Four years ago, I wrote a 4,000-word essay called “The Pill at 50: Unhappy Un-Birthday,” which included this observation:
The Pill fostered a prevalence of the belief that sex without pregnancy is normal. This utterly unnatural idea is the foundation of the Contraceptive Culture.
Throughout human history, recognition of the natural connection between sex and procreation was fundamental to society’s laws, customs, attitudes and behaviors in regard to relationships between men and women. These traditions had varied from place to place, and shifted slowly from time to time, but in all times and all places, social norms had been founded on the understanding that sex and pregnancy were intrinsically linked. Indeed, from a strictly biological perspective, reproduction is the sole purpose of sex.
The Contraceptive Culture, by contrast, is based on the negation of what we may rightly call natural sexuality. . . .
You can (and certainly I wish you would) read the whole thing, because so few Americans now have any memory of life before the advent of the Contraceptive Culture, the origin, history and goals of which are generally distorted by academics and the media. For example, it is often claimed or implied that the development and promotion of oral contraceptives in the 1960s was undertaken in order to “liberate” women; in fact, this project was funded by billionaires (especially David Rockefeller) who were fanatically devoted to a eugenics-influenced vision of population control. (See Donald L. Critchlow’s excellent 2001 history, Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Goverment in Modern America.) The arguments that sold The Pill as a particular blessing to women — and which, by obverse correlation, portrayed pregnancy and motherhood as traumatic burdens to be avoided if at all possible — was promulgated by public-relations specialists hired by Rockefeller and other soi-disant “philanthropists” who shared his population-control agenda.
Because this history is so little known, and because the beliefs of the Contraceptive Culture have become so widely accepted, people are often shocked to be told the truth and sometimes become furiously outraged by those of us who dissent from the now-common way of thinking. Consider liberals’ insane reaction to the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, and also how they have reacted to conservatives’ responses. Here is what Rush Limbaugh said Wednesday:
We had a caller yesterday that asked me this question: “When did birth control pills become so important to the human condition the federal government requires every insurance policy to cover them?” Eye exams, dental exams, dental work are not mandated by Obamacare, but contraception is, birth control pills are. Which is worse, to go blind from lack of regular eye exams or to get pregnant? . . .
[I]n the normal, everyday flow of events, pregnancy requires action that has consequences. Yet we treat it as a great imposition that women need to be protected from. It’s a sickness, it’s a disease, it’s whatever, and there’s gotta be a pill for it. Yet they wouldn’t have the problem if they didn’t do a certain thing. It’s that simple.
Limbaugh then went on to talk about Democrats and their dishonest “War on Women” rhetoric, but what he said about pregnancy being the result of an “action that has consequences” was the lead quote in Caitlin MacNeal’s article at the liberal site Talking Points Memo, which cited Limbaugh as an example of “conservative slut-shaming.”
What you see is how something artificial becomes perceived as “normal” simply by being common, and how the New Normal is then taken for granted as, with the passage of time, people simply forget that it was ever any other way. Interstate highways, air conditioning, cable TV, the Internet — my kids can’t imagine life without any of those things, although these are all relatively recent developments.
The Interstate highway system began construction in the 1950s, yet as recently as the late 1970s — when I was a senior in high school — I-20 had not yet been completed between Atlanta and Birmingham. People my age (54) and older are able to remember what long-distance auto travel was like before the Interstate system existed, and we’re also able to remember when you made such trips in a car that didn’t have air-conditioning. Until the 1970s, if the motel or restaurant you stopped at had air-conditioning, this was a feature that the proprietors were certain to advertise on the marquee, along with “Color TV” (a novelty introduced in the 1960s.)
Nobody wants to go back to the days of black-and-white TV, nor is anyone proposing to ban artificial contraception. Yet the influence of the Contraceptive Culture is such that some people seem to have entirely forgotten that the biological teleos of sex — its natural and organic result, its scientific purpose — is reproduction.
After four decades of rhetoric about “choice,” and two decades of lectures about “safe sex,” younger Americans apparently assume that it is normal for sex to be sterile, and that for sex to produce its natural result (pregnancy) is something weird.
As Limbaugh said, people now think of fertility as a “sickness,” a “disease” that requires medical treatment. So deeply ingrained has this view become among some young people that a sex educator in Massachusetts found herself accused of being “unintentionally heteronormative,” which made her realize that her college students had “never thought about sex in terms of biology or reproduction”!
