Column: You are More than Your Vagina
(Note: Published in Daily Illini as guest column)
Throughout history one of the main dynamics that has influenced relationships between men and women is what can be called the “vagina monopoly.” Men want them and only women have them. In fact, the world’s oldest profession was one that was originally only capable of being performed by women. That profession was the “renting” of women to men for sex. Most of the pathological aspects in male-female relationships revolve around the objectification of women as objects of sexual gratification.
Originally, feminism was about changing attitudes, particularly that women are of equal dignity as men. Women can be just as capable to become doctors, lawyers, CEOs or politicians. Far from being merely sperm receptacles, they are people entitled to the full balance of human dignity. The rallying call of these feminists was “love me for my mind, not just my body.”
Those days are long gone. Enter groups such as the Feminist Majority at the University of Illinois. The motto of this group and those like it can be described as “love me for my body … PLEASE!” The slogans they chose to put on their T-shirts revolve around sex toys and genitalia. In psychology this would be called a “fixation.”
Women traditionally have been looked upon as sexual objects. So what do these neofeminists do? Celebrate and proclaim liberation in being a sex object, of course. Frat boys on campus look at these poor girls as a vagina on two legs and they want to slap that idea on a T-shirt and sell it. They’ve gone one step further from the prostitution of women to preaching harlotry. The difference between a prostitute and a harlot is that the prostitute at least has enough self respect to demand payment for services rendered.
What the “patriarchy” has tried to establish for centuries is whole-heartedly embraced and celebrated, ironically, by self-styled icons of feminism. The results of such puerile notions have been nothing short of tragic.
Every study on the subject has shown that women who buy into the inner-slut mentality of neofeminism are devastated. They suffer from depression, low self-esteem, STDs, single motherhood and they generally feel rejected in life. They grow into jaded women who think that the path to fulfillment is in imitating the worst men among us.
College-aged women can entertain notions of promiscuity-as-fulfillment because society has always lusted after the young woman. However, as they age they find fewer and fewer partners. They’ve become “cold product” and are discarded in favor of “younger models.”
It has lead to the rejection of the biggest trait distinctive of women - motherhood. The senseless slaughter of children for the sake of sexual convenience (about 99 95 percent of all abortions according to the Guttmacher Institute) ranks first among the horrors in the history of humanity. More children have been murdered through abortion than any other genocide in human history. Abortion makes the Holocaust look like a petty crime in comparison.
It is time for a thorough re-evaluation of neofeminism in the light of the human wreckage strewn in its wake. Luckily there are women out there who are discovering that the path to fulfillment does not lie in the inner-slut myth.
Books such as Dawn Eden’s “Thrill of the Chaste,” Wendy Shalit’s “A Return to Modesty,” and others are reexamining the role of sexuality in a woman’s life and are finding that a sequence of unfulfilling anonymous sexual encounters are not at all empowering.
The case for sexual fidelity has never been stronger. Women are finding that sexual fulfillment isn’t found in anonymous sexual encounters or relationships that generate only from physically satisfying sexual escapades, but is found from the lifelong, permanent and complete union of marriage.
Being free from the Friday-night quests to the local syphilis buffet for Mr. Right Now means that women are free to pursue being doctors, lawyers, and being all-around great women. You know … all those opportunities that feminism was supposed to create.
UPDATE: Because so many people wanted sources here are a few.
From Guttmacher, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, you can read that rape is less than .5% of the most important causes for abortion, health of the mother is 4%. Now I don’t regard “health” of the mother as particularly indicative of anything because pregnancy is, by definition, a HUGE factor for the health of the mother and comes with no small share of risk. It’s used flippantly in debates and I have no reason to see the same crowd doesn’t use it flippantly in research. However, even assuming those are serious health considerations (a statement that no one is in any position to say one way or the other), that means 95.5% of abortions are for reasons of convenience. Ok, so here’s your correct, it’s not 99% (I was using old data), it’s 95%. I’m man enough to post corrections, are my critics?
As far as links to say depression on sex (particularly teen sex), see here, here, here, and there is plenty of good ones coming out of the hopper for adults as we speak. That was from a quick web search, I can find more. In fact, there was some interesting studyins on depression and anal sex, depression and gay sex, and so forth. But there are studies, including one that was in the very paper I was writing for not more than a month before.
