Having to live through this year's Republican primaries has been like being jumped and beaten and then tied to a tree on the walkway just outside Monkey Island with my eyelids propped open with toothpicks and forced to watch the priapicly stupid simians inside perform unspeakable acts on themselves while those not frantically performing the Sin of Onan pelt me with rock-hard nuggets of used Purina Monkey ChowTM.
It's been a living Hell.Not content to cut off the head of Zombie Lincoln it seems that this overpaid crew of impudent protohominid snobs is trying to shrink it, paint it black, stuff it full of over-ripe kumquats and then jam the rotting horror into a gaudily painted circus cannon labeled "No New Taxes" and blue the filthy mess all over the republic.
Sigh.
I've long since given up hope that the GOP is in any way, shape, or form saveable. The 2012 edition of the Republican Party is a gibbering loony, a tale told by a congeries of idiots in tri-cornered hats, full of sound and fury, signifying that if you pay Rush Limbaugh to puff out his flabby cheeks, rattle his newspaper, and shove enough rats and old socks in your brain and tell you that the moderate Republican elected three years earlier is a Market-Hating Commie Kenyan Muslim said brain will devolve into a puddle of thick drool and slime mold before breakfast.
The combination of Islamophobia, Taxophobia, Modernophobia, and Thoughtopobia have driven the modern GOP utterly batshit. There is no saving it; ceterum censeo GOP esse delendam - the GOP must be destroyed.
But of all the utterly bizarre, completely clueless things the GOP has done this election year, it's feckless pursuit of contraception strikes me as beyond utterly mad.And that was before the Walking Id of the Republican Party, ol' Rushbo himself, went all Morals Proctor on some poor woman with the unhappy name of Fluke who stood up in public and stated the simple fact that hormonal contraceptive pills are a form of medication and as such in her opinion were a legitimate part of a health care coverage plan.
Aside from the fetid outburst of stupid that revealed that there's a room inside Rush's brain (the one with the "Gurlies!" sign on the door) that's papered over with tattered Maxim and FHM covers and soggy Hooters T-shirts from Rushbo's early pubesence, this slut-shaming seems to have brought the entire howling crew of "conservative" C.H.U.D.s out of their sewers, shrieking about sluts and ho's, and chaining together the notion that a woman who wishes her insurer to cover her birth control is some sort of lust-crazed harlot with a sexual orifice as deep as a well, as wide as a church door, and as insatiable as a swarm of locusts, and that her sole purpose in life is to ingest free oral contraceptives so that she may swive the entire UCLA Marching Band, including the women and the costumed mascot, and, presumably, the wind instruments.
I mean, just look:
This is your GOP, circa 2012. It's hard to tell which is bigger, the racist forebrain or the woman-having-sex-hating hindbrain.But either one is completely batshit insane.
I mean seriously fucking insane.
Canvas-sportjacket-with-wraparound-sleeves, shoes-off, scribbling-with-feces-on-the-padded-walls insane.
Leaving aside the question of the other effects hormonal contraceptives have, the simple fact is that this entire nonsense is based on the notion that sex without the threat of pregnancy is bad.
Sex; fun sex, companionable sex, sex as affection, sex as bonding, even sex as recreation, or sex as friendship - all of these are BAAAAAADDDDDD!!!
Even for the Party of the Incredibly Dumb Fucking Platform, the notion that pursuing this issue as an electoral winner?Insane.
But...I want to pause here for a moment and reflect on the fact that this got ANY traction at all.
What does that say about us, us 21st Century Americans, and especially the sort of people who are clustering around the radio listening to Rushbo, or busily typing away at letters or e-mails about sluts to Powerline and the usual hives of scum and villainy that serve as watering holes for the terminally patriotic?
Why are all these people so wrapped around the axle about sex without the threat of babies?
I mean, human beings have been leaping upon each other for all sorts of reasons since - and probably before - we descended from the trees.
