You Can't Take That Away From Me

How do those in power stay in power?  How do they control the masses?  By using laws?  With money?  By being persuasive?  Maybe.  But they also use sex.

Those in power use sex to control.  Throughout our history the only kind of sanctioned sex was marital intercourse.  So people who were too poor to marry, couldn't have sex.  Those who loved a member of the same sex, couldn't have sex.  Those who had no partner, couldn't have sex.  Those who were too young or too old to reproduce, couldn't have sex.  The institution of heterosexual marriage is the classic example, but there are many others.

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood?  She was a firm believer in the Eugenics Movement here in the United States, whereby many people who were deemed unfit to reproduce were sterilized without their consent.  These included people who were "feeble-minded," epileptics, people with syphilis, among others.  Mostly the Eugenics Movement sought to keep "undesirables" from reproducing, which for many included people of color and the poor.  In order to keep rich, white men in power, they felt it was necessary to keep anyone else from reproducing.

Of course, sexuality has been used as a tool to keep women in their place for as long as men have been aware of their role in reproduction.  Many cultures throughout the world have had the same double-standard as we do in the Western World, wherein men are expected to have sex outside of and before marriage and women are supposed to be virgins.  Even the Roman Catholic Church went through a period of sanctioning the use of prostitutes for men in order to avoid other "more serious" crimes.

Medicine has practiced similar forms of control, claiming that because women menstruated, college would cause undue strain on them and could cause them to become sterile.  Later, the vibrator was invented to help cure "hysteria" a disorder in women in which their uteri floated around their bodies looking for a baby.  Hysteria was caused by a lack of reproductive sexual intercourse and was most often found in "passionate" women.  So women need to get more sex, but not too much either. They needed to get married and have children and everything would be okay.  Religion played a role in this idea as well.  Women are born like Eve but need to meet the impossible standard of being like Mary.

Of course medicine has also brought men down, saying that masturbation would cause a number of illnesses and eventually death and that the loss of too much semen would wreak havoc on the body causing everything from TB and gonorrhea to hairy palms and blindness.  And more recently, the medicalization of every last sexual desire and "problem" from foot fetishes to premature ejaculation, exerts control over everyone who doesn't want 8 minutes of missionary-style heterosexual intercourse 3 times per week.

I am going to leave the media out of this discussion because I think that it is very easy to make the media a scapegoat for all the worlds ills.  I believe the real problem is education.  A lack of education sends people to look at TV for the answers.  TV is fantasy (granted much of it is not my fantasy) but with better education people would be better able to tell that TV is not real.  Just as Spongebob Squarepants is no way to learn about marine biology, pornography (or sitcoms for that matter) is no way to learn about sex.

Which leaves us with the school system.  Sex Education, for years, has controlled people's sexuality.  For years-- and I believe still today, in some districts-- anatomy models remove or cover the clitoris.  In one fell swoop, these curricula remove the importance of female sexuality.  Many are defined in heterosexist language, many promote abstinence, removing children and adolescents (as well as gays and lesbians) from their sexuality.  Many don't discuss sex for people with disabilities.  And nearly all feature thin, white models with so-called perfect figures.

As fat people (and especially fat women), we are told that we don't matter.  We are told that we don't need sex and that we shouldn't want sex.  Books on sex positions and advice, no matter how progressive, rarely have fat people in their diagrams.  Fat women are robbed of their femininity because they are fat.  We "eat like men," or we "must be dykes."  When we have been raped we are told we should be grateful that anyone was willing to sleep with us.  When we want sex or relationships we are told we much lose weight first.  When we are attracted to someone and we tell others about it, they laugh at us.  When we want to buy pretty clothes to impress someone, we can't.

The worst part is, it's effective.  Sex is a great means of control.  But what we have to remember is that sex is just an act, it's what we do.  Sexuality is who we are.  No amount of laws or rules will change who we are.  It may change how we express ourselves or how we present ourselves, but our sexuality is our own, it is built into us.  No amount of medicalization will make people stop masturbating, and no amount of thin sexuality models in our classrooms will make fat people stop having sex.  We need to always remember that they can't take that away from us.  And one day, just as women are slowly being allowed to want and enjoy sex, and people of color are slowly being considered and taught about, one day we too will be in the sex manuals.  We must tap into our denied sexuality and demand equality, for it will set us free.