Abortion, Sex, and Survival—Women’s Reproductive Freedom is About More Than the Right-to-Chose, It’s Ultimately About Civilization’s Survival
The overturning of Roe v. Wade was unthinkable just a short time ago. Since Global Catastrophe is ultimately at stake, perhaps it’s time for women to do the unthinkable. They have the power, but after thousands of years, they’ve forgotten how to use it.
by I. J. Weinstock, author of the new book, OUR SECRET SEX LIFE: The Key to Humanity’s Destiny. This article and his essay, “Is Sex the Missing Piece of the Puzzle?” are adapted from that book.
Protesting recent anti-abortion legislation in Texas, Bette Midler put it simply when she tweeted, “I suggest that all women refuse to have sex with men until they are guaranteed the right to choose by Congress.”
Bette, you may be on to something.
If we’re going to talk about a woman’s right to an abortion, we need to talk about sex. And in a new way. We need to see the big picture and understand that limiting a woman’s sexual and reproductive freedom has been the foundation of a millennia-long patriarchal project which has brought civilization to the brink of disaster.
Fighting for women’s reproductive freedom is ultimately fighting for humanity’s survival.
The Progeny & Property at the Heart of Patriarchy
Historians suggest that around five thousand years ago, our hunter-gatherer ancestors gradually transitioned from a nomadic lifestyle into a sedentary, farming one in which they planted crops, domesticated animals, and accumulated property. During this profound transformation, the seeds of Patriarchy were sown.
This Agricultural Revolution transformed Humanity’s relationship to everything—perhaps most importantly, the relationship between men and women and how they (especially men) related to sex.
Historian Gerda Lerner asserts that because the determination of paternity was essential to amassing progeny, property, and power, men’s control over women’s sexuality and reproduction is both the fundamental cause and ultimate result of Patriarchy.
To gain power through progeny and property, men had to define sex to control women’s reproduction. Driven by concerns about paternity, inheritance, and ultimately power, male-defined sex severely restricted and limited women’s sexuality to ensure paternity certainty.
To consolidate their rule over women and their offspring, men legitimized their authority by rewriting society’s belief systems (religion) to diminish women’s status and justify their dominance.
For thousands of years, ancient Goddess-worshipping cultures respected women as the embodiments of a Goddess. In the new Father God’s upside-down world, only the male is created in the image of the Divine, while the female is birthed from the male (Adam’s rib).
If you birth Eve from Adam’s rib and blame women for Humanity’s misery (the Fall of Man and Expulsion from Eden), you can control her sexuality, own her, own her children, and be assured that they carry your DNA so that you can pass your genes, name, and property on down to your offspring.
The Absurdity & Perversity of Patriarchy
Beyond the fundamental absurdity that the first human created in the Deity’s image is male, while the female is birthed from a man’s rib, Patriarchy created a society in which women, despite birthing and mothering all men, became men’s property to be given away to another man in a marriage in which she swore to obey him and forced to take his name. Women weren’t allowed to vote until recently. Many scholars consider the patriarchal oppression women have endured these past millennia to have been a form of “slavery.”
Patriarchy’s new religions denigrated and devalued all things female, creating an upside-down, man-made world that’s increasingly out of balance with Nature. Men have run the world for millennia and brought us to the brink of disaster!
According to Gerda Lerner, the Patriarchy is not immutable nor fixed — it “has a beginning in history,” so it “can be ended by historical process.”
Feminist scholars believe that for women to be truly free, they must gain control over their sexuality which includes their reproductive freedom.
The Patriarchal Paradox
Over thousands of years, the Patriarchy has built a civilization (based on controlling women sexually) that’s paradoxically undermined men’s status by creating a technological world in which man’s superior strength — which justified his status as protector, provider, and leader — is no longer needed.
Due to technological advances over the last century, women have gradually emerged from millennia of patriarchal oppression. Machines diminished the importance of men’s greater physical strength while household appliances freed women from time-consuming housekeeping chores. Another technological advance, the birth control pill, gave women greater control over their reproduction and allowed them to explore their sexual freedom without fear of pregnancy.
However, as women gained power and provided for themselves, men’s status as protector eroded, and so did their access to sex. Patriarchy’s current existential crisis has created conditions ripe for political manipulation that promises a return to the “good old days” when men ruled and sex was a woman’s “duty.”
The Patriarchal Politics of Abortion
Though the Church’s grip on our genitals has loosened, the State’s hasn’t. For nearly half a century, right-wing, conservative politics has been fueled by anti-abortion fervor. Despite its “pro-life” sanctimony, the abortion issue is fundamentally about limiting a woman’s sexual and reproductive freedom. It’s anti-woman.
The politically weaponized “culture wars” over women’s reproductive rights boils down to whether men will control women’s sexuality. Would a government composed of a majority of women legislate laws restricting a woman’s right to choose what to do with her body and reproduction?
The abortion issue has been such a potent political force over the past fifty years because limiting women’s sexual and reproductive freedom — both the fundamental cause and ultimate result of Patriarchy — is one of the last lines of defense upholding the patriarchal status quo.
Sex & Survival
Two hundred years ago, Malthus warned of overpopulation. Fifty years ago, when there were about three billion people on Earth, Paul Ehrlich wrote a book called The Population Time Bomb.
