“You know, back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.”
- Foster Friess, GOP billionaire mega-donor, 2012, Politico Magazine
“Like I said, Bayer Company invented aspirin,” he told Arizona Mirror’s Gloria Rebecca Gomez. “Put it between your knees.”
- Arizona Senate Majority Leader Sonny Borrelli, 2024
Why, I wonder, is this horrible one-liner so persistent in certain circles? Just kidding, I know exactly why the “don't want to get pregnant? Keep your legs closed, slut” line is so common with those particular groups. And I'll tell you.
You see, Women have a very specific role to play in society, according to them. Women are the guardians of chastity. Of purity.
“Purity” and “Chastity” aren't about refraining from sex, they're about refraining from sex until someone else tells you that you can have sex under these conditions, with this person. “Chastity,” or “Purity” is, at its root, just another way of saying “your sex life is controlled by someone else.” It is not unchaste, in their view, to have sex with someone they approve of your having sex with.
So, why is controlling women's sex lives so important to authoritarians? Because if they can turn even the most basic drives into little rituals of submission, they can control people without allowing the people they control to realize how encamped they are in their subconscious. In their habits. In their assumptions about how things “should” be.
Authoritarianism is always totalizing, it always seeks to control everything about a person's life, especially pleasure. “You will not have sex until I say you can, with whom I say you can,” is about as totalizing a statement of dominance, of ownership of the body of another as one can imagine.
This is why the argument that abortion restrictions that interfere with the physician-patient relationship are certain to harm women and children falls on deaf ears. To them, terror is the goal. They want women and physicians to be afraid. “You don't want to risk dying of sepsis? Keep your legs closed, slut. You don't want to go to jail for giving someone a medically necessary procedure? Let the whore die.” Fear equals control, control equals power.
And fear and power are the only thing an authoritarian understands, or wants to understand.
It has never been about babies. If they cared about babies, they wouldn't keep cutting pre-natal care. They wouldn't be content for a quarter of the nation's children to grow up in poverty. They wouldn't be trying to keep children from getting school lunches. They wouldn't be allowing insane people to purchase weapons of war and butcher those precious children in their schools, where the state has full and complete responsibility for their safety.
It's not about babies, it's not about religion or law. It's about control. It's about saying to a woman, “Your body is not yours, it is ours to control.”
You hit the nail so squarely on the head that I stopped breathing for a minute. I get too emotional when I try to explain why it is so important for women to have the right to make choices for our own bodies, partly out of the injustice of having our rights taken away and partly because people I love were harmed before Roe, when abortion was illegal. Thank you for your clear-eyed logic.
I read this and thought "you just described the Mormon church". I know it describes other conservative authoritarian religious cults - er sects - as well. The Mormons are the ones I have indepth personal experience with.