being— the male Left has simply played dead.
The male Left abandoned abortion rights for genuinely awful
* Except when the mother’s life is at stake in the original version (Hyde’s
version); as amended in the Senate, also in cases o f rape and incest.
reasons: the boys were not getting laid; there was bitterness and
anger against feminists for ending a movement (by withdrawing
from it) that was both power and sex for the men; there was also
the familiar callous indifference of the sexual exploiter—if he
couldn’t screw her she wasn’t real.
The hope of the male Left is that the loss of abortion rights will
drive women back into the ranks—even fear of losing might do
that; and the male Left has done what it can to assure the loss. The
Left has created a vacuum that the Right has expanded to fill—this
the Left did by abandoning a just cause, by its decade of quietism,
by its decade of sulking. But the Left has not just been an absence;
it has been a presence, outraged at women’s controlling their own
bodies, outraged at women’s organizing against sexual exploitation,
which by definition means women also organizing against the sexual values of the Left. When feminist women have lost legal abortion altogether, leftist men expect them back—begging for help, properly chastened, ready to make a deal, ready to spread their
legs again. On the Left, women will have abortion on male terms,
as part of sexual liberation, or women will not have abortion except
at risk of death.
And the boys of the sixties did grow up too. They actually grew
older. They are now men in life, not just in the fuck. They want
babies. Compulsory pregnancy is about the only way they are sure
to get them.
*
Every mother is a judge who sentences the children
for the sins of the father.
Rebecca West,
The girls of the sixties had mothers who predicted, insisted, argued that those girls would be hurt; but they would not say how or why. In the main, the mothers appeared to be sexual conservatives:
they upheld the marriage system as a social ideal and were silent
about the sex in it. Sex was a duty inside marriage; a w ife’s attitude
toward it was irrelevant unless she made trouble, went crazy,
fucked around. Mothers had to teach their daughters to like men as
a class— be responsive to men as men, warm to men as men— and
at the same time to not have sex. Since males mostly wanted the
girls for sex, it was hard for the girls to understand how to like
boys and men without also liking the sex boys and men wanted.
The girls were told nice things about human sexuality and also told
that it would cost them their lives—one w ay or another. The
mothers walked a tough line: give the girls a good attitude, but
discourage them. The cruelty of the ambivalence communicated
itself, but the kindness in the intention did not: mothers tried to
protect their daughters from many men by directing them toward
