Undead Sexist Cliche: If you want sex without the risk of pregnancy or death, you’re a slut!

As I wrote about a couple of years ago, some forced-birthers hate the idea that women can have sex without pregnancy. It’s a mix of things prompting it: fear of the white birth rate dropping, fear of women not accepting their assigned place, the practical point that if women keep getting pregnant they’ll have to depend on a man to support them (1950s, here we come — with bonus vulnerability to abuse!).

Then there’s the point I’ve covered before, the claim that only nymphomaniac sluts get abortions or use birth control. Virtuous married women don’t do stuff like that — it’s slutty tramps who go out, have sex with six men a night, then get six abortions for all the babies! Of course, married, monogamous women get abortions and use birth control but anti-abortion rhetoric is porn for puritans.

The idea that women don’t and shouldn’t enjoy sex like men has a long history: bad girls have sex, good girls stay chaste until marriage. Women aren’t supposed to enjoy sex outside marriage. Most of them hate sex. If a woman has a horrible time in bed that’s no big deal. Married women have a duty to put out even if they don’t want to.

As it’s only bad girls who like sex that makes the morality of banning abortion and birth control simple in right-wing eyes: pregnancy is their punishment for being sluts. If they didn’t want a baby they should not have had sex. Much as they shriek about murder and “American holocaust” the horror at divorcing sex from the risk of pregnancy or even cervical cancer is at least as strong a motivation. Even though it’s a proven fact that birth control and comprehensive sex ed can cut the abortion rate, Republicans prefer the stick to the carrot.

Of course this approach isn’t going to win over women or some of the men who care about them. So in addition to lying about their intentions, Republicans are lying that it’s really for women’s own good, honestly. Misogynist bullshit artist Chris Rufo, for instance, claims he’s looking out for women. The pill causes health problems (so do my statins but nobody on the right tries to save me from them); sex is supposed to create children; and recreational sex is “a large part of the reason we have so many single-mother households” which lead to poverty and crime. Hmm, here’s a thought: difficulty accessing or affording birth control might also cause some of those single-mother households.

This is a good example of something Fred Clark has pointed out, that many conservatives hate the idea of people defining a good life for themselves. Recreational sex has turned out badly for friends of mine; it’s turned out great for other friends of mine. Some women think the pill is worth the health risks, some don’t. Some women want a sex life without children, some don’t. These are questions we all have the right to decide for ourselves. But in the case of birth control and abortion, that would require thinking of women as equals entitled to a say in their own lives.

They simply can’t stand doing that.