… Sexual Restraint Should not be Striking
(c) 2019, Davd
The BBC recently reported a call for a “sex strike” by an actress associated with the “MeToo movement”. Neither the actress nor the BBC seemed aware that her call, which was reported as if something radical, went part way to something prudently traditional — chastity.
The U.S. State of Georgia, the report states, has enacted a law that “… bans abortions as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected – which is at about six weeks into a pregnancy.” More recently, the State Legislature of Alabama has “pass[ed] a bill to outlaw the procedure [abortion] in almost all cases.”
In reaction at the time of the Alabama Legislature vote, one woman lawmaker made a point worth examining, saying: “We have never policed men’s bodies the way we do women’s.” She was reacting to legislation limiting abortion, which men “don’t have and can’t have.”1
Why police women’s bodies? To protect unborn persons. A demonstrator was shown on the BBC website holding up a sign “… get out of my uterus”
and die. That is the point. A fetus taken prematurely out of its mother’s uterus — dies. In the first half of a pregnancy, death is certain. Abortion is homicide. If the woman’s life is not in danger, it is ending an innocent human life because she does not want to become a mother in the near future … does not even want to suffer the bother of completing a pregnancy, giving birth, and then offering a newborn baby for adoption. The fetus is innocent… and dies because the woman carrying it does not feel willing to complete a pregnancy.
(If that last paragraph belabours the point, is is to strongly distinguish abortion, and reckless homicide generally, from “the death penalty” for crime. “A case can be made for” the death penalty, and the holy books of the Abrahamic faiths bless the death penalty in many specific instances reported there. The cases I have seen for easy abortion are based on the notion that a fetus is part of the body of the woman who is carrying it; which is false. Anyone who utters them and is not lying, is avoiding the truth.)
Considering that the fetus is an individual of the human species, distinct anatomically and genetically from its mother, the Alabama and Georgia laws read to this old man as banning homicide. Homicide is wrong, all humanist and most religious people agreed when I was a schoolboy and when I was a young man. What the State of Georgia has done, what the Alabama Legislature has voted to do, is ban something that is wrong; and banning something wrong, ought to be right — right?
Either that, or right and wrong have changed drastically since I was a young man.
Obviously perhaps, I don’t believe that right and wrong have changed. The general public willingness to do right, general avoidance of wrong, have changed.
As an indicative example from outside what we usually call morality, a major food marketing empire advertises cookies (and if i recall correctly, other sweets prepared for pleasure rather than nutrition) as decadent — and those advertisements have appeared repeatedly for well more than a year, so the food marketing empire seems convinced that decadence appeals to food shoppers.
Shoppers will pay for decadent foods. Sexual decadence is the opposite of chastity. If public attitudes toward sex and foodstuffs are aligned, then the actress reported by the BBC is telling her audience that if she cannot have easy abortions when her decadent sexual behaviour leads to pregnancy, she will (i doubt she thought of it that way) resort to chastity.
Resort to chastity, I quite approve. Calling it a “sex strike” seems a foolish way of labelling it — why not call chastity by its right name?
The merits of chastity include protection from STDs2, and a recent CBC business article seems to imply that when women dress chastely rather than scantily, their work performance (as well as that of men in the office), improves. STDs and poor work performance are bad for the economy and society.
Don’t call it a sex strike, call it desisting from unwise sexual hyperactivity… or just call it chastity, and a virtue.
Notes:
1. If the subject were military service and conscription for U. S. military service, men’s bodies would be the ones being controlled.
2. The BBC quotes Dr Peter Salama, of the World Health Organization: “We’re seeing a concerning lack of progress in stopping the spread of sexually transmitted infections worldwide.” WHO recently released a report stating that a million new sexually transmitted infections (STIs) occur each day.
