Bush Nominates A Theocratic Abstinence Advocate

OH NO, THE theocrats in the Bush administration have nominated an abstinence advocate to head up the federal Office of Population Affairs. Dr. Eric Keroack “advocates abstinence as the most reliable method of pregnancy and STD prevention,” according to Jennifer Roback Morse author of Love and Economics and Smart Sex.

Why are the theocrats still trying to frighten kids when everybody knows that the universal solution to contraception and STD infection is condoms?

But that is not the real problem with Keroack, writes Morse.

Evidently, Keroack has given lectures in which he claims that there are long-term emotional costs to non-marital sexual activity. According to Amanda Schaffer, writing in Slate, Keroack said this: “People who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual.”

Yes. That is a real problem. He is suggesting that people who sleep around risk becoming “emotionally wounded.” And studies show that teenage girls who have sex with multiple partners suffer from depression.

But we can’t go too far down that road. Back at the dawn of the feminist age Simone de Beauvoir argued in The Second Sex that the “independent woman” needed the physical release of a love affair or two to refresh herself in her intellectual labors.

Suppose that we concede that “science” has established that what is euphemistically called “a sexual life” is bad for the mental health of women? Then what is left of the whole sexual revolution and the war against marriage—or indeed the whole feminist project?

What indeed?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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