So here we have a court decision, brought about as a consequence of an ObamaCare mandate, which says simply that an employer may refrain from providing insurance coverage for certain types of birth control. That’s it — no one is being forbidden to purchase birth control, nor are any forms of birth control going to be outlawed by this decision. It is strictly a question of whether the federal government has the authority to mandate insurance coverage for birth control. Yet to judge from the reaction of some liberals, the Surpreme Court has unleashed the Sex Police upon us, and we are on the verge of a return to the Dark Ages, when people were expected to pay for their own birth control. It’s as if liberals believe birth control is a right guaranteed by the Constitution.
Now they’re protesting by handing out condoms in front of Hobby Lobby, defending your right to keep and bear no offspring.
I’ll have to take your word for it that in the past “smart and responsible” people were abstinent. I don’t know what you mean about things having flipped though. You can certainly still practice abstinence and be consider smart and responsible. No one believes the only “smart and responsible” behavior is to have sex with “unnatural equipment”. Nor does anything think preaching abstinence is the height of irresponsibility. Abstinence-only sex end is what people think is irresponsible.
Science didn’t decide anything, individuals did. People have used contraceptives throughout human history; the birth control pill gave them something they already wanted.
No, because they didn’t have genetic testing 50 years ago. Also yes because that’s hardly a new phenomenon.
Men like Stacy and Rush just cannot get over the fact that since puberty, even though they have always been intelligently and integriously superior, women prefer to have intimate relations with lesser men.
Left only with the unfulfilling comfort of their lonely erotic repertoire, they lash out at the unfairness of it all.
That is so spot-on it could be considered prophecy.
Science never stops to ask “Will this make people less mature?”
It’s a shame, really.
You must be a libertarian. They are obsessed with telling us something is “not new” while ignoring the fact that is IS new to accept it, drag it into public, and laugh it off.
[…] Sex, Science, Nature and ‘Choice’ […]
“And there we have it, put as plainly as could be, that contraception has enabled women to become as irresponsible as men…”
You can look at it that way, of course,,or you can look at it as women becoming as free as men. The fact is, probably most people regardless of gender are sexually active by the end of high school, and certainly almost all are by their early 20s, but if that’s irresponsible, there are few if any negative consequences for that “irresponsibility” for men. I don’t count your vague reference to becoming spiritual empty souls, because that’s not measurable in any objective way. Men are not socially ostracized or looked down on or thought less of in any way for being sexually active. Since men don’t get pregnant, nobody even has to know if a man is having sex unless he chooses to make that info known. Also since men don’t get pregnant they don’t suffer economic consequences for having sex. They don’t have to leave school or change their college plans or lose their job or be unable to take a job because of having a baby. They aren’t forced into lower paying work by the logistics of having a child. So it’s all very well to say contraception makes women as irresponsible as men, but if that irresponsibility has no real-life negative consequences, whereas for a woman an unwanted pregnancy can wreck all her plans, then it doesn’t mean much.
Again, much more to say, but I’m trying to be responsible about my verbosity. 🙂
“. . and that is considered to be some sort of good, and some kind of gain for our society.”
Well, as I’ve indicated, it’s certainly a gain for women.
Are you freaking nuts?? I’ve known several guys who have been crushed with child support payments. Took some a while to wise up and figure out why it was happening and why they didn’t have any money despite working a decent job.
What did they do after they wised up?
Sans any citation, this is an assertion, and therefore to be ignored.
Yes, I could hit a search engine, but I won’t encourage such lazy intellectual behavior, as you’ve displayed throughout this thread with your drive-by commentary.
Cad behavior was certainly well known back in the day, because it was generally considered unacceptable, or at least inappropriate. A point that you seem to ignore.
But you offer no evidence that it was common or pervasive. Or even accepted. Only that people wrote about it.
So if you are basing your argument on an analysis of historical references about the lives of people back when, be advised that you are drawing from a small, and highly unrepresentative, sample.
That question is immaterial. Men, in fact, have economic consequences for having sex.
If you were honest about have an open discussion, you would at least acknowledge Cube’s point, and then ask your question.
The fact that you have to be reminded of this is not flattering for you.
It’s the “but they get to do it so I should, too” teenage school of reasoning. It’s a bad idea – and everybody including the teen knows it’s a bad idea – but if somebody else does it, everybody should be able to do it. So everybody can be equally stupid and whorish and not be left out. Because that’s unfair and if you think people should have a high moral code and stick with it regardless of what is going on around them, you are a big meanie and also a prude and you think you’re better than everybody else and that just can’t be tolerated! Everybody should just whore around. Because equality! What bullshit.
The question, and the answer to it, are not immaterial. Cube seemed to be implying something that in fact is quite material to the subject of child support. If he doesn’t care to answer that’s certainly fine with me
The question is indeed immaterial …. to the statement Cube made. Had you acknowledged his point, asking the question would have been a reasonable follow on.
