From church dogma to choice dogma

Were women asexual prior to the 1960s? Michael Valpy seems to think so. Today, Valpy chose to kiss the ring of 1960s “choice” dogma, ironically, in an article about how women rejected church dogma in the 1960s. Valpy comments on the advent of a woman’s choice to be sexual, which, apparently, arrived finally, after millennia on the planet, with the birth control pill. Talk about repression! Prior to that, all sexuality was denied her—she was a mere slave to her reproductive system. “Birth control gave them the deliberate choice to be sexual, to move out of enslavement to fertility,” he writes.  

There’s a fairly simple formula, here, that appears to have passed many by. Having sex may sometimes result in pregnancy, and this amounts not to being a slave but to being a parent—for both men and women (for all you parents out there, I’ll grant that sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference). Men didn’t come out scotch free, in this equation, sorry.

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