Certainly sexual congress is a way of procreating. But let's be honest; how many times have you approached your lover with the thought, oh, yeah, honey, let's start a family!
Okay, well, if you're the Duggars, yeah, maybe every time. But don't get me started on that one-family football team. For most of us...there's all sorts of reasons for making love.
We may want to hold our lover, or be held. We may just be crazy-wild with lust; he or she may just be driving us completely berserk. We may be lonely. Or sad. Or joyful, and want to share that in the closest way possible.
We may want a challenge, or a reassurance, or tenderness. We may want to make ourselves a chalice to hold the one we love, or overwhelm someone with pure physical sensation.And there are times when we just want to get laid. Personally - and this is just a suggestion, guys - my feeling is that if you're not interested in the woman attached to the vagina?
Take yourself in hand, let's say. Masturbation would be better for all concerned; quicker, cheaper, safer, and nobody has to lie to anyone else.
But that's just me talkin'.
So here's the point; there's a hell of a lot of times and places where two people want to put the totem pole in the donut hole - or whatever else they feel like doing with someone that, hopefully, in the best of all worlds, they deeply care for. And a hell of a lot of them don't - and shouldn't! - risk producing a kiddo as a result.
For the record, I'm all in favor of those of us who want and intend to make sweet, sweet love to do so, in the times and places and ways we deem best. That is our great strength and our great joy as humans - as often as we fuck it up, screw the wrong people for the wrong reasons, and get ourselves and others in trouble because of it - and we should cherish that sacrament, not hate or fear it. Let us love; let us MAKE love; honestly, openly, truthfully, recklessly.
But that unless we are very, very, very sure that we want a child, are aware of what that entails, and are prepared to deal with the consequences...I want us to make sure the joint venture between my little wrigglers and your egg never gets to float an IPO. Birth control? That's part and parcel of the deal unless we decide otherwise. We should be able to love without risking our lives, and the life of a child, every time we do.
And anyone who thinks they should is a complete and utter moron. Or a Republican.
But I repeat myself.
9 comments:
I would guess that the anti nookie brigade are driven by the idea that The Pill heralded the downfall of civilization and want to bring back the threat of pregnancy and Magdalene laundries to keep women in line. Personally I think that is about as sensible as phlogistion, but I've only voted Republican once in my life.
To me one of the strangest things is how much the Republicans venerate Reagan, when they are so far to the right of Reagan. Just consider Jim Webb, who went from Secretary of the Navy under Reagan in 1987 to Democratic Senator in 2007.
Ah Chief, the GOP is merely the symptom - not the problem. There is a huge swath of people in your fine country that are, for lack of a better word, batshit insane. Get rid of the GOP and they'll support whatever new nutbar anti-woman/foreigner/democrat party that springs up. These are the people who still insist on abstinence education (Utah recently passing abstinence only law) despite evidence showing it's less effective than talking about condoms. People who support creationism museums.
And as always, it's the people who scream the loudest about something usually have some dark secret with it. Anti-gay Repubs and religious types are constantly getting caught with their totem pole in the wrong type of donut hole (danish?). I can only surmise that this lot either can't get any horizontal tango at all or are into some kinky shit that would make Bob Guccione flinch.
The thing that gets me - as I kept coming back to in the post - is the crazy of it all.
Sexual intercourse is one of the great constants in human existence; from puberty to senility, at one time or another, we want it, crave it, try and get it, do things ranging from sweet, cute, and silly to dangerously, utterly destructively nut to have it with partners ranging from dearly beloveds to complete strangers.
Great empires have risen or fallen because of it, marriages have thrived or exploded, treaties have been broken and so has furniture.
So trying to keep human beings from rubbing their reproductive parts together is like trying to shovel water.
SO...the one thing you CAN do is to make as sure as you can that these horny buggers aren't going around making babies. For sure as the sun rises, a hell of a lot of that sexytime involves people who should no more be trusted with a kiddo than they should be allowed to saute' a live grenade.
