I can’t help feeling that the GOP primary season is starting to really establish the conservative “brand” as “hateful.”

RE: above the belt and below the belt healthcare. I think it’s all about what is visible to conservative men. They want to “save the boobies” so they can ogle all they like.* Vaginas and uteri aren’t visible so who cares?

*Unless those boobs are feeding a baby, then the woman is a filthy pervert.

...looking for a way for women to go their whole lives without having a doctor address below-the-belt care.

Seeing a midwife and giving birth at home does not mean a woman isn’t getting below the belt care. It may mean she doesn’t get care regularly depending on how often she is pregnant, but most professional midwives I know (CNMs) provide paps and can even prescribe birth control.

Livi, my guess would be that the fundies would have their own nutball midwifes. I doubt they’re in a big hurry to ditch doctors so they can get healthcare from the stereotypical nice hippy lady with an Obama sticker on her old Volvo.

You may be right about the cynicism with which this issue is being deployed right now—abortion/personhood/contraception, all of which are tied to sex and gender, are playing the role that gay marriage did an election cycle or two ago.  There are a whole lot of people, though, who are honestly afraid of sex.  They think it is Wrong, that it will defile their daughters, that it will tempt their sons, and so on. 

That may not be a profound observation, but it fascinates me just how different people’s views of sex can be: immoral, dangerous, a transaction where the best you can hope for is that both sides get something out of the deal, and nothing can or should be done to change that vs. a fun activity for two (or more) people that should be made as safe as possible through education and science, just like most other fun activities in society.  The former position stems from and feeds into a host of other toxic ideas, as well.  The latter seems so much healthier but rarer.

Comment #3: Well, that’s a stereotype all right. My own homebirth midwife works with the average liberal woman with a job, as well as Amish women.

I’m going to argue that the conservative obsession with sex is actually an example of group capture. It’s not so much that the obsession with other people’s sex lives leads to more effective social control or plutocracy (in fact, in many cases the reverse). Instead, consider that people who are freaked out about sexuality tend to gravitate into authoritarian and conservative circles, because that gives them a way to manage their freaked-outness without seriously addressing it and/or getting the help they need. (Consider the old testimonies of all the queer people who said they had gone into the military or into religious orders to work out internal sexual conflicts.) When they do, they’re not really going to get a lot of pushback from other plutocrats and authoritarians, and before you know it they’ve taken over the public and policy faces of the conservative movement.

This contrasts, interestingly enough, with the older version of social control that involved bread and circuses. The idea there was that if people had enough to eat and enough entertainment (including self-produced sexual entertainment) they wouldn’t need a lot else and wouldn’t particularly care what the top 1% were doing with the lion’s share of their society’s resources. But in an economy fueled by consumption that doesn’t really work, so you have the plutocrats bringing the wound-too-tight types into positions of power so that they can infect the rest of society with their insecurities and get them to buy stuff. Same result as above.

”...so I guess they’re already there, looking for a way for women to go their whole lives without having a doctor address below-the-belt care. “

I’d say they want women to go their entire lives without anyone even looking “down there”’ including the women themselves.  After all, Missionary-Position PIV sex doesn’t require him or her to look, if you don’t use slutty tampons (probably on the fundies ban list already), you don’t need to even touch your own vulva more than minimally, and an allowance can be made for the crazy midwife lady to perform that one essential function of aiding the birthing process.

It would be the American equivelent of wearing a veil

@7 MikeEss

On the other hand, conservatives are huge, huge consumers of mainstream porn, and mainstream porn is all about closeups of genitals. Of course, that’s one of the major reasons porn exists and is so popular with conservatives - they can look upon the genitals of those fallen sluts who star in porn. But looking upon the genitals of your wife? By God, man, she’s a lady!

That’s the thing I don’t get about the conservative view of the world, is that it just seems like a shitty way to live. I’m not under any illusions that people sort of sit down and rationally come up with a worldview. So why not pick one that makes you feel good?

