To the realization that the decades-long right-wing meltdown over women's reproduction has never been about abortion, or contraception, or access to any medical procedure. It's about the sex. Period.
But bigger picture, it's not even limited to women's sexuality. It's the free exercise of sexuality in general, untethered from mediation by either church or state, that so deeply offends them, and that's the reason why, when they're not calling women sluts or gay people child molesters and warning about epidemics of bestiality and buttfucking, they're scolding all of us for adultery and promiscuity and pornography and all the other sex-related program activities that most people engage in during their lives. Of course, right-wingers watch porn and commit adultery too (do they ever), but they can always rely on supplication to some ecclesiastical authority as a means of obtaining forgiveness for their sins, and the fact that so many of us don't feel the slightest need to atone for things we don't consider sinful is probably what really sets them off.
There's really nothing new about this, either. They've been acting this way for generations because it's ingrained into their psyches:
Suppression of the natural sexuality in the child, particularly of its genital sexuality, makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, good and adjusted in the authoritarian sense; it paralyzes the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties. In brief, the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation. At first the child has to submit to the structure of the authoritarian miniature state, the family; this makes it capable of later subordination to the general authoritarian system. The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and anxiety.
I was fortunate enough to have read this tome when I was in college some 30-odd years ago. In its own way, it explained just about everything that's gone haywire in our politics since then. Everyone should check out a copy of it.
---Vitelius
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