In “The Power of the Positive Woman,†Phyllis Schlafly builds a logical and cogent case against the Equal Rights Amendment, arguing that it has the potential to derail women’s sports, weaken the military by prohibiting sex distinctions, and gut legal protections for women who are fulltime homemakers.
She also discusses the relations between the sexes in other contexts. I believe that in some of this book she displays a strong contempt for men.
After writing about the large differences in upper body strength between the genders, she asks, “Does the male advantage in physical strength doom women to lives of subservience?†Then she answers her own question in the negative, asserting that women possess “a different type of strength, one that is at least as great as that of men and, in the hands of a skillful woman, far greater.â€ÂÂ
That strength is, paradoxically, the weaker level of women’s sexuality. She writes that women will never have “an equal desire, an equal enjoyment, and an equal freedom from the consequences†of sexual activity and that people who might think that it is only “society’s repression†that keeps women from these things are deluded because “it just isn’t so.â€ÂÂ
However, Schlafly believes this is to women’s advantage. “The other side of this coin is that women have far greater control over their sexual appetites,†she asserts. “A Positive Woman cannot defeat a man in a wrestling or boxing match but she can motivate him, inspire him, encourage him, teach him, restrain him, reward him, and have power over him than he can ever achieve over her with all his muscle.â€ÂÂ
The relationship that Schlafly describes as that between a Positive Woman and her man is similar, if not identical, to that of a dog trainer and a canine. The “skilful†crossing and opening of the legs is similar to throwing a biscuit to a well-behaving pooch as well as tightening the leash on its collar if it starts to wander in the wrong direction or too far off. Basically she is in effect saying “men are dogs†that women should control.
Phyllis Schlafly is an extremely intelligent person. She could not have been as politically effective as she has been if she did not make valid points. So what about her statement about women inevitably lacking “an equal desire, an equal enjoyment, and an equal freedom from the consequences?â€ÂÂ
For much of human history, the consequence of sex for women was all-too-frequently death. Countless women died giving birth. Advances in medicine – made by men – turned death in childbirth from a common hazard to the rarity it now is in modern Western countries.
Men have also made advances that have lightened women’s special consequences through the development of fairly reliable contraceptives and methods of sterilization. However, it certainly remains true that only women bear (literally) the physical consequences of getting pregnant and giving birth.
Although they are often confused, sexual desire and sexual enjoyment are not the same thing. Men do appear to desire (at least partnered as opposed to auto) sex more than women. However, scientific studies such as those by the famed duo of Masters and Johnson indicate that women have a greater potential for enjoyment both as to intensity of orgasms and their frequency.
It is doubtful that Schlafly has ever experienced any of that potential. Her writing on sex is that of a woman for whom having sex is a way to become a mother and a means to “motivate, etc.†a husband. This view of sex was probably not uncommon among women of her generation.
But it is one that profoundly dehumanizes men.
