Now, bonny boys, come tell to me
Oh, the rose and the linsey, oh
What sort of life I’ll have after dying?
Down by the Greenwood side, oh
Seven years of visions of blood
Oh, the rose and the linsey, oh
And seven years of hurt in the womb
Down by the Greenwood side, oh
Contemporary feminism has a great deal to say about how unfair it is to shame women for putting out, while letting men off the hook for being faithless. But while this is indeed asymmetrical, in a Pill-and-condom-free world the underlying givens are also unfair, and inescapable. Only women get pregnant. The raw misery in The Greenwood Side conveys something of the suffering faced by countless now-forgotten women, who found themselves making appalling choices in such impossible situations.
Far from being a patriarchal imposition of purity culture, then, aimed at repressing women’s innate libidinousness, before contraception ‘no sex before marriage’ was a profoundly pro-women position. Norms forbidding pre-marital sex might seem repressive to the modern eye, but shielded young women from the risk of being knocked up by faithless shaggers and left to deal with pregnancy alone.
So it’s no coincidence that the drive, already nascent in the 19th century, to pursue human flourishing by liberating sexuality from commitment, didn’t get much buy-in from women until a century later, when birth control became widely available. At that point, social norms that sought to constrain human libido in the interests of the longer-term project of child-rearing came to seem more oppressive to women than to men.
In 1970, ten years after the FDA approved the birth control pill, the radical feminist Shulamith Firestone argued in The Dialectic of Sex that the root cause of women’s oppression is our reproductive role. Gestation makes women physically vulnerable, and human infants have an unusually long period of dependence, so creating and raising them takes time and resources. Thus women and children have historically leaned on men for support and protection, and the temptation for men to exploit that dependency has been irresistible. The result has been millennia of male supremacy.
Firestone thought that the way to liberate women from reproductive oppression was decoupling sex from reproduction. Abortion, contraception and — eventually — artificial gestation would free women from the ungainly and physically risky business of motherhood. And as these technologies developed, the principal means of dismantling male dominance would be destroying the institution at its heart: the nuclear family. Mallory Millett, sister of the groundbreaking radical feminist Kate Millett, recalls attending a 1969 ‘consciousness-raising’ group with her sister:
“Why are we here today?” she asked.
“To make revolution,” they answered.
“What kind of revolution?” she replied.
“The Cultural Revolution,” they chanted.
“And how do we make Cultural Revolution?” she demanded.
“By destroying the American family!” they answered.
“How do we destroy the family?” she came back.
“By destroying the American Patriarch,” they cried exuberantly.
“And how do we destroy the American Patriarch?” she replied.
“By taking away his power!”
“How do we do that?”
“By destroying monogamy!” they shouted.
Firestone’s vision was of a world that had achieved “not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself”, as she put it. She dreamed of a world in which it simply doesn’t matter which type of reproductive organs you have, and as such there was no need for monogamy at all. In the course of this radical de-coupling of desire from reproduction and the family, heterosexual relations could be disentangled from the historically unbalanced power relations between men and women, and Eros liberated to suffuse society.
Some decades on, this has to a great extent been achieved. We no longer see sex and reproduction as inextricable, because they aren’t. The project to unchain libido from commitment only remains unfinished to the extent that people still (on the whole) prefer to see their kids grow up. Were it not for two-year-old Kulture Kiari Cephus, the desires of Cardi B and Offset variously to make ‘thot music’ and shag everything that moves wouldn’t even be an issue, because no one other than them would have any serious stake in their continuing a relationship should their desires lead them elsewhere.
But even leaving aside the question of whether this brave new world of unchained desire really is that desirable, we should be cautious of taking the unchaining for granted, or imagining it’s irreversible. Shulamith Firestone’s radical feminism accords with centuries of folk wisdom in showing how women’s reproductive role makes us vulnerable, and she’s right to see contraception as key to freeing women from sexual constraint. But while this change is understood today as a priori evidence of our moral progress, in truth it’s a fragile state of affairs, wholly dependent on technology. Only take contraception off the table, and the entire illusion of women’s sexual liberation evaporates.
It would take a cataclysmic shock to modern social and technological infrastructures to disrupt the mass availability of birth control. But the last twenty years have seen 9/11, the Great Crash, and now a pandemic that’s driving a global economic downturn likely to make 2008 look like a Monaco yacht party. Add climate change and the looming prospect of a new era of great-power conflict into the mix, and only the delusionally optimistic could insist without a flicker of doubt that (as Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide victory celebration declared) things can only get better.
Let’s hope they don’t get much worse. Because if we’re to be confident that abolishing marriage in favour of a sexual free-for-all is in women’s interests, we’d better be equally confident that welfare states and reproductive healthcare will always be with us. Should that ever change, we’ll need a radical revision of what ‘feminism’ looks like. And in that unsettling scenario, we might discover that far from ‘free love’, the pro-women position is once again ‘no sex before marriage’.
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