Now there are almost seven billion people, more than twice as many. The human population is growing by nearly eighty million a year. One and a half million a week. A quarter of a million a day. Ten thousand new humans an hour.
Every new human requires food, which requires energy, contributing to the Climate Crisis and looming Global Catastrophe. According to David Attenborough, the famed British environmental advocate, overpopulation is one of the root causes of many of our social and ecological problems.
Runaway population growth on a finite planet is like a “cancer” endangering the natural world. The population will continue to grow until the situation becomes “terminal,” producing disaster and devastation in which all Earth’s creatures will suffer famine, disease, or predation. Meanwhile, humans will wage war over finite food, water, minerals, and land for grazing, growing, or living.
There is another way to treat the “cancer” of overpopulation — a sexual solution.
Contraception & Abortion — A Sexual Technology that Transforms Society
We now know that limiting women’s reproductive freedom exacerbates the myriad societal crises that result from overpopulation.
Aldous Huxley, the celebrated British author of Brave New World, recognized the societal implications of birth control. “Consider the problem of over-population. Rapidly mounting human numbers are pressing ever more heavily on natural resources. What is to be done?… The annual increase of numbers should be reduced. But how? We are given two choices — famine, pestilence and war on the one hand, birth control on the other. Most of us choose birth control.”
Recently, Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, wrote in her book, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World, “…contraceptives are the greatest life-saving, poverty-ending, women-empowering innovation ever created.”
In her TED Talk, she made the case that birth control is one of the great levers of society. “One of the simplest and most transformative things we can do,” she said, “is to give everybody access to birth control.”
Whenever and wherever women have agency over their bodies, the birth rate falls!
Whenever and wherever women control their reproduction, the birth rate falls!
Whenever and wherever there’s a wide availability of contraception and abortion, the birth rate falls!
The Survival Paradox: Women’s sexual and reproductive freedom can defuse the population time bomb!
Will Women Embrace Their Superpower and Consider a Lysistrata Mission?
On social media, people vented their outrage over the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe —
—“If every time men had sex, they risked death, physical disability, social shunning, a life altering interruption of their education or career, and the sudden life-long responsibility for another being, I think they’d expect a choice in the matter.”
—“If men got pregnant, you could get an abortion at an ATM.”
—“I bow to no law made by those who never bore a child.”
—”We’re in another Civil War—a sexual Civil War between sexually free and sexual “slave” States where women, for all intents and purposes, are sexually “enslaved.”
Some women want to protest in the streets, cancel Fourth of July celebrations or “take a knee” during the national anthem to protest a country and government that’s failed them. Others urge a nationwide female walkout that brings the economy to a standstill. Perhaps women should consider something more extreme, more direct, and more targeted: a “sex strike.”
There’s a secret “heart of darkness” in men — the feeling of being powerless in the face of their sexual desire for women. This biological power that women exert over men challenges the foundational belief of Patriarchy — male superiority. Many of the religious pillars of Western Civilization were conceived by men to resist this sexual desire and so control women — the source of their pleasure, progeny, property, and power.
From Church Father Augustine’s outrage that his spontaneous erection — the undeniable proof of his desire for a woman — was his body’s betrayal of the Spirit; to Islam’s demand that women be veiled from head to toe, in effect, making them invisible. These are all attempts by men to resist, deny, and control women’s sexual power over them.
The “dark secret” in the heart of men is actually women’s “superpower.” When women realize that those who want to outlaw abortion and curb their sexual and reproductive freedom are not only anti-abortion, but also anti-woman, anti-humanity, and anti-survival, they may be inspired by the story of Lysistrata to embrace their sexual superpower to save the world.
Lysistrata, a play by the ancient Greek dramatist Aristophanes, was initially performed in Athens in 411 BC. It tells the tale of one woman’s mission to end the war raging between the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta by denying men sex.
Lysistrata persuades the women of these warring city-states to use their “superpower” and withhold sex from their husbands and lovers until the men stop fighting the Peloponnesian War and negotiate peace. Led by Lysistrata, the women barricade themselves inside the Acropolis and withhold sexual favors until the men of Athens and Sparta put down their spears.
It worked!
The idea of a “sex strike” is increasingly relevant now that women are once again being denied access to abortion. Bette Midler’s suggestion that “all women refuse to have sex with men until they are guaranteed the right to choose by Congress” is something to consider.
Inspired by Lysistrata and organized as a sisterhood, women can employ their sexual “superpower” to fight for women’s reproductive freedom, win elections, and ultimately save (and possibly even transform) our world.
_________
I. J. Weinstock is the author of THE SECRET SEX LIFE OF ANGELS series — an epic quest exploring the mystery that we call “sex.” This essay was adapted from his recent book, OUR SECRET SEX LIFE: The Key to Humanity’s Destiny.
His recent articles on sex and society include:
— “A Conversation with OpenAI’s ChatGPT About Artificial Intelligence & Sex”
— “A New ‘Theory of Relativity’ Could Shake Up the World Again. But This Time It’s About Sex!”
— “Is Sex the Missing Piece of the Puzzle?”
— “Did Jesus Have a Secret Sex Life?”
—“It’s The Sex, Stupid! The Sexual Undercurrents of Recent and Future Politics”
For more information: www.IJWeinstock.com
CONTACT: dreamasterbooks@gmail.com