Take Caitlin Flanagan’s view of sexuality, where we’re supposed to pretend women as little girls being corrupted by outside force and men as fuck-crazed con men. Who wants to believe the world is like that?

Or listen to the MRA version of the world, where a vast majority of women are terrible hateful bitches who are out to steal my money through their vaginas/soul vacuums.

Or the PUAs, where I’m such a piece of shit the only way I’ll ever get someone else to want to touch my penis is by a complicated system of psychological manipulation sold to be by a guy in a hilarious hat.

Or the terrorism mongers, where Al Qaeda is just waiting to fly a plane into your strip mall.

Or the OMG crime bunch, who think there is a race (yes, on purpose) of supervillians stalking them through the suburbs?

It’s one thing to look at the world and find it wanting, but to ignore the evidence of all the people who have decent relations (in both senses of the word) with many other people and are made happier by it or to notice that there aren’t suicide bombs going off at Rite Aid and that your chances of being randomly murdered are pretty damn tiny?

I don’t share the view of wanting to pretend the world is shittier than it is. Compassion doesn’t cost anything and neither does good feelings to your fellow humans. I guess it feels nice to imagine your better than other people, but it seems like an ideology that imagines the world as a dark, scary place is such a high price to pay for that.

I guess it feels nice to imagine your better than other people, but it seems like an ideology that imagines the world as a dark, scary place is such a high price to pay for that.

It is. But it’s a price that many pay to compensate for the fact that they don’t get everything they feel they’re entitled to out of life. That’s why it’s so common for middle- and lower-middle-class whites to be hateful conservative assholes. I mean, it’s obvious why rich whites are; conservative ideology actually works out for them. But many whites feel that they’re entitled to a lot more than they’re getting from life - because they’re white, of course, though many aren’t consciously aware that that’s why they feel that way - and so there must be some terrible people out there, like Mexicans or Muslims or women, who are fucking it up for them.

Why am I not a millionaire who has sex with five supermodels a week? Because women are bitches and the blacks are taking all my money, of course! Accepting that I’ll probably never be a millionaire, and that I’ll get an amount of sex proportional to the number of people who are attracted to me and like me in that way (rather than because they’re in awe of my RAW POWER), is just too much for some people.

And now instead of sex being the source of friction between men and women, it can bring people together.

Perhaps you should rephrase that—a little friction is the best part!

This cultural conflict isn’t new. But it’s truly alarming how much power the gender-role conservatives have gained in recent years. How can we open minds that are so fiercely clamped shut?

Hell, there are Christian fundies who want you to give birth at home *without* a midwife. Because God will make sure everything goes right. Or he won’t, but in that case it’s probably because of some sin you committed.

How right you are. I was diagnosed with cervical cancer at 26. That likely could have been prevented if I’d gone for annual screenings with a GYN, but I was too ashamed of myself for being sexually active and too ashamed of my own dirty body to do so. I honestly believe that if I wasn’t brought up to be ashamed of myself, my body, and my sexuality, I wouldn’t have been diagnosed with cancer at such a young age. I was never radically pro-choice until I could no longer get pregnant, oddly enough.

I’m an older woman, but I have 3 daughters and still remember my concerns as a young woman.  I was on the Komen website the minute I heard about the planned parenthood thing, telling them they’d never see another penny from me.  I hope this firestorm will be a good thing and make other orgazations think twice about this move.

@1 - hasn’t the conservative brand been pretty well established as hateful for some time now?

As for homebirth, some women consider it because of the loss of control in the hospital.  I considered it myself when my macho older doctor dismissed all my wishes for how the birth should go as “unsafe”, and refused the read the journal article about the birthing center at a university hospital where I’d had my last child.  I just wanted the same thing I’d had before, and he thought it was ridiculous.  This was the same guy who dismissed my concerns that I might be having twins as “you’re older, you’re more stretched out because it’s your third kid, you’re tired because you’re older, you’re bigger because you probably haveyour dates wrong.”  It was twins.

