Sherry Chandler

On the other hand…

Okay. I think I got carried away with this responsibility thing. I may possibly have been a bit starstruck but then I do have a tendency toward pomposity.

Poets/writers have to worry about the poem/story. Otherwise they are in danger of becoming propagandists. For example, here is the beginning of a NYTIMES Magazine piece called “Contra Contraception,”

The English writer Daniel Defoe is best remembered today for creating the ultimate escapist fantasy, “Robinson Crusoe,” but in 1727 he sent the British public into a scandalous fit with the publication of a nonfiction work called “Conjugal Lewdness: or, Matrimonial Whoredom.” After apparently being asked to tone down the title for a subsequent edition, Defoe came up with a new one — “A Treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed” — that only put a finer point on things. The book wasn’t a tease, however. It was a moralizing lecture. After the wanton years that followed the restoration of the monarchy, a time when both theaters and brothels multiplied, social conservatism rooted itself in the English bosom. Self-appointed Christian morality police roamed the land, bent on restricting not only homosexuality and prostitution but also what went on between husbands and wives.

It was this latter subject that Defoe chose to address. The sex act and sexual desire should not be separated from reproduction, he and others warned, else “a man may, in effect, make a whore of his own wife.” To highlight one type of then-current wickedness, Defoe gives a scene in which a young woman who is about to marry asks a friend for some “recipes.” “Why, you little Devil, you would not take Physick to kill the child?” the friend asks as she catches her drift. “No,” the young woman answers, “but there may be Things to prevent Conception; an’t there?” The friend is scandalized and argues that the two amount to the same thing, but the bride to be dismisses her: “I cannot understand your Niceties; I would not be with Child, that’s all; there’s no harm in that, I hope.” One prime objective of England’s Christian warriors in the 1720’s was to stamp out what Defoe called “the diabolical practice of attempting to prevent childbearing by physical preparations.”

How very 18th century, you say? But not so. The article continues:

The wheels of history have a tendency to roll back over the same ground. For the past 33 years — since, as they see it, the wanton era of the 1960’s culminated in the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 — American social conservatives have been on an unyielding campaign against abortion. But recently, as the conservative tide has continued to swell, this campaign has taken on a broader scope. Its true beginning point may not be Roe but Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that had the effect of legalizing contraception.

I am 60s enough to wonder why it is that contraception has to be legalized in the first place. And I can’t imagine the affluent women are going to give up their birth control. For the rest of us, maybe we’d better pay attention to that young wife Dafoe describes. If the right has their way, pretty soon we’ll all have to find some granny women to tell us what brews to concoct. (I have a lot of respect for grannies, having always aspired to be one, but I think we may have lost most of the ones with that kind of knowledge.)

Some rants well worth reading on this subject at Pandagon and Hullabaloo.

For myself, it’s enough to make me recant. Watch that responsibility stuff. Could be a great big trap.

Possibly related posts:

Still Demeaned after all these years

So glad to be post-menopausal

Control

Liberty Hall

Mother’s Day Report Card

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