Why Patriarchal Men Are Utterly Petrified of Birth Control -- And Why We'll Still Be Fighting About it 100 Years From Now
The whole country is talking about contraception right now and to the 90% of American women who use it, it’s a little baffling. Most of us have used some form of it our whole reproductive lives, and so have our mothers and even our grandmothers. We kinda took it for granted. So now that it’s under attack, it seems out of left field, but maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe we underestimated the attachment most men have to the Patriarchy. I mean, the fact that women and only women bear children is both the justification and the means of enforcement for the Patriarchal values that have governed the world for ever. Now that women’s control of their own reproductive choices is well past critical mass, that justification is gone completely and the beneficiaries of the former system seem willing to fight to the death to keep it in place. And this, about the Catholic Church, pretty much articulates perfectly that situation:
It’s this rage that’s driving the Catholic bishops into a frenzied donnybrook fight against contraception — despite the very real possibility that this fight could, in the end, damage their church even more fatally than the molestation scandal did. As the keepers of a 2000-year-old enterprise — one of the oldest continuously-operating organizations on the planet, in fact — they take the very long view. And they understand, better than most of us, just how unprecedented this development is in the grand sweep of history, and the serious threat it poses to everything their church has stood for going back to antiquity.
The Catholic Church has been the one holding the gilded Patriarchal stick for most of history*: the annihilation of Celtic matriarchies, the cult of the Virgin, witch burning, women forbidden from the priesthood, sex itself - the purview of the woman/seductress - forbidden from the church. They have a lot to be ashamed of when it comes to women, and a lot to lose.
*I mean, not just the Catholic Church - just that they’ve been the most powerful and the most efficient at it, historically. Fundamental Islam and Judaism are no kinder to women in the name of God. “Does God Hate Women” by Olivia Benson is a hard read, but boy oh boy is it an important one.)
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