Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll is experiencing déjà vu all over again in AGAIN WITH THE SEX STRIKES. She writes:

A couple of weeks ago I saw a lot of talk from the pink knit hat crowd about going on another sex strike. They’ve been short on updates about the results of the last one, but they never learn, do they? Dock workers can go on strike and have a big impact. Similarly, truckers or farmers or airline pilots. You know – USEFUL people.

Random women – alone, or even in a big unattractive gaggle – denying their sexual favors to their particular partners is exactly as meaningful as a strike by phone solicitors, Gender Studies professors, or rappers. Literally, NOBODY cares, ladies. NOBODY. (In fairness, I stipulate that columnists denying their opinionating services to the world would not have a significantly larger impact. I have always known — whether comedian or columnist– I would do very poorly in a barter economy.) One reason why I attached myself to a smart guy who I somehow intuited would one day learn to code. Also, he was really cute. I am just that shallow.

I have seen the ladies pledging to go on strike. I can only imagine the relief of whatever men or women are in their lives, who would probably sooner prefer cold showers, one of the more attractive farm animals, or what the Catholic Church used to call self-abuse.

This unhealthy-looking menagerie is a cohort of permanently enraged women much tattooed, pierced, and with Hair by Dennis Rodman. Even standing six feet from them, to say nothing of something more intimate, a person would risk coming away with – at a minimum – monkeypox, if not mandrill mange. Plus, I think you would have to put up with a lot of angry shrieking before any real payoff. Or as the great Toby Keith requested: “a lot less talk and a lot more action.”

The very funny but not family-friendly comedian Ron White had a classic line: “If you refuse me for several months, I WILL CHEAT. I’ve seen me do it.”

I have some experience with labor struggles. And, no, not just when I was birthin’ my baby. But for many years I was a dues-paying union member in two different unions – the International Typographers Union (which eventually merged with the Teamsters) and AFTRA (American Federal of Television and Radio Actors).

Like even FDR, I am opposed to the government worker unions which basically involve government time-serving drones taking time out from porn-surfing to give humungous donations to the politicians who will then negotiate the unionists’ salaries from the taxpayers’ stash. The taxpayers, needless to point out, get no say.

But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been righteous battles for workers’ rights, especially with the Industrial Unions. In 1934, The Minneapolis Teamsters took actual casualties from employer-hired goons and strike-breakers in order to get 43 cents an hour for their labor and the ten-hour day. For the funeral of the one murdered striker, Henry Ness, it was estimated that somewhere between 40-100,000 working class sympathizers lined the streets. It was a cause that elicited a lot of support from the general public and eventually won the day.

Getting coal delivered in any month except July in Minnesota turns out to be pretty important. A strike because women are throwing a hissy fit over a political issue about which at least half of Americans disagree is sure to have less mass appeal.

As an adolescent girl I would sometimes lurk by the heat register in the kitchen, “stealth” reading a book while alertly listening to the Big Ladies talk about sex in what they obviously believed were guarded terms. How else was a girl to learn anything? Sadly, we did not yet have Drag Queen Story Hour. Nor did we put condoms on cucumbers even once. It’s a miracle any of us even reproduced. And so much of what we learned was dead wrong! We were taught that there were only TWO sexes and that it took one male and one female to make a new human. Now, of course, we know that’s crazy, and if two adult men get into a hospital bed holding newborns, it means they can pretend to have birthed babies.

One topic, returned to with some frequency by the coffee klatch, was basically “how to get out of doing their marital duty.” Many ruses were discussed, including the old stand-by “headache.” Even as a pre-teen girl, I was confused. It SEEMED to me – innocent that I was – that with all that kissing and heavy breathing and such between headache-free men and women in movies, it looked like the people were having a pretty good time! Why, then, would anyone conspire to get OUT of it? Well, for once, something I suspected might be true as a kid turned out to be right. Dang! I think some of those modest ladies were fibbing to the others about not liking it! Sex IS fun! So we can appreciate the self-sacrifice, if not the pointless futility, of today’s sex strikers.

It is unclear when these pathetic modern Listerias (No, that’s a food-borne bacterial illness. Close, but no cigar…) Lysistratas (yup, that’s the women who denied their menfolk sex in order to end the Peloponnesian War) will end their strike. If abortion is left up to the states and the citizens of each state decide on a spectrum from “none at all” to “twelve weeks” to “one second before the baby is born,” one would think that there would be a state where every woman could find a home.

But what if YOUR state does not allow the leeway you came to expect when abortion lurched far from the original Roe v. Wade to “no pregnancy too far along”? In the early ’70s, when abortion was only legal in California, and New York, I knew several women who flew to one place or the other with no particular hardship.

Now it turns out several major corporations will pay for the whole schmear for you. This is not altruism or feminism at work. As someone has pointed out, it’s much cheaper than three months of paid Parental Leave. With HIPAA in place, what would prevent hundreds of women (not to mention other random “birthing persons”) from lying about being pregnant and just going to California for a nice paid vacation?

So why all the hysteria? And my conclusion is that a certain subset of immature and humorless women ENJOY hysteria. There is no other way to explain various outbreaks of mass Twitter freak-outs, AOC and her Squawking Squad, or the donning of ugly red dresses and matching bonnets whenever they don’t get to pick every Supreme Court justice.

They have male counterparts, these professional hysterics. In 2008, soon after the Obama election, I had a gig for state employees in San Diego. The speaker right before me was a prevaricating prima donna from the IPCC. As I have mentioned a couple of times before in columns, Life has made me acutely aware of the price people pay to be “in the arena” as the great Teddy Roosevelt’s 1910 Sorbonne speech described. I have never in my life booed an athlete, performer or speaker. But this one was the closest I ever came, except for the fact that I was on deck. Which would set an unfortunate precedent!

At the end of the most dishonest hour I have ever been subjected to, one little muscle-free fellow sporting the obligatory man-bun raised his hand and with tears in his eyes and a choking voice asked, “How much time do you think we have left before it’s too late?” The answer was “under 10 years,” as gasps filled the room. He added this proviso to bring white guilt and raaaacism into the mix: “The United States might have a little more time, but think of Niger and Mozambique. They don’t have the luxury of time that we have.”

As heads bobbed up and down sadly at that thought I wanted to scream out, “How are Niger and Mozambique doing right this minute? How have they EVER done?”

But since grownups don’t GET to do everything they WANT to do, I kept my counsel. And here we are FIFTEEN years later, having a perfectly average regular summer in Arizona. (Hint: it’s hot!) And the little weasels have moved the goalposts once again. Last I heard we just got an extension – like I used to get on my late term papers – and now have eight years. Whatever.

By age 83 I may just enjoy a degree or two more of warmth. The Russians and many others think we are on the verge of the Ice Age promised in the FIRST Ecology Day in 1970. In which case, it should be ideal in Arizona. We’ll see. In any event, I think the courageous sex strikers should deny their favors until they can control not just reproduction, but the weather too. From strength to strength, ladies!

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses