One of the main targets of this budget slashing, was an amendment proposed by Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind), loosely based on the idea that such spending cuts were being designed to "get taxpayers out of the business of financing abortions." In reality, this is a bold-faced lie and Rep Mike Pence must have put a lot of skill points into bluff when he leveled up in November because the federal government has been barred from spending any taxpayer money towards financing abortions since the 1970's, by virtue of the Hyde Amendment. (I should know, I got told my oh-so-great health insurance that I got from my active duty husband didn't mean squat if I didn't want to have a baby about 4 years ago.)
In reality, there is a vendetta against Planned Parenthood the likes of which I can't honestly comprehend, but loosely based on the fact that PP (for shame!) does provide (legal in this country) abortions, and more generally that (gasp!) they would dare to encourage people to (oh noes!) have(safe) sex.
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But all that is, in fact, just an explanation of the background political environment that both prefaces and engenders the need for what I'm about to say. I would say that the background was for anyone reading this blog who isn't from the US, but the honest truth is that a lot of my fellow citizens likely don't know the full truth of the matter either.
This morning, before leaving to go to class, I was checking messages as I sometimes do (but really shouldn't because I'm chronically late to begin with) and stumbled across a [gentlewoman] commenting on a Facebook thread discussing the proposed amendment and Planned Parenthood in general, with this particular argument:
"Funding for Planned Parenthood should be eliminated. It is not my responsibility to pay for birth control pills for you to have recreational sex."
Later in the thread, she goes on to argue that,
"I see it as another year that you try to force me to pay for your recreational pleasure and not thinking about how your actions hurt others around you. Your forcing what you want down my throat. Every woman and child has the r...ight to receive quality care but women do not have the right to reach in my wallet to pay for items that are not needed to maintain their health. Birth control pills are not needed to maintain a woman's health. It is considered a want not a need to sustain life; therefore, that is why many insurance programs do not fund it."
Now you might imagine that this sort of argument would have me, as a staunchly and some would say radical liberal progressive and sexual rights activist, about seeing Red to the point of having nothing articulate to say in response. ...If that's what you envisioned, you'd be right. So I didn't comment on the discussion. But this has been nagging at me all day long and even reaches back prior to today, because there is something fundamentally jarring hidden behind this comment, as well as others like it, that try to couch their logic for anti-sex and anti-choice arguments in the framework of "encouraging responsibility." And it really deserves to be dealt with, because no matter how much it strikes me asblatantly wrong-minded, it has real effects on convincing real people that dangerous policies are in fact, logical and even justifiable and ethical. So let me go back to the beginning.
"Recreational sex"? "Recreational pleasure"? Now I do realize that there are forces and political bodies in this country that want to discourage people from having and enjoying sex both because it's scary and powerful and because they want control over the masses. But, I think the reason this strikes me as sofundamentally abhorent that it makes me want to cry is this idea of framing sex for pleasure as an unequivocal evil, and what scares me is the seemingly almost-plausible logical framework of "simply wanting to encourage responsibility."
A Thought Experiment:
What if painting for pleasure were an unequivocal evil? Nevermind actual paintings for art anddecorative purposes... What if all painting from hence-forth should be for utilitarian purposes of the application of white finishings to walls so as to be easier to clean and seal the drywall, and any purposes for paint beyond this puritanical varnish were to be regarded as sinful unnecessary pleasure, a selfish greed for hedonistic satisfaction and a blatant disregard for the effects it would have on other visitors in one's home.
...Puritanical, is right. But thankfully, we do not look at the pleasures we derive from art and productive leisure as fundamentally immoral merely from the rational that "it is pleasurable." And we ought not to hold similar views towards sexuality. I generally dislike Mills' structuring of "higher" and "lower" pleasures and the assumptions required to support the concept of hedonistic calculus, but the basic premise that there must be pleasurable activities that are beneficial and moral seems to be inarguable, and on the whole it seems more plausible that the benefits/out-comes are a more worthy measure of what can be said to be moral behavior rather than deontilogical ethics that requires that all occasions of an act are either universally moral or universally immoral.
To deny a human being the right to seek sexual pleasure is in fact, an unconcionable let aloneunconstitutional breech of ethics. No, we do not have a right to demand that any one person or even someone else in general fulfill our sexual needs, but we do have a right to seek out someone that would like to. The Declaration of Independence succinctly defines the rights of man as the right to "Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness," inasmuch as to be human is to be a creature of physical as well as mental and emotional needs, which includes physical touch and validation of one's sexual expression as a fundamental part of being human, then to deny such a right can be, if not wholely "Unconstitutional" then at the very least entirely contrary to the spirit of Liberty.