@16

I dismissed the homebirth thing as a bit of yuppie fluff until I heard a lot of stories from a lot of women about their doctors treating them this way. In general I’m not one to diss “Western medicine,” but in this case it’s clear that male privilege causes a lot of problems.

Seeing a midwife and giving birth at home does not mean a woman isn’t getting below the belt care.

Outside of wingnut circles (and maybe even inside of them), it’s probably a sign that they ARE getting care. Midwife care is on the whole cheaper than seeing an OB-GYN, but it’s also less likely to be covered by insurance. So women who see a mid-wife are more likely to be women of some means.

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You know what to do.

Count me in as one of the post-menopausal women who fights for pro-choice.

Following in a family tradition: I remembered how surprised I was when, in the ‘70s my Greatesti Generation Aunt Ginny revealed she was pro-choice.

But then again, Aunt Ginny, as they said, “had to get married” (code for pregnant pre-wedding) back in the 1940s.

I suspect won’t work as well on older women as anti-choicers might think. My experience tells me that very few women go through menopause and then turn on their younger sisters who still have the needs of fertile women. On the contrary, I tend to find that older women are often more thoughtful and nuanced, having had enough experience to see that the division between “good girls” and “bad girls” is a lie, and that we’re all bad girls.

This is very true, as far as my experience being involved with my local Planned Parenthood. Most of the volunteers and women I clinic escorted with were older, retired women. Partially because they had more time, but also because they remember what pre-Roe days were like.

I’m not under any illusions that people sort of sit down and rationally come up with a worldview. So why not pick one that makes you feel good?

If it were that simple, therapists would be out of a job.

Miss Cherry PI, the stereotype is that men get more conservative as we age, but women get more radical.

My mom’s retired now and she’s just getting godless-er, liberal-er and generally cooler. My sister has even convinced her to start swearing.

Yes, they are encouraging women not to see gynecologists, calling it everything from lesbianism (if the dr is female) to adultery (if the dr is male). After all, showing your parts to anyone else, letting them touch and prod and penetrate would be, so why are you willing to let someone do it, just ebcause they’ve been to college?

Yes, this is the actual argument. It’s been rattling around since the 80s and All The Way Home.

I’ve already seen men claiming that because PP screens and then refers to mammograms, that it’s just perverts getting their thrills groping teenagers boobs.  No one should be paying for that anyway!

And, yes, the assholes making that claim were male.

@24 and @25

The basis of these arguments seems to be that patriarchal people literally can’t conceive of any reason to think about or touch a woman’s breasts or genitals other than sex. That’s what women’s bodies are for, after all, right?

Here’s a kinder theory on the conservative fear of sex.
  The whole thing is wrapped in morality, but the question is what is it that people are afraid of that they’re wrapping in all that morality? My guess is that it’s basic sexual insecurity. Men and women tend to be insecure about their looks and their sexual performance. I think that the fear is that if we become a more sexually open society, that your partner will realize just how substandard you are, or even decide that he or she deserves better sex and decide to go elsewhere. I think that liberal minded monogamists feel more secure because they make a conscious choice towards sexual exclusivity. Conservatives who are monogamous because it’s the “rules” rather than having chosen it are going to be less comfortable with the rules changing. Maybe they would have chosen it anyway, but would their partner have?
  Most people in American society tend to fall into monogamous relationships. We seem to like not having to compete sexually for our partner. I think that if you wanted to take a more compassionate view of how conservatives feel, look at your own insecurities, and then look at a more openly sexual culture as something that threatens to expose everything that you’re insecure about. I wonder if that’s the core that all of this fear and morality is wrapped around.
  I don’t think that you can change anyone’s minds until you can understand what they’re really thinking.

