Last May, The Heritage Foundation — the far-right architects of Project 2025, the creepy ass plan to fire all federal civil service workers and replace them with conservatives who have been specifically trained by them to further Trump’s agenda — published a tweet calling for the end of birth control and recreational sex.
For whatever reason, the tweet started going around again this week. It features a video in which some ridiculous woman starts talking about how “we” need a feminist movement to end birth control and also recreational sex, so that people only ever have sex when they intend to have babies.
Hardest of passes!
“It seems to me that a good place to start would be a feminist movement against against the pill, and for rewilding sex, returning the danger to sex, returning the intimacy and, really, the consequentiality to sex.”
No thank you! If people want to add danger to sex, there are things they can buy at their local sex shop that’ll do just fine without bringing a child they don’t want into the world or contracting a virus.
Without delving into the history of the feminist sex wars of the 1980s (Hooray! We won!), we shall get right to the point here — which is that not everyone was quite as horrified by this as we might be.
Michael Shermer, who is one of those people who thought the Right was seriously into free speech and didn’t realize that authoritarian Christian nationalism was the whole plan all along, quote-tweeted the article writing “I called it yesterday–IVF frozen embryos is just the start: a feminist movement against the pill, end recreational sex, have sex, make babies.”
This is not some kind of M. Night Shyamalan twist. This has been their plan all along, but guys like Shermer just kind of pretended it wasn’t because they liked dunking on “wokeness” and asking “genuine questions” about trans people too much.
He may not have been too into that, but you know who was? Christopher Rufo, the guy whose job it is to tell conservatives what random academic terms they should be freaking out about at any given time.
“So what? The pill causes health problems for many women,” he wrote. “‘Recreational sex’ is a large part of the reason we have so many single-mother households, which drives poverty, crime, and dysfunction. The point of sex is to create children—this is natural, normal, and good.”
Yes, just to be clear, he thinks that birth control pills cause women to become single mothers. Roll that one around in your mind for a minute.
This is not a new thing. Conservatives have always wanted to end recreational sex (for other people) and yet somehow it’s never been all that successful. In fact, it’s been just the opposite. The states that teach abstinence-only sex-ed also have the highest teen pregnancy rates.
I’d love to be able to say “Good luck with this tack! The people will never go for it!” but the fact is, there are a whole lot of people out there who, while they may enjoy recreational sex themselves, also very much enjoy the idea of punishing other people for having it as well. It’s more or less the entire story of the Republican party.
There is also a whole anti-sex, anti-masturbation thing going on with young male Republicans, especially. Nick Fuentes bars his Groypers from not only masturbating, but from having sex with women, on account of how having sex with women is “gay.” The incels have largely taken over the asylum, and their rhetoric permeates a good deal of today’s conservative discourse.
Speaking of people who may enjoy recreational sex on their own but delight in punishing others for it, Marjorie Taylor Greene got up on her pulpit to tell Christian women to dress modestly because otherwise they could cause men to “stumble” — which I believe means “want to have sex” in the parlance of evangelicals.
This might be an unpopular opinion and could hurt some feelings. There are many conservative Christian women, who are influencers or leaders, that are selling themselves short and not being good role models by conforming to the world’s sexualization of women.
If you are conservative and a Christian you know you don’t have to express yourself in sexual ways and you know you are attractive by dressing nice and feminine, and you can be beautiful and modest at the same time.
Men will respect you more and think of you much more highly than just a sexual object for gratification. It’s also good to not tempt your Christian brothers and cause them to stumble.
As conservative Christian women let us always be an example to girls and young women by displaying actions that our faith believes and not conform to the patterns of this fallen world. Be the light, don’t fall into the darkness.
Is that what happened with the polyamorous tantric sex guru that you cheated on your husband with, Marjorie?
I would also like to point out that men are perfectly capable of sexualizing women or not thinking of them highly (or the opposite of that!) regardless of what they are wearing. You can trust me, an adult woman who has gone to the grocery store in a hooded panda poncho, on that one.
The kind of man who would think less of a woman because he can see her sinful elbows is not the kind of man who should ever be around women, period.
All of that aside — for all their supposed love of freedom and “freeze peach,” for all their willingness to overlook Trump’s divorces, adultery and porn star boning, for all of their “we’re the punk rock rebels now!” nonsense, the Right is just as authoritarian as it has always been. Perhaps even moreso. They want to control everything from the way people dress to how they can wear their hair, to what they talk to their doctors about, to what they do in their own damn bedrooms.
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