Ok, so early last summer, during the big radical-feminist/blowjob kerfuffle, one thread of the argument said that, basically, radicals should be celibate or, if they just can’t give up sex, lesbians not because they’re not interested in men but in hopes that if all women would just go on strike like that then men would surrender and do… um… whatever it was they wanted. Like, um, stop trying to trade things for pussy, I guess… in exchange for pussy. Anyway, call that a Lysistrata-based use of women’s sexuality to advance a political agenda.

Then consider Lysistrata’s opposite, the “Quiverfull” fertility cult wherein (mainly) evangelical women attempt to stay as pregnant as possible in order to fulfill a Bible verse that goes “The fruit of the womb is a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, So are the children of one’s youth. Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them.”

“Our bodies are meant to be a living sacrifice,” write [Quiverfull authors Rick and Jan] Hess. Or, as Mary Pride, in another of the movement’s founding texts, The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality, puts it, “My body is not my own.” This rebuttal of the feminist health text Our Bodies, Ourselves is deliberate. Quiverfull women are more than mothers. They’re domestic warriors in the battle against what they see as forty years of destruction wrought by women’s liberation: contraception, women’s careers, abortion, divorce, homosexuality and child abuse, in that order.

Here too people are using either their own or other people’s sexuality as instruments. Have I ever mentioned that the only long-term-viable reason to have sex is because you want to have sex? Or that the only reason not to have sex is because you don’t want to? Having sex (or not having it) in order to get something else is, um, perverted.