Not to thread jack, but even liberal yuppy home birth tends to be heavily influenced by woo and the sort of mind set that leads people to be anti-vaxers. I really recommend this website http://skepticalob.blogspot.com/ for a more balanced perspective. A lot of people get really mad at her tone, but she does a pretty good break down of statistics regarding c-sections and home vs hospital birth and can be a good balance for those who really really want to believe that nothing can go wrong with home birth and that OB’s are basically the Illuminati.

@ Alysia, Tuteur is literally a troll on pretty much every pro-homebirth blog I read, and some of the studies she cites are notoriously bad, most notably the now infamous Wax Study. If you want a blog that actually does provide balance on the issue, I recommend the Navel Gazing Midwife. She’s a former homebirth midwife who’s become increasingly critical of the homebirth movement in the past year. I disagree with some of what she says, but most of her criticisms are valid (so sayeth the liberal feminist homebirther).

Comment #28: alysia - She is the last person I would link to for a balanced perspective since she is 100% anti-homebirth. I know this is only anecdotal, but having chosen a homebirth with my first I have since met many homebirthers, midwives and doulas, and the type of person who chooses a homebirth is extremely varied and people choose it for a variety of reasons. Some vax some don’t, some are religious some aren’t, some see their calling in staying at home with their children and some head right back to work. The average homebirther is more educated about pregnancy and childbirth than the average hospital birther who never explored other options.

All of that to say, that I have no trouble believing that for a certain fundie sect of people homebirth is done to stay away from “liberal docs” and those people may well be ignorant of the risks.

Yeah, Tuteur is one of those scary ‘a doctor can do no wrong’ people. Just as scary as a one of the woo pushers in my opinion, as my father worked in a hospital and could list story after story of the doctors that were afflicted with the god complex. From the near misses to the straight up, could have been hauled in for manslaughter.

She also spends all her time beating up on home birthers but does nothing to address the problems of current medical care. (The US is kind of sucking on that whole infant and maternal mortality rate compared to the rest of the world) I mean, one page into her blog and she compares patient’s complaints that they are ignored, talked down to, not informed and don’t have their wishes respected to asking a doctor to cut off a healthy limb. And the desire to have birth without drugs is compared to forgoing cancer screenings. Tuteur has zero interest in being “balanced.”

I didn’t mean that she was balanced, she is obviously biased as hell. I meant “balance” more as in the counter-weight meaning of the word, sorry to be unclear. I have no kids and don’t know if I ever will,so I don’t really have a horse in this race, but in the upperwardly mobile white liberal circles in which I tend to travel, women who have c-sections and aren’t absolutely certain that the baby would have died otherwise as well as those who choose epi’s are so so demonized it is nice to have an aggressive push back. I am entering my mid-twenties so baby havers are all around me and I do genuinely worry that some of them will be harmed by getting too caught up in anti-science liberalism regarding childbirth.

I agree that Naval Gazing Midwife is a great source for home birth minus woo and probably would have been a better balance.

@9

An MRA and especially a PUA would retort that you just can’t handle “the ugly truth” (hell, it’s the title of a film about a PUA douchebag, even) about sexuality. Obviously a cursory examination of society would show them that their beliefs don’t align with the truth, the ugliest aspect of which is the existence of people like them. But they avoid doing that cursory examination at all costs.

The PUA blogs I used to read out of intellectual masochism would conveniently gloss over the existence of anyone who challenged their theories of sexuality, claiming they were all either lying (women who say they aren’t attracted to the behaviour PUAs encourage, women who say they are sexually dominant or want casual sex rather than a relationship, young men who say they are only attracted to older women) or freaks of nature who totes don’t count.

I’ve already seen men claiming that because PP screens and then refers to mammograms, that it’s just perverts getting their thrills groping teenagers boobs.

Er, I recall being a pervert groping teenage boob.  I don’t recall having to go through medical school first to do so.(*)

As ever, the projection is strong with these ones.

(*) Although this might explain Doogie Hawser…

If sexual relationships were necessarily, 100% of the time as bleak and hurtful as PUAs make them out to be, any decent human would simply refrain from having sex. PUAs act like they’re simply acknowledging “the ugly truth,” but they also seem to feel entitled to roam the earth causing pain and heartbreak as long as it makes their penis happy.

