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Saturday, May 18, 2019

Sex strike



Her initial tweet has been getting lost of buzz. A few observations:

i) The assumption is that a sex boycott hits men where it hurts the most. It hurts men disproportionately. That plays on the misandrist stereotype that women don't like sex: sex is just an onerous favor that women do for men, like a reward for mowing the lawn. Or a bargaining chip to get what they really want in exchange for sex. 

But if women have so little interest in sex, why are they getting pregnant in the first place? Why are the getting abortions? Why do they clamor for abortion as a fallback in case of pregnancy? In almost all cases, their pregnancy results from consensual sex. Remember the supermodel who dumped Tebow because he refused to have premarital sex with her? 

ii) With the proliferation of sexbots, women are more expendable in that regard. Of course, sexbots are a pathetic substitute for the real thing. But they're easier to get along with than feminist banshees like Milano and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 

That's not a recommendation. I'm not making a moral assessment. I'm just responding to Milano on her own crass grounds. 

iii) If women wish to have sex without getting pregnant, why aren't they using contraception? Evidently, Milano thinks women are so lacking in foresight and impulse control that they engage in activity with easily foreseeable, but undesirable consequences. 

Even if, for argument's sake, we cast the issue in terms of bodily autonomy, this is not about denying women the right to control their own bodies, but the failure of many women to exercise self-control. If they don't want kids, practice abstinence or use contraception. Abortion is a fallback for women who are able but unwilling to control what they do with their bodies (prescinding the fraction of pregnancies cause by rape). 

If feminists think women are that reckless and impetuous, why should they be in positions of authority and responsibility? Why should they have the right to vote or be public officials in policymaking positions? 

iv) Then we're treated to the euphemism of "reproductive rights," as if prolifers want to pass laws making it illegal for women to reproduce. But what prolife laws actually reject is a murder exception for women–or mothers in particular. We don't think being a woman exempts you from the prohibition on murder. If it's okay for a mother to kill her baby, it is okay for husband to kill his wife? 

v) Pregnancy is how every feminist came into the world. Suppose a ship capsizes and a passenger climbs into a lifeboat. He then fishes a floundering women out of the water. But when a girl swims over to get on board, the second passenger kicks her away, causing her to drown. The second passenger was rescued but rather than rescuing another passenger, kicks her away. And what if that was a mother who turned her daughter away? 

Abortion operates with a Nietzschean philosophy, but if Nietzschean ethics is the yardstick, then men have all the rights. If it boils down to ruthless power, men come out on top.  

In another tweet she poses as the proud mother with her kids. But if she thinks she has the right to kill her children before they are born, does she have the right to kill them after they are born? Likewise, if abortion and infanticide are rights, does that mean matricide and patricide are rights? Do grown children have a right to do to parents what parents have a right to do to babies? 
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3 comments:

  1. Wenatchee the Hatchet5/20/2019 4:30 AM

    Many years ago I had a coworker point out to me that what seems to happen a lot is that there are people who are for abortion and against the death penalty and also people who are for the death penalty and against abortion but that he found very few fellow Americans who seemed to stake out coherent positions. When I said I was not in favor of either abortion or the death penalty, and also against pre-emptive rather than defensive war most of the time because I think the state should not make it's business deciding who should be killed off for the welfare of the state my co-worker said I'd staked out a consistent position across the board, which he found rarely happened. I'm not a pacifist, I think the state should use military force to defend the public interest if we get attacked but that we shouldn't resort to lethal force as some kind of first option. Most of the defenses I've see made for abortion seem, in the end, to use a secularist or progressive mutation of what ultimately seems to be a transfer of the concepts developed in just war theory into a defense of the individual as having some kind of inalienable moral and legal right to use pre-emptive lethal force to stop not a hostile nation state but an unwanted child. TO me the inconsistency involved in writers at, say, Salon, shouting their abortions for the individual as a moral triumph while damning the use of pre-emptive lethal force in the form of, say, Gulf War 2, seems impossible to reconcile. I wasn't convinced the case for Gulf War 2 was compelling enough to justify the decades we've spent there ... and I'm also not convinced that abortion is morally and legally necessary even if people attempt to put a kind of "positive Malthusian" spin on the practice. It seems possible to argue that if people are concerned about overpopulation and resource scarcity that in a paradoxical way the most conservative traditional teaching on sexuality in Catholic or Orthodox traditions that specifies that you just have sex when you explicitly want children and refrain so as to avoid concupiscence might be the more eco-friendly stance. Historically the alternative that was preferred, particularly in the case of the state dealing with women of Latin American and Native American descent, was the emphatically negative Malthusian approach of enforced sterilization. This is an element of progressive policy history that tends to be ignored in favor of contemporary liberal and progressive writers writing as if racist policy implementation could only happen on the right. There have been plenty of racist policies from people on the right, but contemporary polemic from white progressives and reactionaries can tend to broadbrush and attempt to scapegoat just the one or the other strand of white communities for what has historically been a shared legacy of racism. For that matter, Teddy Roosevelt's legacy shows that it was possible for him to stake out racially progressive views with respect to African Americans and negative views toward Native Americans. Contemporary progressive writing wrongly tends to assume that racism plays out as an all or nothing position as if historical documents haven't shown us that racist attitudes are often selective and contextual. One of my friends, a Chinese American, has pointed out that mainland Chinese are among the most explicitly and remorselessly racist people in the world but that Americans don't tend to realize this or think about it because we're acculturated to think of racism as an explicitly or even exclusively white custom.

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    Replies
    1. steve5/20/2019 10:06 AM

      I think many progressives take politically correct positions on some issues, like opposition to capital punishment, as a form of collateral virtue that compensates for their position on abortion.

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  2. Wenatchee the Hatchet5/20/2019 4:30 AM

    Finally, my brother was pointing out from his reading of medieval history that there's a history of intellectual and scholastic groups arguing that the wrong kinds of people reproduce too much, i.e. if too many poor peasants have sex and have babies they would have more babies than agricultural technology at hand could provide food for, which my brother pointed out shows that the intellectual and social elites of the West have had a history of worrying that the uneducated and unwashed masses were having too many babies goes back at least a thousand years.

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