The GOP used to be all about abortions; abortion was a crime, abortion was a sin, any woman who had an abortion was an Evil Murderess.
With that line you'd think that the GOP would be all OVER contraception. You'd think they'd be practically handing out the damn pills with Romney fliers.
So my conclusion is roughly the same as Big Daddy's; that this isn't really about abortion OR birth control, but a deep-seated horror that women (since you notice that nobody is going all freaky telling the boys to wrap up that rascal before launching the pink torpedo...) are fucking, and fucking without the Blessing of The Man...
And...as you both point out; the entire "force-the-damn-broads-to-shut-their-legs" program is doomed to fail because people are people and people; good girls, bad girls, good boys, and bad boys, well all just like to rub our babymaking parts together. Anyone whose "plan" depends on changing that is a complete and utter moron...
Or a Republican...
But I repeat myself.
You lay out the terrible situation exceedingly well (as always). My word for the night: "swive".
As Big Daddy suggests, the impulse seems a yearning for a simpler time. If woman can just keep the aspirin between her knees, all manner of ills will retreat to their hiding places, too. If the wicked wench can't, well, there's always the iron Maiden ...
It surely is a projection of male fear onto the outsized threat posed by voracious female desire. (And a vain hope in the very creation of that lusty desire which doesn't quite jibe with the reality most of them face apres marriage.)
If women can have sex without fear of pregnancy, they then control their lives as men do. I can't even conceive of not having access to birth control. That would render women imprisoned by their physiology. When I think that some people wish to deny women access to that protection I feel the weight of misogyny which persists.
IMO, atavism makes no sense as a political platform, unless you're pandering to the KKK crowd. Leon suggests the wingnuts are out in force; in my neck of the woods, I had always presumed I was seeing a particularly insular mindset.
But going by election results, it seems 50%+ of us must be just whacked.
p.s. -- thank you, Chief, for holding up the impulse to decency in our sexual congress. It is amazing how spectacularly people manage to flub up what should be a really straightforward interaction.
Tangential: I came across this quotation (attributed to Harriet van Horne & Julia Child, but I'd bet on the former): Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.
Of course, love and sex may be different things . . .
Lisa: I must not be reading the right white papers or something. It just seems completely whack, to me, to somehow try and deny what seems like a simple, sensible product of modern scientific civilization as a solution to an old problem (having a kid show up as the result of a moment's passion).
The idea that you can either 1) prevent the passion from running it's course, or 2) force ONE of the impassioned pair - since there's nothing holding him in place other than his fundamental decency, and people being people that's a pretty thin reed - to spend the next 20 years rearing a child, well, that's the part of the "argument" that leaves me utterly dumbstruck. What fecking idiot would want that?
And - and this is the subject of my next post - part of our problem is that we've (at the same time) almost divorced love and sex while binding them together in a mental chokehold. We have a very strange attitude towards sex; reviling it while exalting it and all the while holding it to some fairly ridiculous standards, and I think that merits some discussion...
Chief:
You are not thinking of the big picture.
Population pressure is the basic energy source for social engineers, just like steam pressure is a basic source of power for mechanical engineers.
The farmer doesn't let his cows decide when they should get pregnant. (in fact, he would be "crazy" to do so).
Why would you expect anything different from the oligarchs.
A lot of things, which seem "crazy", make a whole lot more sense if you simply assume that the political classes don't consider their supporters to be peer human beings.
We have a very strange attitude towards sex; reviling it while exalting it and all the while holding it to some fairly ridiculous standards, and I think that merits some discussion...
I agree!
Lisa: Just finished - see yesterday's post...
Per your final comment:
It IS odd that the very people who are most conscious of reining in their procreative capacity will do what it takes to stay responsible. while the "browns and blacks" who compose most of our lovely earth will keep on doing what they do, without heed.
Yeah -- you'd think if they wanted to maintain a "standard" of productivity, they'd be four-square behind contraception.
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