Comment #32: alysia - With only 1-2% of births happening at home, a 30% c-section rate and at least 50% of women in hospitals receiving epidurals, all the “demonizing” voices are relatively small. Sure, there is the occasional asshole who will say disparaging things about a woman who didn’t go “natural”, but there are also plenty like Tuteur who think all homebirthers are idiots putting their babies’ lives at risk.

Signed,
The homebirth, hospital transfer, c-sectioned mother.

It’s also funny how “the ugly truth” is something uglier for women than men (because it’s normally part of a worldview that justifies inequality), but women are still supposed to give pity fucks to “omegas” who can’t naturally seduce them so they don’t turn into angry George Sodinis. So the natural order benefits “alpha males” to the detriment of both women and lesser males, but it’s women’s responsibility to make the “lesser” men feel better about their lives. Who’s making women feel better about their status as sex toilets? No one, because if they felt good about themselves in any way they might get the idea they deserve better than the fucksticks who subscribe to this view.

Also, what I think I should have said in the first place is that PUAs (at least the leaders of the movement, not the followers) don’t really see the worldview they have constructed as “ugly” for them, only the people (women) who are understandably reticent to believe it. It’s literally constructed around what turns them on most to believe. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been reading some screed and thought it would be better for everyone if the author had just joined a Gorean fetish group instead of trying to proclaim their fetish a rule of mainstream society.

Well if the antics of a local cult are anything to go by, a conservative move towards homebirths doesn’t mean you get oversight by an experienced doula with a nurse practitioner’s license. The ultimate goal is to take power away from female hands so child-birth gets handed over to the nurse who probably wont have a replacement with medical training because the daughters in the community are discourage or disallowed further education. And when women start dying in childbirth at pre-20th century rates it’s god’s will, not a stupid, preventable, mistake.

If you want to go farther into second-wave thinking: Witless chum pointed out the stereotype that as women age they get more radical, and most of us have known a few iron-fisted matriarchs ruling their families and/or social circle well into their golden years. The accumulated wisdom of many years does convey a certain amount of power which wouldn’t be much of an issue except women tend to outlive men, especially wives. So you end up with a small but powerful group of elders who are all female with no husbands to keep them in line. That’s a big threat to a patriarchal society and they need to find a way to take it out. Death in childbirth was the biggest control on the female population before modern medicine.  It allows them to keep women around long enough to breed but cuts a substantial number of them away before they can grow into any kind of power in old age.

Comment #38: scrumby - Wanting, or at least being willing to let, women die due to lack of adequate health care really is at the heart of the anti-choice agenda. Sure, they the don’t give a crap about the “sluts”, but hey even if that means a few “good” women die that’s just the price of admission.

@39

There are no truly “good” women in the conservative worldview. If the Virgin Mary managed to give birth to the Messiah and still remain a virgin, these women shouldn’t have so much trouble doing the same thing. They died because they just weren’t pure enough to defy logic and reality.

@39 Livi: Obviously those women weren’t really good or they wouldn’t have died.

That’s the frustrating thing about extremists of any type—try pointing out the obvious failures of their approach and it quickly turns into a type of No-True-Scotsman argument.

Well, to be fair, she did add in their claim of no deaths in fifteen years and it still doesn’t come out safer.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not an option; it certainly can be cheaper.  You have to balance access with cost as well as safety… Some things may be safer, but it would be prohibitively expensive to do them as well.

Anyhow, this whole argument of hospital vs home is a distraction from the thread of demonizing vaginal cancer vs breast cancer.

After all, showing your parts to anyone else, letting them touch and prod and penetrate would be, so why are you willing to let someone do it, just ebcause they’ve been to college?

That’s why traditional Chinese doctors used to have a doll where the patient can demonstrate ‘where it hurts/is red/swelling/etc’ without having to lose the modesty required of a Chinese girl or woman.

