Maggie McNeill on her " The Honest Courtesan " website refers to these feminist extremists, with their unyielding demand for a pseudo-Marxist uniformity of belief, as " Neofeminists. " I think I shall borrow that term from her for future references to the extreme feminists who both bedevil and undermine the cause of equal rights not only for women, but for all people living in the United States today.
The Neofeminists, from what I have observed , believe that unless all of the power is given to the woman for the instigation and process of the act of heterosexual coitus, that it is tantamount to rape. Women like Robin Morgan, Catherine McKinnon , and the late Andrea Dworkin made a career of promulgating this hypothesis, which has caused needless suffering among both men and women for nearly four decades.
If you want true equality among the sexes, at least within the socio-sexual realm, you must permit equality in both right of initiation and responsibility of execution in the matter of coitus to both the male and the female of our species.
I believe that this idea extends to the political and economic realms as well: rights and responsibilities must be, at a very basic level, shared equally by men and women. This idea is, of course, as all good laws are, modified by the Roman legal concept of equity, with Jefferson's ideal (in modern paraphrase) "that all of Humanity are created equal," its sole watchword.
The reality of course, is that all humans are not created equal in any physical or mental sense. It is only in an expectation of equal justice under the law, meted out by an impartial Judiciary, that all of humankind should be able to consistently find equality. John Adams' Empire of Law (from his Thoughts on Government, 1776), and its Steward Blind Justice, should always see humanity naked: without any benefit of the trappings of rank, or birth, or wealth, and bereft of race, color, creed, sex, or national origin. Only the truth, including aggravating or mitigating circumstances, and the content of one's character, should matter.
This leads us back to the question of human promiscuity, and finally to the subject of legalizing prostitution.
All human sexuality is real, and not everyone has the same degree of libido, or the ability to sublimate it, as another person. For every Giacomo Casanova there is a Sir Isaac Newton, and for every Valeria Messalina there is a Mother Theresa. The curve of our human libidos, both male and female, goes from the extremes of being essentially asexual, to nymphomania and satyriasis. While our gender preference for partners appears to be genetically predetermined, our need to satisfy that desire appears to be as much a matter of nurture as it is nature. This in turn is modified by the actual availability of sexual partners, and social limitations imposed on the individual by both society and themselves.
As I stated earlier, rape is a matter of lust, not of power. The sole exception I can think of is when soldiers, guerillas, or gangs of criminals use rape as part of a program of intimidation and pacification in order to control the people in a given area, such as is currently happening in the Congo. Without the threat of ongoing violence or other forms of coercion against those being raped and their families, the illusion of power cannot be maintained, as Edmund Burke pointed out above concerning nations in 1775.
I say illusion, because as I have shown in " The Tao of Government " (OpEdNews, February 28, 2009) and other articles, all power exists only in the minds of those who believes it exists. If tomorrow everyone in the United States believed I was King, I would be King; everything else would be paper work, including my immediate abdication. The effects of power can be very real, without the power itself having a leg to stand on other than terror, e.g., the drug cartels. The lack of legitimacy of their power is why criminals--including criminal governments such as Idi Amin's Uganda--rely on terror, and legitimate governments do not. Here is Girard's First Law of Government: The legitimacy of any government is inversely proportional to the amount of fear it feels it must instill within its people to stay in power.
So, while there maybe a number of psychological, hygienic , and ethical reasons for an individual to avoid a promiscuous life, the last based either upon religious belief or individual morality. It is not a legitimate function of government in a pluralistic society to inflict any limitations upon that lifestyle beyond those needed to protect other members of society from the direct consequences of their excesses. These would include: providing scientifically based sex education to our young people so that they can make informed decisions when their sexually ready bodies have outstripped their young minds; insuring that all the partners of a person with a sexually transmitted disease are informed of the fact; preventing adults from taking sexual advantage of young people, especially if that adult is in a position of trust; insuring that any resulting child of a sexual tryst is provided with support by the father if the mother keeps the child. Any other limitation uses the innate power of fear possessed by a government entity in a manner that interferes with our rights as individuals. (I would also note that the use of a condom by males will greatly reduce the need for the last three possibilities of governmental intervention.)
Individual responsibility among the promiscuous members of our society is an absolute necessity. As I pointed out in "Making Sex a Crime," the incidence of STD's is " twice as high in the promiscuous segment of the general population as it is among streetwalkers ," who have the highest rate of STD's among professional sex providers. Streetwalkers are also those who have the least control over the usage of condoms of any of the professional sex providers.
Unfortunately, the most promiscuous members of our society are often times those who are most ignorant or uncaring of the consequences of their actions.
To get a handle on the threat of HIV/AIDS and other STD's in this country, we can no longer stick our collective heads in the sand, and pretend--as the proponents of abstinence only sex education programs do--that some miracle is going to occur that will decrease our collective libidos to near zero overnight. All that years of fear, neglect, and gross misinformation have given the United States the highest teen pregnancy rate (" Innocenti Report Card: A League Table of Teenage Births in Rich Nations ," Issue No. 3, July 2001; UNICEF, July, 2001; Table 1), as well as one of the highest rates of first degree sexual assault, i.e., rape (International Statistics on Crime and Justice; European Institute for Crime Prevention and Control; edited by S. Harrendorf , M. Heiskanen , S. Malby ; ISBN-978-952-5333-78-7; Helsinki, 2010) in the Western Democracies.
The definition of insanity, according to Albert Einstein, is to repeat the same behavior over and over again, while expecting a different result.
As a society, the United States has been fighting a war against both promiscuity and prostitution since our inception 235 years ago. Using the tools of legal prohibition and public shaming of participants, there has been an ongoing attempt to deter members of the poor, working, and middle classes from this type of behavior. Like every other system that relies upon prohibition to deal with a vice, it has not worked.
We have seen a reduction in the number of professional sex providers in the United States from four percent of the female population when our nation was founded (Larry Flynt and David Eisenbach, PhD.; One Nation Under Sex; 2011; p. 5). Nickie Roberts' book, Whores in History , states that t his number had climbed to an estimated five-and-one-half percent at the end of the Nineteenth Century, when women in the American and European cities were forced by the worst sort of exploitative capitalism to work as professional sex providers,. That number has now fallen to somewhere between two-tenths and three-tenths of one percent today , for declared, i.e., full-time, professional sex providers in the United States.
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