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Sunday, March 05, 2006

Menopause pwnz!!
Posted by Jill | 10:04 AM

I've decided that I love menopause. I really do. No, I'm not crazy about the way it makes my overall aging accelerate, but since I'm not having a lot of hotflashes or mood swing problems, and the most inconvenient side effects so far are dry skin and an occasional inability to focus and concentrate, it's really not so bad.

But the best part of menopause is I can fuck like a bunny and the Christofascist Zombie Brigade can no longer touch me.

If you think that the South Dakota anti-abortion legislation, and similar bills winding their way through other states, won't hold up in the Supreme Court, I have two words for you: Roberts. Alito.

But let's forget abortion for a moment, shall we? Let's forget the people who think that women are not capable of making their own decisions about their bodies, but are eminently capable of raising children. Let's talk about the idea that you can greatly reduce the risk of unwanted pregnancy by using contraception.

Now I'm very lucky in that I never had a contraceptive failure. And I'm very lucky in that I became sexually active in the era of the free clinic, back when college students were able to make responsible decisions about protecting themselves without breaking the bank. In the aftermath of Bush's America, those not as lucky will have to go through nine months of unwanted pregnancy to bear children they don't want if they're among that 3% or 7% or whatever the failure rate of their chosen contraceptive method is.

But if you think that's all that's going to happen, guess again. Because they're gunning next for your pills, your Norplant, your patch, your IUD:

Birth control prevents God’s work
By Kristin Knight
Special to The Star

Karin McAdams, in response to Laura Scott’s column on family planning, poses an honest question about “what objections, perhaps biblical, perhaps otherwise” people have for discouraging artificial means of birth control (Letters 2/15).
Although many Christians may point to the Genesis account of Onan and many Catholics may point to papal encyclicals, most notably Humane Vitae, the whole biblical tradition reveals that God has intended for sex to be a marriage act that is open to, or at least not deliberately closed off to, the transmission of life.

By using contraception, you prevent God’s creative power in bringing forth new life. Sex is a complete self-giving love you pledge to your spouse within marriage, and contraception destroys the unitive and procreative qualities of sex. Pleasure is not the purpose of sex — it’s the motive or consequence.
Our culture has now put pleasure at the center of everything, and we speak of human sexuality in such animalistic ways — as though we can’t control ourselves, waiting for marriage, waiting for stable economic circumstances, waiting to have sex until we are ready to be open to life.

Self-control or temperance is a Christian virtue, and by practicing modern, effective methods of natural family planning by having periodic abstinence, you can postpone pregnancy if necessary in a healthy, inexpensive, fulfilling way as you embrace chastity appropriate for your stage in life.

As for McAdams’ concern that it’s so “expensive” and “difficult” to raise a child today as opposed to former generations of women with more children than today’s modern moms, I think again that pleasure — and its good ally, materialism — is at the heart of this notion. Our society in general promotes two-income households with more stuff in them than prior generations ever dreamed of having.

The concept of sacrifice has been replaced with stuff, stuff and more stuff as our children are raised in day-care centers and our elderly are shuttled off to nursing homes. Our value for life at both ends of the spectrum has diminished in our society, where life is measured by its contribution, not its intrinsic worth, and where some work so hard to safeguard methods to prevent pregnancies while never accepting that we have the controls already to prevent pregnancies naturally through abstinence and chastity.


Abstinence and chastity. That's what it's really about, and that's what it was always about. Sex is bad, and the wages of sin must be death -- or so the Christians currently running this country believe.

It's easy to say that it's just about the fear and loathing of female sexuality that is part and parcel of all of the religions born out of the interestingly named Fertile Crescent. But it's not so much the fear of women that drove the men who created these structures, it was the fear of themselves and of their own impulses. Yet instead of making the effort of will to control themselves, it was so much easier to demonize women, to turn them into temptresses. Hence you have the hair-cutting and the wigs of Orthodox Jewish women and the ban on sex during the times when one is least likely to become pregnant. You have the highly inconvenient Mary Magdalen recast as a prostitute. And then you have the burqa.

With the exception of Confucianism, which with its placement of women as inferior to men, its bans on all physical contact between husbands and wives outside of the act of procreation, which was itself regarded as sinful, carries the same baggage as Christianity, most Eastern religions are NOT judgmental about sex.

Taoism, with its belief that energy and momentum are the sources of all life, sees sex as a means of cultivating that energy. Sex and spirituality are not mutually exclusive. In Hinduism, the upper castes of India had access to the Text of the Sixty-Four Arts, which we know as the Kama Sutra. Buddhism, outside of the orders of monks, isn't doctrinaire at all about sex.

It is the Big Three Western Religions where men have built structures to deal with their own impulses by restricting women. And the more that the most doctrinaire flavors of Christianity become integrated into our political life, the more we're seeing men looking to pass laws restricting women's (and gay men's, for that matter) sexuality because of their own fears of themselves.

Women who support such legislation are coming from a different side of the same issues. I have no doubt that there are plenty of women who are similarly afraid of themselves, of their own sexual impulses and their own sexual power, and they seek patriarchy as a means of dealing with those impulses. But I think that for many of these women, it's a reaction to what they see as family stability crumbling all around them. It's a rejection of modernity no less than the wearing of the burqa.

You are NOT going to put this particular genie back into the bottle, mostly because the era these people hold so dear -- the 1950's -- was a mere blip on the sociological map of even 20th century history, let alone earlier histories. Women have always worked, and women have always sought to control their fertility. In an agrarian society, women did different work than men, but their work was no less valued and was no less important to the running of the home, the farm, the income, than the work done by men. It wasn't until the post-industrial age, that 1950's era that has been set up in a shrine as representing the ultimate in civilized society, that the roles of women became somehow lesser. Betty Friedan didn't devalue housework; its practitioners were well aware that their work wasn't appreciated long before Friedan put a name to what they were feeling. And women worked for pay outside the home long before Rosie the Riveter. Before there was a middle class in this country, poor women worked to augment the family income, or before marriage. Those killed at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire weren't men.

Life today is complex and difficult, and it's far easier to blame feminists, or sex, or abortion for the difficulties of modern life. But the fact of the matter is that people have sex. They always have, and they always will, and not just for procreation.

And there is nothing that the Christofascist Zombie Brigade can do to stop it. All they can do is make the consequences for women -- and for the children they profess to want to save -- that much more dire.
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