#40 & #41 - Silly me! Of course there are no good women.

Treefinger:

I’m probably not saying anything you haven’t said nearly verbatim, but to wingnuts, “the ugly truth” is usually that people who aren’t them are subhuman and not worth helping. (Just read anything by, say, Eric S. Raymond, who had one good insight about software development and now stands out as being openly racist, misogynist, and blazingly pseudoscientific. For reasons that have something to do with also having once been a fan of Roger Clemens, he’s one of my favorite whipping boys in the dark side of the geek community.)

“Wanting, or at least being willing to let, women die due to lack of adequate health care really is at the heart of the anti-choice agenda. Sure, they the don’t give a crap about the “sluts”, but hey even if that means a few “good” women die that’s just the price of admission.”

...well, sure, Family Patriarch might be unhappy for a little while after one wife dies, but you just soldier on, pick out another one at a church social or something similar, marry her and continue on.  Just as long as there’s somebody to catch his manly seed, all is well with the world…

(Seriously, looking at my own genealogy, it seems like women — when medicine still thought highly of leeches, as well as the importance of a great deal of praying — were merely a replaceable part.  Your wife dies in childbirth, or dies from an infection she picks up soon after, and just bury the old girl and move on to the next one.  Father 7-to-17 children, only 3 or 4 of which live to adulthood, have 2 or 3 wives — serially unless you’re Mormon — and die of old age when you’re in your late 40’s to 50’s.  What a great life it was for men before all this modern — read “liberal” — technology ruined everything…)

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You know what to do.
Comment #19: judybrowni on 02/02 at 01:36 PM

Thank you.  And done. 
You can also go to the Komen Board website and email (through their corporations, sorry , a bit time consuming) the board members. 

Remember Brinker herself (founder) is a GWB lackey; unfortunately, she got the medal of honor from Obama in 2009 for her work at Komen.  She was Komen’s sister.  She gave a ridiculous, lying interview in defense o f this today.

So, I’m including requests that she resign.

I think the tendency of conservatives to see groups in perpetual conflict explains the attraction they have to things they perceive as “pissing liberals off”.

My experience tells me that very few women go through menopause and then turn on their younger sisters who still have the needs of fertile women.

That sounds right to me, which is why the decision strikes me as astonishingly self-defeating. Komen’s key demographic in terms of fundraising and volunteerism is, I very much suspect, relatively well-off and savvy women. It comes across as that kind of operation. Perhaps the assumption was that Planned Parenthood’s key demographic was sufficiently different that they could be disregarded (à la ACORN) but how many of Komen’s supporters were (or still are) PP users? You don’t forget yourself that easily.

I’ve already seen men claiming that because PP screens and then refers to mammograms, that it’s just perverts getting their thrills groping teenagers boobs.

There was an obvious troll with a female handle on the WaPo site claiming that “she” was molested by lesbians at PP. I almost wanted to shout “BINGO” for covering all the wingnut bases.

The problem is that the folks who ran Komen bought the line that it wasn’t a grifter org.  If they’d known what Komen really is—a sinecure—they would have been much more careful to avoid controversy.

Eric S. Raymond

Ugh fuck that guy and fuck much of white nerddom in general. I mean I’m a huge nerd, and I’m also all for open-source software, freedom of information, all that jazz. I’m not a fan of SOPA or PIPA or anything of that shit either. But people like Raymond - along with your stock Internet libertarians and such - somehow manage to make it abundantly clear that their sole concern is that the Internet be free and open for straight middle-class white dudes.

If you’re so fucking concerned about freedom of information, hows about you spend as much time helping to ensure that everyone of every race, class, and gender has equal access to the Internet as you do fighting for your right to upload anime clips to YouTube.

when medicine still thought highly of leeches

I know leeches get made fun of a lot because they’re icky, but as pre-modern medicine goes, leeches were actually among the sounder and more reasonable methods. I’m mainly just nitpicking; like anybody with a soul, I like 99.9% of what you say.

