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This is why liberated female sexuality is so threatening. Conservative ideology holds that men and women are opposites. Men like sex, and so in order to keep the ideology intact, women can’t. In this world, women instead want male approval and of course babies, and sex is something they have to endure to get it. Contraception and especially abortion undermine this theory, not just because they can’t conceive of a woman saying no to babies, but also because they’re operating under an image of pregnancy as being something that gets men who otherwise want nothing to do with women (outside of sex) to commit. That women themselves say no to babies but yes to sex makes it hard to believe that it’s just women putting up with sex to get marriage-and-babies. That women often choose abortion in order to avoid marriage and babies (at least at this point in time) sends them around the bend. It suggests that people are individuals, not easily categorized genders with predictable and opposite behavior.
If you won’t choose it, then they feel that they’re in their rights to force it. When women can’t access contraception and abortion, sex is, in fact, less fun for them because it’s fraught. It does, in fact, introduce a power imbalance to sexual interactions between men and women because women are vulnerable in a way men aren’t. Giving men that power over women restores what conservatives believe is the proper order. If they can shame women and convince them that only sluts like sex, they can also get women to engage as enforcers, implying that they’re too good for that dirty sex stuff, unlike those lesser women. (Exhibit A.) That just bolsters the illusion that male and female sexuality are very different, and in that difference, they can find leverage to argue—-though indirectly, as is their habit—-that women are lesser than men.
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Amanda Marcotte (via greaterthanlapsed)
“It does, in fact, introduce a power imbalance to sexual interactions between men and women because women are vulnerable in a way men aren’t.”
(Le sigh at gendered language, but the point still stands.)
(via existentialcrisisfactory)