There is a unique burden differentially placed on genders regarding sexuality. I have nothing new to add to the debate, but I feel it should be represented here on WIS. In a simplistic, vulgarized rendition: masculinity is defined in some ways by how much (hetero-normative) sex one can have; and femininity is defined by how closely-guarded one can keep their sex. This is not hard-and-fast analysis, nor is it the best descriptor of sexuality regarding gender. Desire obviously plays a huge part, not just over-simplified observations about gender identifications. Nevertheless, I still see evidence of assumptions about sexuality and the different genders’ roles in its regulation in the posts under the abortion topic.
Donovan calls for men to take responsibility for their part in pregnancy and pay for their share of obligations, but even in Nick’s posts in this issue, he speaks of "women with the fortitude to abstain from sex" and implicit in that use of gender is that girls are still the gender that must guard their virginity or chastity. It is the women who must regulate their own bodies and be responsible for what they are capable of doing (becoming pregnant). This makes a certain sense, and while it is unfair, it is completely understandable that biology and culture have colluded to put this burden on women. Men are held responsible for that one moment of putting a woman in the family way, but women are responsible for their bodies over the next nine months and perhaps even over the next eighteen years. Yet women are discouraged against aborting unwanted pregnancies with guilt - often religious, but sometimes secular or cultural. Women have been made to feel guilty by the very discourse of abortion. Of course for, me it’s not a matter of right or wrong regarding abortion, it is a matter of providing less traumatic, less invasive, more humane methods for facilitating abortions. RU 486 is a step in the right direction. I believe that with responsibility over their bodies, women should have choices that enable them to carry out said responsibilities regarding what is best for their lives as they see fit free of subsumed cultural pressures
The problems with the cultural burdens of pregnancy and motherhood go way beyond abortion. Women are under such heavy expectations of motherhood, that to be a bad mother is one of the most incriminating identities to have in Western society - a burden that "dead-beat" dads, while also frowned upon, come no where near equaling in magnanimously negative connotations. Once a woman has a child, her life is expected to change completely while men seemingly walk away with a slightly negative stigma and a monthly child support payment. For women, a stronger social umbilical chord is in place long after the fleshy one is cut. Infanticide and postpartum depression ( a very common occurrence) are examples women who crack under this societal burden. There is no bigger social failure than a woman who kills her child. Certainly these occurrences have much to do with hormones, but there are several cases in which women kill their children systematically, long after postpartum depression-inducing hormones have subsided, and longer-lasting depression may have set in, perhaps from the expectations of how her life is supposed to be now that she has the identity as a mother.
My suggestion is not to have a motherless world. Someone of course must raise children, but I argue that the cultural scales are still weighted in favor of women serving a child-rearing domestic role while men are freer to shape their lives and identity regarding their children - men’s careers and lives are much less necessarily affected by being fathers than women’s are by being mothers. What’s worse is that biology (as an advent of the Western World) has lead to this cultural norm - as mammals (a classification named for the practice of motherly feeding of children from a woman’s own body), human mothers are identified as being the primary source of food for infants, and therefore the primary care-givers otherwise. This is actually not trans-cultural, but it is firmly in place in this culture right here.
It is a double-edged sword to strive for the alleviation of cultural tropes of motherhood from sexuality; on the one hand we may argue that women should have the right to an abortion because of their dominion over their own bodies and identities and any other life that may be dependent on these things. On the other, given acknowledgement of this responsibility, we may then argue that if one chooses to remain pregnant and brings a child to term, then the responsibility for one’s own creations continues through motherhood, and enforces a father’s obligation as less-than because of the lack of bodily connection he had with the infant. These aren’t my arguments, rather, they are my imaginings of what may be argued by some and ones we must deal with.
My suggestion is that in sex education we remove the burden of virginity-protecting from women in abstinence-only teaching. That we refrain from proscriptive discourse about how special sex is, or how dangerous it is, or how it should be saved for marriage, which enforces societal structures that really have little to do with the sex education most crucial to pubescent humans. Education about pregnancy and disease prevention as well as an open dialogue with adults about the emotional involvement of sex and relationships would be most beneficial to youth who may not identify with abstinence nor the institution of marriage. Men and women should be equally responsible for their bodies and their sexuality. Sex is most dangerous and destructive when it is conflated with things like masculine prowess, feminine virtue, and marriage. In these contexts it can facilitate disappointment, heartbreak, and irresponsibility.
This has been Andy D.
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