It’s counter-intuitive, but the reason leeches were a valid treatment is the fact that for infectious bacteria, iron is a limiting factor for growth, so if a patient was bled, they had their iron stores depleted:

So it is a bit of an irony that people who have hemochromatosis, a genetic disorder that causes them to retain large amounts of iron in their bodies, are able to survival infections like the plague. This is because they starve the invading microbes through “iron locking.” They have a lot of iron in their bodies, but they keep it away from the bacteria. Other people who have low levels of iron in their bodies are able to withstand bacterial attacks because they also keep what little iron they have away from the germs. In fact, one of the body’s initial responses to microbial invasion is to limit the amount of free iron in the system.

Survival of the Sickest.

Isn’t there also a recent batch of studies about leeches reducing scarring and thinning blood in other ways that can benefit under certain cercomstances?

circumstances, damn it

Yes, helen,  leeches could hold the key to dealing with strokes and heart disease:

Recent studies have shown that leech saliva is basically a damned miracle elixir. Their spit is lousy with anesthetic, antibiotics and beneficial enzymes and anticoagulants that could prevent heart attacks and strokes.

I think that the fear is that if we become a more sexually open society, that your partner will realize just how substandard you are, or even decide that he or she deserves better sex and decide to go elsewhere.

I’d say that covers it.

I think a lot of people just can’t physically get off without a measure of drama, misery, and bullshit. Happy, fun sex with an equal just doesn’t turn them on. They don’t want to masturbate to rainbows and unicorns and fluffy kittens.

As someone who was raised conservative and saw just how dangerous it could be, I have to echo a lot of these statements.

I’m not even sure it’s the whole “misery loves company” argument that makes conservatives so hostile to open sexuality - at least, not solely.

I was raised to hate my body - to hate the things it does naturally - as disgusting and unclean. I was raised to submerge my baser urges, to dismiss them, or worse, totally ignore them - as they are uncivilized and subhuman. I was taught at an early age that the human body is not a thing of beauty, but as an object of scorn and derision - and the only way we could be passably decent was if we were dressed appropriately.

The human body was not something you cherished - it was something you ignored unless something was wrong with it. You did not celebrate the beauty of the human form because it was not beautiful. It was a filthy, disgusting vessel that just happened to contain your “soul”.

I guess a lot of the conservative mindset is self-hatred, self-loathing, and self-abuse - and to an extent, anyone whom they see who doesn’t do that to themselves must have something wrong with them because they either don’t realize just how filthy and disgusting we humans are, don’t care about same, or seem to be unburdened by the massive amount of guilt that conservatives place themselves under every day that they lash out.

And of course, it’s a vicious cycle. They indulge in pleasures that contradict their own “beliefs” to assuage their own negativity, then they feel guilt for having done so, which causes them to further indulge in pleasures that contradict their beliefs to relieve the guilt…and so on, ad nauseam.

After I turned 21, I started to see just how badly it had skewed my worldview and I’ve been trying to fix it ever since. So much of that self-hatred becomes internalized to the point where you can’t get rid of it.

I realize that the things I was taught as a child may not necessarily mean much in the grand scheme of things, but I thought sharing those things might help clarify the question as to why conservatives hate not only sex, but anything pleasurable.

And of course, it’s a vicious cycle. They indulge in pleasures that contradict their own “beliefs” to assuage their own negativity, then they feel guilt for having done so, which causes them to further indulge in pleasures that contradict their beliefs to relieve the guilt…and so on, ad nauseam.

They also mistake that guilt for proof that indulging their bodies is gross and wrong. Like you said, it’s a vicious, self-feeding cycle.

Here is an example of fundamentalist midwifery: http://midwiferyinstituteofamerica.com/

Get this: correspondence course!

And yes, there is a significant percentage of fundamentalists who believe that women should not see OB-GYNs. Their body belongs to their husband, after all, and they shouldn’t defile themselves by letting someone else see it.