As it is, you were ignoring his point, i.e., not answering, and trying to change the topic at the same time. Because you were caught making a mistake, and the left never admits to a mistake, no matter how small.
Rather like you tried to do to me. But you made my point by ignoring it. Nice try, but no cigar.
The Leftie School of Dishonest and Non-Civil Discourse has taught you well.
“Quartermaster, I don’t know where you get this idea from but you’re mistaken.”
I get the idea from what I have seen in history, and I’m not mistaken. Such men were branded as black sheep. In British society, for example, they often ended up abroad in the empire so they couldn’t blacken the family name any further, and were told why they were being sent abroad. The same often ended up happening in US society as well, it just was on some business posting rather than imperial posting.
Women have always bore the heaviest weight in illicit relationships when a pregnancy results. It has always been thus, and always will be thus.
If you think a “loving” illicit relationship is possible, then you are dealing in a species of insanity with which I have no truck. That it is insanity is inarguable. Sex outside of marriage is akin to allowing a toddler play with thermonuclear weapons. It is fraught with spiritual and emotional danger. God designed marriage in the way he did for our benefit and getting outside of it, doing things that are reserved for inside is the height of idiocy. You can make your own choices as God will allow you to use your free will in any way you choose. However, there are serious consequences, and those things that happen in this life are quite minor compared to what will happen when you enter eternity. The worst day is a Sunday school picnic compared to what you will get when you violate God’s law and enter eternity with that to your charge.
If you have rarely heard the term “man-slut” that’s your problem. The term is current in my circles and we have no use for such men. They are no better than women who routinely have sex outside of a covenant marital relationship.
He wasn’t the only one to say that, just the most publicized.
” I don’t count your vague reference to becoming spiritual empty souls, because that’s not measurable in any objective way.”
You have fallen into the scientism trap. The reason you have is you are one of those empty souls and are suffering the temporal consequences of your lifestyle. Worse consequences are coming.
What a surprise. A conservative who’d rather believe what he wants than actually educate himself. Could you be any more pathetic?
Here’s your citation, moron: http://www.boston.com/health/2014/05/06/teen-pregnancy-rates-hit-historic-lows/ZNVyKpwErZgE1PMlUyUd8O/story.html
If one can avoid economic consequences by ignoring them, or refusing to take responsibility for them, then it doesn’t mean much to call them consequences, now does it? I didn’t want to spell that out, because I didn’t think it was fair to do so until or unless I could find out, from Cube, whether he was implying, with that remark about his friends “wising up,” that said friends decided to stop paying child support, or pay only what they decided they should pay. Your defensiveness on Cube’s behalf, along with his failure so far to answer my question tells me that both of you know exactly why I asked that question *before* agreeing that Cube’s point was valid.
When you can honestly tell me that a mother can just decide one day to stop feeding her child as easily and consequence-free as that child’s father can “wise up” about sending that check every month, then your indignation about “economic consequences” for men might evoke a reaction from me other than derisive laughter.
Goodness. How do you know what my lifestyle is? Actually, what is my lifestyle?
Oh, I agree totally. After all, the meth addled left is destroying the future of those children.
Perhaps you are right. They do despise them, however. They are working hard to destroy any future they may have in this country by destroying the country.
If you really think that there are not people that hold teaching abstinence is irresponsible, you haven’t been paying attention. That idiocy has been going on for 30 years.
Considering the source, it may or may not be true. I’ve learned long ago to never trust libtard sources.
OTOH, the teen rate, while a concern was never the ends all. The fact that most births among blacks are outside marriage, and the number of whites are nearly 50%, is of deep concern to anyone with two brain cells to run together.
But if they can just ignore them once they “wise up,” those consequences aren’t really consequences, are they?
“We now have the ability to copulate with as many women as we wish….”
When it comes to specifics, however, my wife of 39 years is just as narrow minded as she ever was. A dollar to a donut says yours is too. 🙂
The comment stands as I was addressing what you have posted. You defend it as your lifestyle, so I made the reasonable assumption that it is. If you don’t like that, then don’t defend the indefensible.
She was hooking up with whoever so no idea who the father is. Daddy gub’mint means she doesn’t have to narrow it down.
You could always hand out aspirin tablets to the women, and explain to them that it’s an old-fashioned method of birth control; put it between your knees and hold it there.
I have said.nothing about my lifestyle. If you want to.know, I am a 64-year-old (today!) divorced woman, retired, living alone in a one-.bedroom apartment. I have a 24-year old daughter who lives in NYC. Now, you may not approve of this lifestyle, but I’m quite certain I didn’t mention it before now.
But what else could everything possibly revolve around? I mean, reallY!
