The Anti-Sex League And You: The Utility In Subjugating Sexuality

I have spent a lot of time lately wrangling in print with anti-choice groups and the weird byproducts of their propaganda. First, there was the ‘Porn Kills Love’ campaign, where Mormon anti-pornography group Fight The New Drug brought their billboard campaign regarding so-called ‘porn addiction’ and all of its attendant nonsense to San Jose. Then there were the revelations about the ‘soaking’ phenomenon at BYU — another Mormon institution — with ‘soaking’ being a term used to describe when a boy sticks his penis in a girl’s vagina but doesn’t actually move it, thus preserving the virginity of both parties, or something. Ridiculous, right? We had a few good laughs on The Plex about that one, the audio of which you can check out below:

Once the ‘Porn Kills Love’ billboards disappeared from my neighborhood, some pretty outrageous replacements were soon to follow, courtesy of ProLife Across America, another nasty religious lobby. “Real Men Love Babies!” they proclaimed, in a direct effort to undermine the masculine contingent of pro-choice supporters. Crude but effective, given PLAA’s reach in recent years. Out of my research on the group came the discovery of ‘saddlebacking,’ an Evangelical Christian practice where young girls engage exclusively in anal sex in order to preserve their virginity. The comedy practically writes itself, especially if you’re Garfunkel And Oates. If there’s funnier commentary on saddlebacking than “God’s Loophole,” I’ve yet to find it.

While all of this was happening, presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina and the rest of the Republican goon squad were continuously lambasting Planned Parenthood over a recently released video hoax of their employees trying to sell baby parts. The GOP rhetoric was a lightning rod jolting straight through the heart of every radical simpleton with a gun and a Bible across the nation, and sure enough, one of them took the bait: while I set the final type on my article about ProLife Across America, right-wing terrorist Robert Dear stormed a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, taking several hostages and eventually shooting several of them during one of the more widely publicized mass shootings of 2015. According to his ex-girlfriend, Dear “believed he was doing God’s will, and I’m sure he probably wanted to die in the process of carrying out what I’m sure he thought was right.” These ideas don’t appear in a vacuum; I wonder how many ProLife Across America billboards there are in Robert Dear’s town? Does he believe in porn addiction?

Fight The New Drug and ProLife Across America are powerful voices in the anti-choice movement, influencing millions of believers all across the country. Both rely on an incredible degree of misinformation and scare tactics in order to influence people’s decision making process, which can lead to all manner of unhealthy results, even fatal ones. This is why the term ‘anti-choice’ is so critical: whether it’s ‘soaking,’ ‘saddlebacking,’ or the outright murder of pro-choice supporters, they all constitute an assault on women’s reproductive rights. Choice and consent are essentially the same thing, and whether you’re baffling some girl with bullshit in order to get into her pants or gunning several of them down in a doctor’s lobby, you’re taking away a right to choose that was never yours to begin with. It seems more clear than ever that the Religious Right is willing to use any and every means necessary to take that freedom back. But the question remains: why?

Why spend so much time and energy over thousands of years controlling and subjugating women? Doing so might seem like a means to its own end, given the possessive and entitled nature of the patriarchal social order that dominates most modern societies. But that’s a fairly reductive explanation, one that doesn’t account for the broader utility inherent in controlling the sexual instinct itself. That’s really what’s at stake here, what groups like Fight The New Drug and ProLife Across America are agitating for: they want to, as George Orwell put it in his book 1984 when speaking of Big Brother and The Party, “kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it.”

“It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible,” Orwell wrote. “What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship.” Given how completely the Republican party has suctioned itself like a lamprey onto nearly every Evangelical Christian in America, it’s easy to see how groups like ProLife Across America and Fight The New Drug are rapidly shaping up to become the real-world equivalent of Orwell’s Junior Anti-Sex League, with the GOP functioning quite handily as the Ministry Of Peace. Together, they’ve managed to divert millions of young believers out of each other’s beds and into the arms of Jesus and Big Brother and Uncle Sam to the glory of God and the Empire, hallelujah. “For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch,” Orwell asks, “except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force?”

Epitomizing Orwell’s radical claim in 1984 that the “sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion” is Julia, a member of the Junior Anti-Sex League with whom Winston, the book’s main character, has a relationship that ultimately destroys them both. During one of their many conversations, Juia sums up Orwell’s notion of the “connection between chastity and political orthodoxy” quite succinctly:

“When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?”

Orwell may not have predicted the particular virulence of America’s anti-choice movement in regards to women’s reproductive rights, but making that connection wasn’t necessary for him to understand that there’s a bigger game afoot, one that has been woefully ignored in the modern age. Merely stemming or even reversing the tide of anti-choice legislation in America is not enough: in the War On Women, like so many other national issues, pro-choice advocates are consistently losing ground on ideas and narratives. “Eroticism was the enemy,” according to Orwell. “Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema…The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account.” In other words, sex is dirty, war is clean, and “Desire is thoughtcrime.” Undoing this narrative is critical to the long-term success of the pro-choice movement, and the emancipation of human sexuality from the shackles of antiquated religious morality. Otherwise, the Religious Right’s Two Minutes Hate will stretch on into eternity, as Big Brother watches and laughs above us all.