Right-wing Women

Henry Hyde, author of the Hyde Amendment forbidding Medicaid money to poor women for abortions and opponent of all abortion under all circumstances without exception for rape, was asked by a television interviewer if he would insist that his daughter

carry a pregnancy to term if she were pregnant as the result of

rape. Yes, he answered solemnly. But the question he should have

been asked was this one: suppose his wife were pregnant as the

result of rape? This would impinge not on his sentimentality, but

on his day-to-day right of sexual possession; he would have to live

with the rape and with the carnal reality of the rape and with the

pregnancy resulting from the rape and with the offspring or the

damaged woman who would have to bear it and then give it up.

Regardless of his answer to the hypothetical question, only the

male sense of what is at stake for him in actually having to accept a

pregnancy caused by rape or incestuous rape in his own life as a

husband to the woman or girl involved could make the rape or the

woman raped real. Abortion can protect men, and can be tolerated

when it demonstrably does. In terms of the woman used, herself

alone, she is her function; she has been used in accordance with her

function; there is no reason to let her off the hook just because she

was forced by a man not her husband.

*

Norman Mailer remarked during the sixties that the problem with

the sexual revolution was that it had gotten into the hands of the

wrong people. He was right. It was in the hands of men.

The pop idea was that fucking was good, so good that the more

there was of it, the better. The pop idea was that people should

fuck whom they wanted: translated for the girls, this meant that

girls should want to be fucked— as close to all the time as was

humanly possible. For women, alas, all the time is humanly possible with enough changes of partners. Men envision frequency with reference to their own patterns of erection and ejaculation. Women

got fucked a lot more than men fucked.

Sexual-revolution philosophy predates the sixties. It shows up in

Left ideologies and movements with regularity— in most countries,

in many different periods, manifest in various leftist “tendencies. ”

The sixties in the United States, repeated with different tonalities

throughout Western Europe, had a particularly democratic character. One did not have to read W ilhelm Reich, though some did. It was simple. A bunch of nasty bastards who hated making love

were making war. A bunch of boys who liked flowers were making

love and refusing to make war. These boys were wonderful and

beautiful. T hey wanted peace. T hey talked love, love, love, not

romantic love but love of mankind (translated by women: humankind). T hey grew their hair long and painted their faces and wore colorful clothes and risked being treated like girls. In resisting going

to war, they were cowardly and sissies and weak, like girls. No

wonder the girls of the sixties thought that these boys were their

special friends, their special allies, lovers each and every one.

The girls were real idealists. T hey hated the Viet Nam W ar and

their own lives, unlike the boys’, were not at stake. T hey hated the

racial and sexual bigotry visited on blacks, in particular on black

men who were the figures in visible jeopardy. The girls were not

all white, but still the black man was the figure of empathy, the