Lynn Coady, Twilight of the Patriarchs
In her book, Delirium: The Politics of Sex in America, Nancy L. Cohen examines how sexual hysteria has hijacked American conservative politics in recent decades. She begins her story with the arrival of the contraceptive pill in 1965, demonstrating how the new era of sexual freedom led directly to the women’s and gay liberation movements. “Although it is easy to grasp why ‘women’s lib’ and gays coming out of the closet might have ticked off a lot of people,” writes Cohen in her opening chapter, “it is hard to imagine how it could have sparked the delirium that has consumed American politics for four decades.”
The ‘sexual counter-revolution’ started not in response to Roe vs. Wade, says Cohen, but as a conservative backlash against the Pill. The new sexual freedoms the Pill represented ran counter to cherished patriarchal ideals about the family, exposing it as “a petty tyranny,” and setting “itself against fundamental assumptions about American culture.” Assumptions such as the idea that women (well-bred women, at least) were indifferent to sexual pleasure, or that their natural and preferred domain was at home with children. More than a generation later, in his nonsensical leap from insurance-covered contraception to sluts and prostitutes, Rush Limbaugh was merely reframing the original patriarchal panic attack over women’s sexual freedom.
Late in 2012, after the U.S. election, I called Cohen at her home. I was feeling suffused with relief and elation at the decisive Republican defeat, but still shaken by the woman-hating leading up to it. In 2012 alone, by way of example, congressional Republicans introduced an astounding sixty-seven bills that focused squarely on restricting legal access to abortion. Matters were even worse at the state level, with forty-three new restrictions enacted in nineteen states, the one most resonant of The Handmaid’s Tale being a Virginia “informed consent” bill that conveniently left out the consent.
This bill in particular warrants detailed examination. In the online magazine Slate, Dahlia Lithwick wrote about the bill, which mandated transvaginal (meaning, internal) ultrasounds prior to a woman receiving an abortion. An amendment had been proposed before the bill was passed, Lithwick noted, specifying that women would have to give their written consent to an internal ultrasound if that was what their doctor determined was necessary to obtain images of the fetus—essentially allowing them to opt-out of being penetrated unnecessarily—but this amendment was voted down. Therefore, wrote Lithwick, “the law provides that women seeking an abortion in Virginia will be forcibly penetrated for no medical reason. I am not the first person to note that under any other set of facts, that would constitute rape under the federal definition.”
Eventually the Virginia law was amended due to media attention and public outcry (including counter-amendments tabled by female legislators that would have done Jonathan Swift proud, such as one requiring men have rectal exams before they could get prescriptions for erectile dysfunction medication). Women would still have to sit through unnecessary ultrasounds, but at least now would not be penetrated. The dystopian irony here is that it meant the mandated procedure was not just medically unnecessary, but pointless; external ultrasounds produce no images in the early stages of pregnancy. These legislated ultrasounds, then, were pure theatre—a legally-enforced ritual straight out of an Atwood-inspired nightmare.
This was all icing on the large and unappetizing cake being served by the Tea Party in the lead-up to the 2012 election. But the Democratic victory in November did stand as a decisive repudiation of their policy menu. Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times that defeated Republican candidate Mitt Romney had “resoundingly won the election of the country he was wooing…white male America,” noting, as did others, that the 2012 election featured the largest gender gap in history. The feminist website Jezebel credited “team rape,” Todd Akin, and a cadre of other gaffe-prone Republicans for making such a mess of the abortion issue that they actually helped to increase support for abortion rights across the United States.
When I called Cohen, she told me she was still in the process of getting her thoughts together, post-election. As an expert on sexual delirium in American politics she had been much in demand leading up to perhaps its most delirious political race to date. Recalling the images of women protestors holding signs that read, “I can’t believe we’re still protesting this shit!” I asked Cohen how America could have come so ridiculously close to turning back the clock to the days when sex was, in her own words, “risky, dangerous and, in many situations, completely illegal.”
“The Tea Party has always operated under the radar,” Cohen told me. For all its avowed obsession with taxes and the economy, it’s telling that the highest-profile Tea Party candidates tend to be anti-abortion and anti-gay rights evangelical Christians—what Cohen calls the newest generation of “sexual counterrevolutionaries.”
“That’s their pattern,” says Cohen. “When they’re losing, they tend to rebrand themselves as something other than the religious right.”
Many pundits have expressed bafflement that, despite clear evidence that the Republican “war on women” was in large part responsible for the defeat of the GOP, Tea Party Republicans have by no means powered down their war machine. In a late November editorial, the New York Times took Republicans to task for stonewalling the Violence Against Women Act, patiently explaining how heartless such indifference to women’s suffering was making the party look, especially in the wake of Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” remarks, and asking, “Is that really what Republicans want to stand for?” Why, we might well wonder, isn’t the GOP leadership doing an about face on women’s issues now that it has proven to be their Achilles Heel?
Because, says Cohen, their goal is not to win the hearts and minds of the American public. Nor has it ever been. “These people are ideologues bordering on theocrats. The war on women was never a distraction—it was a main issue for them.”
In other words, it’s not so much about winning over public opinion as it is about achieving an overarching theocratic agenda.
Coady takes this, and a talk by Margaret Atwood, and wanders across Slutwalk, Kate Harding’s thoughts on the Komen/Planned Parenthood brouhaha, and the obligatory death and rape threats that any woman faces when confronting the patriarchy, like Anita Sarkeesian.
Go read her piece.