Female Marxism, Part II: Sexual Empowerment
Alyssa Milano, a two-bit actress currently playing the role of a two-bit celebrity activist, has come up with a stellar plan for fighting back against abortion opponents: a “sex strike.” Before you get excited imagining alternative implications of that interesting name, what she means is that women should stop having sex as a means of forcing men to stop passing laws restricting abortion “rights.” This is peculiar on a number of levels.
First, the leading modern advocates for abortion have been radical feminists, who are typically homely or socially awkward women who would rarely have the opportunity to make the choice Milano is proposing — which, if we’re going to be psychologically honest rather than politically correct, is why so many hardcore feminist thinkers and activists are lesbians and/or single women. That is to say, until feminists somewhat obscured their nature by joining forces, awkwardly, with the progressive-pornographic entertainment industry to make licentiousness and deviancy chic, feminism was very obviously to female life what its intellectual parent, socialism, is to political life, namely a symptom of psychological weakness, uncontrolled envy, and moral infantilism.
Second, Milano is implying that controlling access to physical pleasure as a means of getting men to give you what you want is an acceptable method of social influence for women, which is exactly what traditional marriage practices are all about. The moral persuasion and political function of marriage rituals is based on this very premise: If men want the pleasure of sexual gratification, then they must first promise to take care of the women, provide for their material needs, and also, most importantly, take responsibility for any children that might issue from such relations. This has been one of the most basic practical premises of civil society: Men’s animal desires, rather than flowing randomly into chaotic and irrational channels, must be restrained and guided down socially beneficial ones.
Milano’s proposal is a morally twisted version of that same female-empowering, male-subduing premise, with the one alteration being that “taking responsibility for any children that might issue from such relations” has now taken on a darker, less socially beneficial connotation.
Third, feminists with more brain capacity than the performance artist Milano will see that her proposal is in effect promoting the antidote to their latter-day, progressive-pornographic version of feminism: abstinence. For Milano’s “sex strike” amounts to saying, “If you want to engage in this pleasure-seeking lifestyle, but you don’t want to let us kill any children you might cause through such behavior, then you’ll have to cool your heels.” What does this admonition mean in practice, other than that men who wish to fulfill their sexual desires should restrain themselves unless and until they find a woman who does not want to kill her baby, but rather is looking for a mate with whom to produce a family? Great idea!
Interestingly, female Marxism, like its umbrella dogma, has always pursued an overtly anti-family agenda. The family is progressivism’s primary political enemy, as it buffers the individual against the influence and attraction of state collectivism, as well as providing a natural material safety net that obviates the need for the state safety net that constitutes the main propagandistic mass appeal of socialism.
Until a few generations ago, feminists pursued their anti-family agenda on terms that were superficially aligned with protestant moralism. Abstinence, or at least the rejection of marriage customs and ordinary heterosexual relations, was their way of saying, “We don’t need men to find fulfillment as humans in our own right.” The era of more effective birth control and medically normalized abortion procedures — the era often identified with feminist heroine and genocidal racialist Margaret Sanger — changed the game, and also allowed the more forward-looking feminists to expand their audience beyond the realm of the priggish, the frightened, and the angry. As birth control (including abortion) as social control became practically viable, feminists, following the rest of the post-Frankfurt School Marxist intelligentsia, leapt on the new promiscuity bandwagon and claimed it as their own. Specifically, this meant a shift toward the sex-for-pleasure doctrine as an even more effective means of undermining the “traditional” view of sex as primarily nature’s means of propagating the species, and secondarily civilization’s means of forging stable communities through the family structure. In short, feminism gradually shifted from its emphasis on the sexual equivalent of prohibition, to its new (and current) emphasis on the doctrine of hedonism as power.
Those who oppose abortion, female Marxism (aka feminism), and progressivism’s systematic disintegration of the family, ought to be cheering on Alyssa Milano’s idiocy. She is a living model of the way irrational moral positions tend to contradict and annihilate themselves. She has just unwittingly made herself a leading voice for moderation, and against the mainstream sexual promiscuity that has been one of the chief material causes of today’s precipitous breakdown of civil society, the practical advance of socialism, the death of education, art, and philosophy, the deterioration of religion and community feeling, the spread of kneejerk nihilism, and the general vulgarization of human relations.
I stand with Alyssa! If you don’t want to produce babies only to turn around and kill them for your mere convenience, then by golly, don’t have sex with a woman who wants to give and receive physical pleasure devoid of moral considerations. We used to have a few special names for women like that. Parents used to warn their sons to stay away from such women. It’s still good advice.
(Also see “Female Marxism, Part I: The War Against the Feminine.”)
