By Alana S. Newman, The Public Discourse
September 25, 2012 --
Young women now have to defend themselves not only from stereotypical sexual predators, but also from older women and gay men who seek their eggs.
Value depends on scarcity. In the world of human reproduction, the most valuable entity is the fertile female--specifically, her eggs and her womb.
The fierce politics surrounding female fecundity and women's reproductive rights rests not only on a woman's ability to create new life, but also on the incredible amount of commitment and risk involved when her eggs and her womb are accessed for procreation. Since women are fertile for a shorter period than men, since gestation takes forty long weeks, and since labor and delivery pose life-threatening risks, young women always will face disproportionately high demands for access to their bodies. But those demands are rising in unexpected ways, and from unexpected people.
Historically, it was understood that sex created babies. Cultural scripts thus emerged that valued and preferred certain types of sex and male-female relations. The profession of prostitution has always been highly stigmatized for this reason. As we've learned the hard way, when female prostitutes engage with their clients, fatherless children can be born, and grow up distinctly disadvantaged.
By far, men have always been the main buyers of sexual access to fertile females. Women virtually never pay for sexual access to either gender. Women and girls make up the overwhelming majority of prostitutes and escorts, and men overwhelmingly make up the clientele. This is true for every human culture, in every period in history. And it has everything to do with reproduction and the scarcity of the fertile female....
By neutering ourselves in our youth via contraception and abortion, women have increased the scarcity of the fertile female body, which has increased the demand for it....
