W. F. Price #sexist web.archive.org

["Hey ladies, if you're so equal why are you mad about getting raped? Checkmate feminists."]

One of the reasons I brought up the naughty teacher in LA and the contradictions in the law is that something that’s been on my mind is this idea that there is equal responsibility for sex. It’s something feminists will never fail to bring up when one suggests that it isn’t fair that a guy is on the hook for 18 years when he slept with a woman without intending to have a child. What they consider a rock-solid, ironclad justification for demanding the support is “he didn’t have to sleep with her.” Well, no, he didn’t. But take a 17-year-old boy and a mature woman of, say, 29, and who has more control over the sex act? Who is the gatekeeper? If the woman isn’t in any position of authority over the boy, it’s a legal sex act in most states, so she is free to sleep with him if she wants. However, realistically speaking, the woman has far more control over whether sex will actually happen. A boy of 17 has very little self-control over sex.

So why is it that the law puts the burden of child support on the boy when the responsibility for pregnancy lies overwhelmingly with the woman? It’s another one of those contradictions that characterizes feminist thinking.

Another thing that highlights this is the feminist claims of mass rape throughout society. If as many rapes happen as they claim, chances are someone on your street has been raped recently. There must be multiple simultaneous rapes occurring at any given time within your zip code. Can you hear the silence screaming around you? (this is probably what goes through the minds of feminists). Anyway, the point is that if men are so irrepressibly prone to rape and so sexually voracious, and women so prone to being unwilling, then who really is most responsible when consensual sex does happen?

One of the most sacred and cherished rights of feminists is the right to say “no” — that is, the right to deny sex. Do men value the ability to deny sex as much as women? Perhaps when it comes to forced sodomy, but that isn’t a common issue. One rarely sees men marching down the street with placards declaring that “NO MEANS NO,” and when they do, they are generally just holding signs for women. So, if women actually like denying sex, and are more likely to exercise that power, who has more choice when it comes to whether or not a given sex act will occur?

When a woman gets pregnant as a result of consensual sex, who bears the bulk of the responsibility?

Let’s break it down:

Men have a higher sex drive than women
Men have less control over their sexual impulses
Women value the ability to deny sex
Women are far more likely and able to deny sex than men

If the above are true, then barring outright rape, surely women are more to blame for pregnancy than men. So why does the law treat males and females as equal participants in the sex act, and why does policy hold the man to be more responsible? Clearly, the female has more control.

Additionally, it creates a double standard where statutory rape is concerned. If women have more control over whether a sex act will occur, then older women who sleep with with adolescent boys are guilty of a more serious crime than older men who sleep with adolescent females. The adolescent female has more control over whether she will have sex than the adolescent male, who is hopelessly overwhelmed by surging hormones. However, men who sleep with underage females are generally punished more severely than women who do so with boys.

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over the disintegration of the American family and marriage, but few people dare to point out the obvious reason America is fast becoming a nation of bastards. It’s actually fairly clear: women are not being held to the appropriate level of responsibility where their sexual choices are concerned. In the old days, it was understood that, barring rape, women were more responsible for who they slept with than men, and if they screwed up they had to deal with it. This is why the rate of illegitimacy was so low for so long. However, today, women can get pregnant and receive guaranteed support from not only the government, but whatever random man they permitted to have sex with them.

Holding men more responsible than women for sex has been an abysmal failure, yet the policy remains in place despite thousands of years of received wisdom that lets us know it is a bad idea. Holding men and women equally responsible would be inappropriate as well, but we’ve gone past even that. Without some change in policy soon, the majority of all births in the United States will be illegitimate in a decade or so. The current system, which absolves women of responsibility for a choice that is largely in their hands, and for which they have even more options and tools at their disposal to deal with the consequences than ever, is unsustainable.

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