My wife of 35 years, one month and 23 days would also take a rather dim view of such, but think of the society we’ve created, one in which we expect our prospective spouses to have sampled the cuisine rather thoroughly.
I was at a Hallowe’en party last October, attended primarily couples younger than us. The conversation took a turn in which married couples were laughingly saying that, if your prospective mate asks with how man other people you’ve copulated, the maximum answer should always be five. The laughing assumption was that the real number was going to be significantly greater than five, but that you never confess to more than five. It seems as though even those children of the eighties felt some sense of embarrassment about what their “numbers” were.
Uhhh, an historic low, based upon what starting date, 1979? Start looking at 1959, and your statistic will change.
A link which I followed, and noted that their graph began with 1971.
Of course, there is another problem with that chart: while your earlier comment referred to the “unwed te(e)n pregnancy rate,” the chart refers to teen pregnancy rates, period, leaving out marriage as a factor. And young women married much earlier a few decades ago, and many of the teen pregnancies of the fifties and sixties were among married women.
Tsk, tsk! Your reading comprehension is indeed poor.
I said “ignore your assertion until you offer proof”, not “I’ll insert my own assertion”.
Too bad you weren’t so considerate up front. One gets the feeling that you don’t like the people here.
That’s quite telling. I noticed that the founder of the Guttmacher Institute was a Planned Parenthood president at one time.
Think there might be some bias in the study, hmmmmmm?
I have not defended Cube in any way. I pointed out your dishonest rhetorical maneuvers in this discussion, and tried to put you back on topic. Nothing more.
The fact that it dragged your lack integrity into the light, and highlighted your avoidance of honest and open debate, well, that’s just gravy.
Then don’t defend the indefensible.
The only correct answer to the question is zero.
Being a Christian, I had no part in the creation of society as it is today, and I doubt you did either. But the brats that took over the educational system are a much different matter.
It’s also as near free as you can get as the tablet can be reused.
I am not defending anything that is indefensible. Having read every word you’ve written here in response to my comments, it’s you who is doing that. Your religious fanaticism and medieval attitude toward women’s lives is horrifying.
[…] In a brilliant take on the subject, Stacy McCain at his blog, The Other McCain, noted that we now have people, many of whom are on the consequence free/abortions are groovy sex train, that have lived their entire lives during this time when an altered form of human biology is considered the “norm”. The fact is that the altered form of human roles is not the norm because until the advent of the “pill” in 1960 and its common usage in the ensuing decades, the act of sex was understood to be a procreative and consequential, not merely an act of responsibility free sensual pleasure. It had a purpose other than recreation. […]
You can think that all you like. I stand with what has worked for millennia. You, on the other hand, are defending modern immorality, something that is doing nothing less than destroying civilization.
As far as I’m concerned, you can take your “fanaticism and medieval attitudes” and put them where the sun don’t shine. What you are defending was spawned in hell. It is that type of morality that is making women’s lives horrifying.
Frankly, that is what feminism is designed to do, and feminists have such a dearth of critical thinking ability, because they are so poorly educated, that they are unable to see they have been duped by people such as yourself.
Have a nice day.
Really, Quartermaster? You think women had it better when they couldn’t vote or hold office or own property? When they couldn’t negotiate legal contracts without the permission and signature of their husband or another male relative? When they weren’t allowed to be present much less speak when men were discussing the law or politics? When they could be raped and/or beaten with no legal recourse at all, and nowhere to go because women couldn’t work or live on their own? Up until at least the the 14th century, in the aristocracy, marriages were political alliances arranged in childhood and sometimes at birth. Of course the marriage didn’t take place until later, but “later” in royal marital alliances could mean when a girl was 10 or 12. Think of the wedding night, Quartermaster. Today, that would be rape in any civilized country.
Do you really think women had it better then?
Alas! I did have some part in the creation of today’s society, and the truthful answer to the question, for me, requires both hands, but I can still leave my shoes on.
I have never claimed not to have been a sinner. Things weren’t quite like the “hook up” culture of today back in the 70s, and the girls did have some idea that maybe they ought not copulate with just any guy who asked, but that was the time when we moved from when girls were mortified if it was discovered that they had been screwing around to when it was pretty much expected that dating couples were fornicating. The cultural barriers were being removed, but the individual resistance, from growing up in the fifties and sixties, was still there.
[…] Even if it weren’t for my other concerns about the Contraceptive Culture (see “Sex, Science, Nature and ‘Choice’“), I would still be dubious about hormonal contraceptives on the basis of common-sense health […]
[…] Sex, Science, Nature and ‘Choice’ […]
You shoulda gone to Tennessee Tech instead.