The Looming Threat to Sex for Pleasure

Why do we have sex?

Have you taken the time to consider the reasons for having a sex life? If you haven’t rest assured, there is a group out there that has done that thinking for you.

So give it a shot, and you might come up with something like this.

Because it’s pleasurable. Because it’s fun. Because it creates bonding with our partners and strengthens relationships. (Thought it can also be fraught, sadly, and cause relationships to splinter.) It creates an outlet to explore our fantasies. Sex relieves stress and other feel-good hormones.

Having sex puts us in touch with ourselves — and somehow melds the physical with our deeply-rooted, instinctual, primal urges and desires for touch, sensuality, pleasure and connection. It’s something our bodies are naturally urged to do.

It also can make babies.

If fundamentalist forces get their way, you can toss out the long list of reasons for having sex, and instead limit it just to reproduction.

A world without birth control?

Conservatives have made it clear they want to ensure our sex lives are about reproduction only (for religious, patriarchal reasons) and strip away the ability to have sex for pleasure.

That’s why they’ve repeatedly blocked efforts to protect access to contraception.

In voting against a such proposal, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said an effort to safeguard access to birth control is “not serious” and “doesn’t mean anything.” He claimed that since contraception is currently not illegal, to suggest that it might one day be is “embarrassing.”

As if, once the right to access contraception becomes illegal, it will be so easy to get it back.

Cornyn is the one who should be embarrassed, because making it harder or even illegal to get contraception is exactly what his political friends are trying to achieve.

In the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned, right-wing zealots who want to manage and control Americans’ sex lives are gunning for limiting access to birth control.

If enshrining the right to contraception doesn’t mean anything, as Cornyn says, then why did Republican lawmakers in Missouri try to block a bill securing that right by falsely claiming birth control pills cause abortions?

What explains attempts like the one in Idaho to make IUDs and emergency contraception illegal?

And in Louisiana, an antiabortion group helped kill a bill that would protect the right to get several forms of birth control.

Make no mistake: access to contraception is absolutely on the line. Despite what Cornyn says, it’s something we should absolutely take seriously, we being anyone who is currently utilizing or taking advantage of birth control and wants to continue to be able to do so (and wants others to as well).

That’s not just the the 80% of women who have used birth control, or the 20% who have used an IUD.

It’s also every single one of those women’s partners.

The headline in the article linked to above about Idaho’s efforts to limit access to contraception misses this point. It says ‘Bill to protect women’s rights to contraceptives gets temporarily shelved.’

It’s not just women’s rights to birth control, though.

(As if that’s not bad enough. That means taking away a critical freedom for half the population. On its own, isn’t that mean, cruel, unfair and misogynist?)

But it’s not just women’s rights.

Attacks on limiting birth control are an attack on all of us, and men need to understand that, especially the men who, like me, think sex has a purpose beyond reproduction.

Birth control is not a women’s issue

For most of my sexual life, birth control has been something close to a streaming service subscription: set it and forget it.

Actually, it’s been even easier than that, as I haven’t even been the one setting it. I mostly just forgot about it — and wholly took it for granted.

At most, I stood in line and paid for a partner’s birth control pills at a drug store. And even that was a rare occurrence. The pills were delivered by mail and put on a credit card. I made up for it, perhaps, by paying the wireless bill.

With partners with an IUD, there wasn’t even a bill to pay.

And what did I get for my lack of trouble, cost or inconvenience? Worry-free sex.

Until there’s a safe, effective contraceptive method for men (besides a condom, which interrupts sex and decreases pleasure, or a vasectomy, which is mostly permanent) women will continue to bear the burden of contraception.

Please let’s not pretend men don’t benefit from that. We do.

So much so, that it affords us the luxury of not even thinking about it.

Yet we’re not the ones taking a pill every night, or going to a doctor to have a device implanted in our reproductive organs.

My life has been made infinitely more pleasurable and satisfying because of contraception. To make access to that contraception more difficult, or even impossible, doesn’t just hurt my partner. It hurts me.

I’m not going to dive into the reasons why arguments that contraceptive methods like the pill and IUD are not abortions. Those arguments are false, scientifically dubious, and politically motivated. Besides, even if they were legitimate, they should still be permitted, because safe, easy access to abortion is a basic human right to reproductive health care.

But they aren’t legitimate. They are means for others to dictate and control the bodies and lives of others. And again, even if that control only applied to women, it would still be abhorrent and immoral. What gives anyone, much less the government, the right to that kind of physical control over peoples’ bodies?

But it doesn’t just apply to women. It applies to everyone.

Acknowledging the existence of sex

Some of the podcasts I listen to begin by advising an episode’s content includes reference to sex. That seems reasonable to me, since who knows? Maybe kids are in earshot. The point is, people are given the choice to listen.

If a podcast can do it, why can’t elected officials? Sex is a normal part of human existence. It’s something we crave and enjoy.

It also can have consequences — the biggest of which is something that humans have wanted to control for thousands of years.

The birth control pill and other forms of contraception have been revolutionary. It has changed the way we are able to experience sex — and given women (and men) the ability to manage our reproductive choices.

Contraception gives women a chance at a broader experience of life, with more control — which is why it’s a threat to the fundamentalist patriarchy — and the ability to have sex for reasons other than reproduction, which is why it’s also a threat to religious extremists who view sex as a reproductive act only.

We talk a big game in this country about freedom.

I’d like to assume that part of that freedom is having the kind of sex I choose to have. Birth control pills, IUDs and emergency contraceptives play a big part in making that kind of sex possible.

Contraception is a conduit to a higher quality sex life, which is part of a better quality of life overall.

Birth control (and abortion as well) lets me and more importantly my partners manage the paths our lives take. It bestows a true sense of freedom: the freedom to control one’s life in the present and future. That’s the freedom extreme religious fundamentalists and politicians want to take away.

Understanding what’s at stake

Sex can be life-affirming, so embodying that it gets to the core of who and what we are as physical beings.

Making abortion illegal has already lead to countless lives and bodies ruined. The right to a safe, easy abortion should be restored as soon as possible.

And with it so too should access to any form of contraception a person chooses.

These fights won’t end.

If there’s anything the fall of Roe v. Wade should teach us, it’s that the days of assuming rights we thought were permanent are over.

Anyone who has benefitted — and wants to continue to benefit — from what contraception offers us should be aware and act accordingly.

Limiting access to birth control is such an intrusion into our personal, private lives that it is hard to comprehend. It’s an attempt to dictate what kind of sex Americans have.

That’s gross and insulting.

Sex can fill us with feelings of joy, wonder and satisfaction that are distinct to sexual pleasure.

To live in a time when the ability to experience that pleasure free from concern of an unwanted pregnancy is something for which we should be thankful — and not take for granted.

—

This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

***

You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:

White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism

Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box

Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race

What We Talk About When We Talk About Men

—

Photo credit: iStock.com