why we should regulate masturbation
if abortion is murder, masturbation is mass-murder
Every time I worry about losing my credibility as a journalist because I talk so much about male masturbation, I remember that lawmakers across the United States spend their precious time talking about what women should do with their private parts.
Obsessing about ways to control women is not even something that politicians do on their own time, it’s what they do when they’re at work. There is no job where a woman gets to be paid to think about more ways to restrict her male coworkers rights, but if you reverse the sexes, being a member of Congress is one of them. It’s so awkward. Imagine being on a zoom with the guys you work with where you’re like “hey team I just wanted to circle up and update you on my progress on the whole stripping you guys of their most basic human rights…sharing my screen can everyone see it?” For it to be truly accurate though, I would also have to make completely absurd claims about male bodies just like Republican State Representative Vito Barbieri from Idaho who learned that women’s stomachs aren’t connected to their vaginas while he was in the middle of trying to make laws about said vaginas.
It must be weird for politicians to come back home to their female partner after a long day of tirelessly trying to disenfranchise them. As House speaker Nancy Pelosi put it last week, after she brilliantly got the Republican party on the record opposing a woman’s extremely basic right to contraception, do her male coworkers realize they’re voting to take away their own wives’ and daughters’ civil-liberties? “I ask those who oppose contraception, again, do you even know what’s going on in your own families? Why don’t you ask? Do we need a session of the birds and bees to talk about why this is important?” Pelosi quipped.
If it’s unprofessional for a woman to talk about what men do with their penis, why is it not equally unprofessional for men in congress to talk about what I’m doing with my vagina? It’s creepy. Of all the growing mountain of pressing issues they could be focussing on solving (monkeypox anyone???) my body is at the top of their agenda? Congressmen caring about my uterus, in this economy?
I enjoy comparing abortions bans to masturbation bans because they’re the virtually the same thing: the state impeding on extremely private and intimate decision they have no business being involved in. Every argument I get from outraged people online against the state legislating men’s bodies, inexorably becomes an argument against abortion bans. “Men aren’t killing babies!” Well, women aren’t either. The sperm and the embryo are both single-cell entities and one isn’t more “alive” than the other. Or commenters will say “how would you even regulate what men do in their homes!” which applies to the vast majority of abortions, which happens in women’s homes. Why is one absurd and the other isn’t? The patriarchy makes a mockery of our ability for logic and reasoning. It makes us all sound so silly.
Back in 2017 I made a parody video of crisis pregnancy centers, tax-payer funded centers that lie to women about the risks associated with abortion, by inventing a center that discourages men from masturbation. I could tell it was pretty good because Ben Shapiro hated it.
In the same way that crisis pregnancy centers are allowed to mislead women into thinking that abortion causes cancer and mental illness, I suggested that we should warn men of similar consequences about masturbation. After all, if we’re going to let the Bible determine when life begins, let’s be accurate. The Bible describes life as beginning at first breath, and it also defines sperm as being the actual seed of life. Sperm is so important that in Genesis 38:10 a man who spills his seed has to be forgiven by giving two pigeons to a priest. Sperm is not more alive than a fertilized egg. It has genes, chromosomes and can create proteins, it can even live outside of men’s bodies.
According to research by Peter Brugger, a neurobiologist at University Hospital, Zurich, sperm even has the capacity for “memory.” A recent scientific breakthrough by Sarah Kimmins, PhD, at the Canada Research Chair in Epigenetics, Reproduction and Development finds that “sperm remember a father's environment (diet) and transmit that information to the embryo.” Sperm doesn’t just have the capacity to remember and pass on how stressed a father’s life was, it also evolves and changes as it makes it way through the reproductive tract. Sperms sounds pretty alive to me! If lawmakers create laws that guarantee personhood to an embryo as having electrical activity and erroneously calling it a “heartbeat” why don’t we make laws that give personhood to sperm based on the fact that it has a memory? After all, memory seems way more human than electrical impulses?
I don’t think any one book should be used to inform the human rights the government gives to any group. As much as I would love bell hooks to inform our policy-making, I wouldn’t expect any group of politicians to just take her word as their only gospel. But if you’re going to use the Bible as a reason for disenfranchising an entire group of people, at least be consistent! By cherry picking the parts you like according to your own interpretation, it’s a little too clear that you’re just looking for something to justify what you already decided you were going to do.
I don’t care what men do with their bodies. I care that so many people care about what women do with theirs. And unless men start pushing back on the men restricting female bodies, they’re opening the door to theirs being next.
I am on (Twitter) record as calling for sperm/AMAB DNA registration so we can track down the other biological parent responsible in case of so-called illegal abortion. If an ended pregnancy results in charges, the sperm provider must be punished equally. Register them at birth so they cannot escape responsibility for making babies.