Male Control of Women & Sexuality: Restricting Sexual Choices as a Means for Controlling Women, Sex, Society

_{Image © Austin Cline
Original Poster: National Archives
Click for full-sized Image}

An all too common theme in the policies and agenda advanced by the Christian Right is the exertion of increasing control over sexuality in general and the bodies of women in particular. Such control serves several purposes: it allows for the restriction of sexual behavior, it helps broadly regulate people’s lives, and preserves stratified power between men and women such that male authority over women is preserved.

What often goes unrecognized is the fact that our sexuality and our sexual behavior are not peripheral in our lives; rather, they are instead fundamental to who we are and how we live. Authoritarian control over our sexual behavior inevitably leads to authoritarian control over our physical bodies, our emotional connections to fellow citizens, our psychological health, and thus also our lives overall.

There are many ways, both subtle and overt, in which authoritarian Christian Nationalists seek to use the power of the government to control our sexuality. One of the most absurd has to be legislative bans on sex toys, whether it’s bans on selling them completely or just bans on promoting their sexual function. The constitutionality of these laws get challenged and in some places they are struck down, but in others there are upheld, most recently in Texas where the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of lower court rulings.

There are two questions which commonly get confused here: are the laws just and are they constitutional? It’s possible for them to be completely unjust, unreasonable, immoral and even silly while still being constitutional. There’s no specific constitutional provision against stupid laws, after all. This is an argument offered by many who themselves personally oppose such laws: they are wrong, but technically within the scope of government authority. They have fair legal arguments but there is something fundamental which needs to be addressed: is it really within the scope of government authority to regulate private sexual behavior?

Technically, bans on selling or promoting sex toys don’t qualify as the regulation of private sexual behavior, but is anyone so naive as to imagine that that isn’t the point? There may be superficially neutral reasons for regulating sex toys (safety, for example), but wholesale bans on selling them and most especially on promoting their sexual uses exist only to keep people from having and using these devices for sexual purposes.

This leads us to the question of justice: is it just for the government to seek to control, limit, and regulate people’s sexuality or sexual behavior, whether indirectly like this or in more direct ways? In the context of a liberal democratic state, the answer has to be an unequivocal “no.” Such laws are far more appropriate to an authoritarian government where the state seeks to exercise varying levels of control over every aspect of people’s lives.

Women’s bodies have long been fields of conflict for authoritarians and fascists in particular. Women who uphold high standards of sexual and moral purity are treated as the foundation of society. Women who fail to do so are little more than prostitutes. Their sexual immorality is treated as the basis for social chaos, the fear of which often lies at the heart of authoritarian and fascist agendas.

_{Image © Austin Cline
Original Poster: National Archives
Click for full-sized Image}

Authoritarians and fascists don’t believe that society can be successful if allowed to proceed without a firm hand holding the rudder. People need to be controlled for their own good; women in particular need to be controlled because they are an especially strong force for social disorder. Women are in a sense defective, incapable of being trustworthy on their own. Controlling women and controlling their sexuality is simply another facet of the overall need to control society and human behavior generally.

The sexual purity demanded of them can reach a level where it may become indistinguishable from asexuality. This might seem to be a problem, but fascists at least have long been recognized as preferring violence to sex anyway. Violent, brutal behavior becomes a fetishized replacement for normal, healthy sexual interactions between men and women. For fascists, violence exists for its own sake and is a necessary component of male life. Only women and the weak eschew the glory of violent, decisive action on behalf of the national interests. This includes violence against women who break authoritarian taboos designed to maintain sexual purity.

For this reason, we must consider that there may be very real connections, hidden just below the surface, between bans on promoting the sexual function of sex toys and other issues like violence against women (why have the targets of recent school shootings been primarily girls?), the increasing militarization of Christianity, efforts to promote patriarchal social structures against modern liberalism, and more. It is implausible that legal and political attacks against the “wrong” sexual behaviors, and sex toys in particular, are a completely isolated issue. We need to take some time to look more closely for what the connections are and how they can be explained to the public.

The first image is based on a World War II poster of a woman “making bombs and buying bonds” for victory. The text was inspired by something posted by Jessica at Feministing. The second image is based on another World War II poster of a woman saving for the war effort.

As always, you can see more such images in my gallery of Christian Right Propaganda Posters.