are to be stuck in the kitchen cooking, how much worse will the sex-loving girls have it? I’m a current career girl and previously a sex-loving girl, so doubly-damned. BTW, your articles on rape and the role of prostitutes in mopping up excess male sexuality were truly a light bulb moment for me. Literally, I had NEVER once thought that out, but once explained, I could only marvel that I’d never seen it before. And I’m a firm third-wave feminist, well-read and far too well-educated about biology to believe that nonsense about how gender is just “conditioning”…yet I was so blinded by what “everyone knows” I never thought about the function that prostitution plays in a healthy society.
The whole birth control “controversy” is nothing other than a smoke screen (on which both parties collaborate) to draw attention away from the real issues, such as the collapsing economy and ever-increasing police state. We don’t have two parties in the US any more; we have two chapters of one party, the Big Centralized Government Party, and their differences are purely cosmetic. That’s why I cringe when I hear women buy into the idea that the GOP is their enemy…it certainly is, but so is the Democratic Party. They both want women safely denuded of rights and placed in farms where we can be kept “safe” and docile; all they differ on is which holding pen is best (kitchen vs. cubicle). And though one might say that Republicans want us forced to produce babies, one might also say the Democrats want to imprison the babies we do have in government indoctrination centers (i.e. crappy public schools) where they’re taught to shut up, sit down and do as they’re told…and both want those kids arrested if they disobey or “make trouble”. They both spread “sex trafficking” myth to suppress whores, both support ever-expanding police and government surveillance powers, both have refused to consider ending the drug war, both support universal criminality, and both support “end demand” schemes which criminalize men and define women as retarded adolescents.
So though I’ve touched on the controversy a little on Twitter and mentioned it obliquely in columns, I don’t think it would be productive to discuss it as an isolated phenomenon…because it isn’t. The closest I got was probably in “Legislators Gone Wild” last March, in which I pointed out that a lot of the misogynistic legislation (from both sides of the aisle despite the claims of Democrats) is a predictable backlash against the anti-male policies of the past two decades, which have created a huge pool of resentment in mostly-male legislators (as any practical psychologist could’ve told them it would).
