Chris Jepson: Sex as a four-letter word

“I just had a terrible nightmare. It was 1912 and I had to listen to a bunch of old men debate the morality of women accessing birth control. Oh wait this is real life.” (Image: a woman looking distressed) From: Your ecard

Soon. Soon America’s evangelical Right (and the Republican Party) will refocus all its moral outrage against women and their damnable sexuality. Gay rights and gay marriage are inexorably being achieved in America.

Oh, the South will be a predictable bulwark of resistance. Actually anywhere in the United States will be challenging where Republicans publicly check their brains at the door. In reality, no political jurisdiction is “safe” when the GOP holds a majority. Yet the day of criminalizing and marginalizing America’s gay community is rapidly coming—hopefully—to an end. Female sexuality will again be the tried and true “red meat” riling our beloved GOP faithful.

What is it about sex and women that gets evangelicals and Republicans all tied-up in knots, their undies in a bundle?

Indonesian author Okky Madasari summed it up well with, “Women become the objects of rules; they are repressed and lose their rights in the name of religion, or they lose their freedom in the name of tradition, while the state [legitimizes] this foolishness with laws.”

Sex is a four-letter word to Republicans — specifically female sexuality. If the issue were strictly abortion rights, Republicans would be all over making birth control as ubiquitous as M&M’s and sex-education comprehensive and mandatory. That is a major gripe I have with the GOP: most understand that to have fewer abortions nationwide, make birth control safe, accessible and affordable (free if necessary). It behooves us, too, as a nation, to thoughtfully educate our young on human sexuality and responsible sex.

So the issue gets down to (no pun intended) the libidinous nature of women and how men have historically attempted to control “it.” I’ve jokingly said for years “no man knows for sure” the father of his children. It’s meant as humor but few characters in literature are portrayed as pathetically as the cuckold. All three Abrahamic religions make a point (repeatedly/specifically) of marginalizing and controlling women. Oh, they do it in the name of their God but no good god of mine would relegate half the good minds to a subservient status.

So, why is that? Why has religion, why have men treated women so poorly the past 5,000 years? It’s the $64,000 question. Why did it take until the 1920s for American women to secure the right to vote? Why did we “give” recently emancipated male slaves the right to vote decades before our free mothers, sisters and daughters? Free. Too funny.

Any “war” on women is a historical continuation of the male marginalization of women. To place the state in a woman’s uterus, to involve the state in a woman’s sexuality is insulting to the intelligence of all women. That there are Republican women who participate in this injustice should come as no surprise. It is, after all, women who perform the abominable female clitorectomies in the Middle East and Africa. One theory suggests that to participate in your own subjugation, well, simply consider the Stockholm Syndrome. I joke. I jest. Hmmm.

It, too, is ironic that Republicans eagerly salute the gospel of “the unborn” yet somehow conclude American women are ill-equipped or insufficiently wise or are emotionally incapable of managing their own bodies.

Owning one’s self: nothing is more fundamental. Vote accordingly. Always.