"Friends enjoying music on speaker during rooftop party at terrace against sky."

Ludicrous caption for "The pleasure principle: How the left wins the abortion wars/The right wants to punish sex — so the only way to win the abortion wars is make sex fun again." 

That's a Salon article by Amanda Marcotte. It's a stock photograph, and they just used the stock photo description. I guess they needed a photo of people having fun sex. 

 How idiotic does this look?

 

I'm certain Salon is fine with offending those who morally oppose abortion. In fact, this article aims to insult them. It says so in text: They're not really about saving babies. They "want[] to punish sex." I'm saying the photo (and caption) are ludicrous because they represent Salon's idea of inviting its readers into the world of sex as fun.

Look at those models. They're so beautiful yet slightly drunk. They're sitting on the edge of the roof. They're ecstatic about a miniature speaker. They have a black friend, tucked away as far back as possible, with his head slightly bowed. The man in this foreground — Is he stretching in joy over whatever music emanated from the elongated rectangle wielded by the central figure? Is he the drunkest of the lot? Or is he lying there, arms outstretched, as our flight path into sex? Girl in Hat gazes back at us: Yes, we can join them. We can experience pleasure.

So... "the pleasure principle" — the argument premised on hedonism. I've seen this many times over the decades. If it feels good do it. Girls just wanna have fun. "The Difference in Women’s Hedonic Lives: A Phenomenological Critique of Feminist Legal Theory" by Robin West.

But let's read Amanda Marcotte and see how she calls the pro-abortion crowd to the activist tactic of "mak[ing] sex fun." It's not sex for the sake of sex. The headline says there are "abortion wars" to be won and asserts they can only be won through sex. And not just any sex. You've got to make sex fun. 

That doesn't sound like it means the activists themselves should have fun having sex. It seems as though she's advising them to make other people feel that sex is fun. Just like that photographer setting up that photo shoot to demonstrate that a miniature speaker equals fun, the pro-abortion activists need somehow to use their skills to persuade onlookers that SEX IS FUN.

I do plan to read this article eventually, but first I want to read your mind. Maybe not your mind, but I'm pretty sure at least one of my readers got to the end of the previous paragraph and felt inspired to write a comment like: SEX IS FUN? How fun is it to have your limbs torn off one by one?

Marcotte quotes an Erick Erickson tweet:

Dear people upset Roe is dying. I want you to remember the feeling of dread you have right now. Now understand this is nothing compared to the feeling you’ll have on the day of judgment you think is a myth. Repent.

Marcotte paraphrases that: "That fornicators are scared right now because they are about to face the punishment of forced childbirth for their dirty sex-having ways."

She continues: 

It's easy to see why progressives want to focus on the most dire outcomes from abortion bans. Images of dead women and starving babies are believed to create moral urgency around the issue.... The problem is that it's too easy for Republicans to dismiss the dire outcomes as fringe cases that have no impact on most voters....

By reframing the issue around sexual freedom, however, progressives would have an opportunity to make the discussion salient to people's lives and identities, which has a much bigger impact on voting choices....

It's another category of identity politics! The happy sex-havers are a voting bloc!

As I've argued before, voters want to be on Team Fun People instead of Team Sanctimonious Scolds. Republicans get this. That's why they rarely defend their rancid bigotry on its own terms, but instead try to pretend the debate is over fun-loving free speech jokesters versus the cancel-culturing "woke mob."...

That's a good point. Get the left to back off from it's repressive sanctimony. But it seems you only want that as a means to an end. It's a way to win the abortion wars. Do we get our freedom of speech back too, or is the "fun" thing for one issue only? Watch what you say, but have lots of fun sex. Ironically, that sounds like an old anti-feminist prescription for women: Don't talk. Fuck. And believe that you just love it.

With sex-positive feminists leading the way, there was robust public discussion about everything from porn to kink to issues of consent. There were even Slutwalks, as feminists stood up for their right to get laid without getting raped. Sex got so normal that it kind of got a little less sexy.... 

You know whats really unsexy? — abortion. But I guess Marcotte's point is that if people were thoroughly immersed in their own sexual pleasure, it might vastly overshadow the unpleasant collateral things — abortion, babies, rape, disease. 

Unfortunately, in recent years, the left has largely abandoned the role of being the fun ones.

Remember when the lefties promised fun? Was that less than 50 years ago?

Instead, we all too often lean directly into the worst stereotypes of progressives as dour scolds who can't even take a joke.... Self-righteous preenings gets [sic] shares and retweets.... 

All the talk about coathangers and rape victims really brings people down....

So, as difficult as it may be to overcome the puritanical impulse baked into the American psyche, the left needs to talk about sex again. Not just the bad parts, but why sex is good and why people should be free to pursue their happiness.... Freedom and pleasure arguments may not score points on Twitter, but they win people over in the real world.

There's something of an idea here, but it's too much about partisan voting to truly express hedonism. And if hedonism is your credo, develop it with some depth of meaning. Otherwise, your sex-is-fun routine is as shallow as that stock photograph.