did you know that in the seventeenth century in western Europe it was women who were sex-crazed and would literally become ill or crazy or dead if they didn’t get some sex?

Men who were the perfect specimens of humanity did not need sex, but women whose body fluids were imbalanced (hence they were female and not male) needed sperm to help them achieve perfection. Without it, they became ill and got diseases such as greensickness. Juliet is accused of suffering from greensickness in Romeo and Juliet, hence her father’s attempt to marry her off. Sex controlled women. Without they were running around all crazy and using their bodies like they had a right to them or something.

Science backed this up- it was a completely natural state of affairs!

That said, much of what you’ve said here makes a lot of sense.

And they accuse us of not dealing with our sexuality when they are, in fact, the ones incapable of dealing with it.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_jason_mi_060809_pornification_is_a_d.htm

http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/

To understate!

Found this the other day:

Patriarchy has always used sexuality to control people, and it is still doing it, but times have changed and it is doing it a bit differently these days. Our government used to censor porn. Then they found that it was easier to maintain the morale of male combat troops if instead of censoring it, they distributed it. So they did. And it worked. So they began promoting it outside of the military because they wanted to control civilians too. And that worked also. There are millions of people in the U.S. today who believe that because they have access to porn, they still have some privacy from government intrusion. Many of them have clever little methods of maintaining their privacy when they visit kiddy porn websites. And whenever a few thousand of them get arrested in a federal sweep, they think it is an aberration, or that they just weren’t using the right security precautions. The truth is that none of their security precautions work and the government can round them up any time it wants. While they’re watching porn, big brother is watching them.

There’s an old Sufi story. A magician had a flock of sheep and he was too lazy to fence them in, and too cheap to hire a shepherd. So to keep them from straying, he hypnotized them into believing that they weren’t sheep, they were magicians. And it worked and his sheep never strayed.

Real freedom of speech, as intended in the First Amendment, is the freedom of the powerless to speak truth to power. The powerful don’t need freedom of speech to be guaranteed to them as a right, since they have the power to say whatever they want. It is the powerless who can be silenced by the powerful, so it is the powerless who needed to be guaranteed freedom of speech. That right has been completely destroyed. You can criticize the powerful, but you cannot do it to their face. You cannot speak truth to them. You can watch all the porn you want, but you cannot get within a hundred yards of Bush if you’re wearing an anti-Bush or anti-war t-shirt. You have the freedom to watch videos that objectify, trivialize, humiliate, and even torture the least powerful people in our society, but you do not have the freedom to speak truth to power. And most people never even noticed the trade-off. That’s how hierarchies work. You get to pick on anyone lower than you in the pecking order, so long as you don’t turn on those above you. Most people think it’s a sweet deal, and will put up from almost anything from their superiors, so long as they can pass the abuse on to those below them.

From a comment by mymarkx on:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_jason_mi_060809_pornification_is_a_d.htm

This is the sentence that sent me running for green, leafy relief*:

“Then they found that it was easier to maintain the morale of male combat troops if instead of censoring it, they distributed it. So they did. And it worked.”

*My homicidal-tendancy-prevention medicine, keeping the murder rate around here down while protecting my karma as these boys are playing hell with certain spiritual path issues like not hating these cockwads with every fiber of my being.

“I worry about boys and girls, men and women, finding an ‘asexual’ Web site and accepting their asexuality as an identity without even trying to understand its genesis. Some of these people need help.” (Aline Zoldbrod, “Boston-area psychologist and sex therapist”)

Boys and girls? Men and women? What about folks with a non-binary gender identity? Is that something that also needs to be “helped”? An active, sex-based sexuality is clearly a commodity in which these sex therapists and psychologists have a capitalistic investment.

People uncomfortable with sex having the sanctioned option to just opt out (of sex, then out of heterosexuality and the commodification of sex, so holy hell, then even out of the entire patriarchal structure, as you point out) are incredibly dangerous to all of the matrices of power presently in place.