Furthermore, to take the position that anything that can be considered or labeled "recreational," is therefore unimportant, lacking of value and negligible, is ethically as well as intellectually lazy as my example with painting demonstrates. The declaration makes claim for more than simply the "right to live," which is important in it of itself. It is not simply the statement that "you have a right to be alive," but rather, "you have a right to live a life of meaning, and to pursue an enjoyable quality of life." This same position that mere life without quality of living is not enough, is also behind our labor laws (which incidentally my new state is currently vigoriously debating via protests), our 8 hour workdays with two days off, even the whole concept of living wages AND benefits and holidays, speaks to the fact that "recreation," as the lady so dismissively put it, is more important than simply a luxury for the privileged few who can, for example, "afford" to access it. To that affect, access to birth control (nevermind the prevention of disease like cancer screenings that have nothing to do with sexual activity what so ever) is about way more than "license to have casual sex," it's about bodily autonomy. The same right to bodily autonomy that was supported by the 1965 supreme court case Griswold v. Connecticut that ruled married couples have a right to access birth control, and in the 1972 Eisenstadt v. Baird that ruled singles have the same rights.
The sheer virtue of nature garauntees even just as a statistical requirement, that human desires and expressions of sexuality will be multiple and varied. And I do not mean in any twisting of my speech to imply that no human can ever entirely lack sexual desire, for example, the asexual movement (no matter how my own little brain cannot really wrap it's head around that in an experiential and visceral way), any more than I mean to express that all people will experience the sexual urges in either the quantity or quality that I do. (I am given by virtue of the amount of arguments to the contrary, to be forced to acknowledge that this cannot be the case, unless you are all bloody filthy liars, which I doubt.) Likewise I do not believe by any stretch of the imagination that any person can ever be said to "owe" another person sex-- no matter the circumstances of previous sexual history or the so-called "teasing" and "blue-balls phenomenon" and anyway that is so not the issue here.
Regardless, to take a stance that is so counter not only to sex but to liberty as to charge that the pleasure and joy and vibrancy of human experience that can be so in-articulately captured in passionate, healthy and life-affirming sexuality in all it's multi-faceted varieties is not a Right of Human Dignity but in fact merely a "priviledged recreational activity" that has no business making claims upon the government for protection...
Then I can only resort to that famous quote that says, "Give me Liberty, or Give me Death." Because I won't live in a country, in a world that would make such an abominable crime against humanity as to claim that the need for contraceptives and desire for sexual pleasure is the result of something so immoral and despicable as "a deficiency in responsible behavior."
If there is to be a manifesto for my fight for sexual freedom, if you ever had wondered why is that, "dear god, that woman can never stop talking about sex," let it be this.
No man, woman, child, androgene or trans-gendered person, ought to be subjected to a world in which such a fundamental piece of their human being, their sexual expression and pleasure, should be so demonized as to be relegated as unremarkable for the maintainence of health. That a desire for "healthy partnered sex" should be made synonymous with "irresponsible and immoral behavior." In fact this is an outright lie of the highest order, as any doctor (ought) to be able to tell you that sexual health in fact does have influence on all other aspects of health, and a chronic denial or dysfunction of sexuality will invariably lead to dysfunctions in other aspects of life.
That our very sense of morality and ethics become so unhinged and torn apart that we have no recourse but to attack the very and truly only benefit of leading a good life, the experience of good and pleasurable things, which is at it's heart the only purpose of ethical discourse, the discernment of what "a good life" is in the first place.
This, is what a statement like, "...forcing me to pay... for you to have recreational sex," is ultimately saying. It can be hard to see it, because the phrase "recreational sex" actually conjures up the smokey distracting haze of demons and devils like "promiscuity" and "recreational drugs" and "irresponsible behavior," and kind of sounds like an LSD-inspired trip through the free-love hippie 60's, which while I've got no problems with, plenty of "moralists" do. But if you follow this logic fully what you are doing is equating, and fundamentally marrying, the pursuit of sexual pleasure with irresponsible behavior, which can only lead you down one path that ends at the door to "Sex should never feel good and is only ever moral when it creates babies."
Now it's entirely possible, and I will never claim that it's not, that sex can be immoral, unethical, that it can be painful physically as well as emotionally and have plenty of negative repercussions, and there's a whole world of possibility for sexual activity to be conducted irresponsibly. But never ought we to confuse the two, if we are contemplating sexual ethics. To do that, is to commit several logical fallacies, and end up with the conclusion that Sex = Pregnancy at best, Bad things all other times. This is a lie, it is a lie that the religious right anti-sex brigade propogates with fear-mongering as well as faulty logic and pseudo-science when it thinks it can get away with it.
And it is a lie because in order to live up to such a standard, all husbands would be require to rape their wives every time they have intercourse (and only for the sake of babies, any sexual relations when pregnancy would be unlikely would therefore likewise be immoral.) Furthermore, it would be the husband's duty to resist the temptation even to experience the pleasure in sexual congress, since all pleasure would therefore be sinful. Likewise all women would be required to absolutely never ever be aroused or experience pleasure through such sexual activity (orgasm from rape, "forcible" or otherwise, is not unheard of, or even all that rare) or else again, such behavior would be immoral. ...To my knowledge, while there are plenty of religions that have remarkably strict and conservative views on sex, I have never heard of any so stringent as this.
Now someone might be tempted to make the claim that, just because sexual pleasure isn't a "right," doesn't make it a "wrong," and all the position is arguing is that taxpayers shouldn't have to "pay" for people's "hobbies." But equating sexuality with a "hobby" is itself a grave injustice, an insult and an outright unethical stance to take in the way it must inherently rely on a denial of personal liberties, so there really is no middle ground to be found here.
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