2. Booby traps

A World War II U.S. government poster to get GIs to avoid sex infections (Brandt, 1987, fig. 19).

Fintan O’Toole needs to brush up on his American history. He used his review of Noelle Gallager’s Itch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination to scold our former president for his odious views of women. It appeared in his “Vile Bodies,” in the The New York Review of Books.

He called Trump to task for his hateful belief that only women cause sex infections. Fair enough. But he further claimed that Donald’s view is unusual and ahistorical. He argues, weakly, that men gave up this belief as far back as the 19th century. But to do this he overlooks the real history. In fact, America indicted all women interested in sex as “booby traps” for infection for most of the 20th century. Men were only victims as they fell into those traps. Here are just a few brief examples:

During the First World War, the military warned GIs that all women, not only sex workers, carried sex infections. It had the government police “flappers” to keep them from spreading them. Women agents policed the streets across America on the look out for “wayward” girls. The Public Health and Research Act of 1918 allowed authorities to detain and examine any “person” they thought might carry a sex infection. They detained more than 15,000 women. They only charged one out of three as sex workers. And they only detained one guy.

By the time of World War Two, the military and government saw all women equally as “booby traps” for syphilis and gonorrhea. They arrested so many of them for being “too sexy” that there was no longer room for them in jails, and the government had to open 30 “civilian conservation camps”. It warned GIs this way:

Avoid prostitutes, Pick-Ups, Push-Overs and “Easy Women.” They are not and cannot be

made safe. Pick-Ups and other “easy women” are by all odds likely to be infected too.

Another thing to remember is that a girl, free of infection at one time, may now have VD

and can easily pass it on to you.

Men were not responsible.

Trump and a whole lot of other men still embrace this nearly universal 20th century point of view. It lasted until medicine and safer sex decreased the cases of gonorrhea and syphilis at the end of the century.

Our history is important, and we need to own it. We also need to stop seeing our former president as an uncommon man. The fact is, he is a very common man —in most all meanings of the word. That’s what makes him so dangerous.

For citations, see How Sex Got Screwed Up, Book 2, pages 296–305.

1. FIRST THINGS FIRST

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) is my greatest hero. She changed the world for all the women of the world by making it possible for them to have coitus without becoming pregnant. For thousands and thousands of years, women had to have children or go without marriage or having coitus. And the patriarchal world liked it that way. Sanger overturned most people’s thinking about that and gave women a way to control their own reproduction — the pill. This may have been the most important contribution to human rights in the 20th century. But Sanger is not everyone’s hero. Far from it. For example, New York City had a commission to name important New York women to honor with public memorials. Sanger, arguably the most important woman in world history, was not on the list. The reason is that the anti-reproductive rights movement successfully smeared her reputation with outright lies and misrepresentations in order to besmirch her brainchild, Planned Parenthood. It continues to produce falsehoods that she was a racist and a eugenicist who believed society should force certain women to not have children. The truth is that Sanger believed that all women should decide for themselves whether or not to have a child. But these lies about her are attractive to many and are now part and parcel of some women studies programs across the country. Even Planned Parenthood itself has mostly given up defending her. With current challenges to Roe v Wade, it believes it has bigger fish to fry.

There are many people who couldn’t care less about history. Sanger matters little to them. Nor do Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) and FDR (1882–1945). It also matters little to them that two of the women New York has honored, Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), believed that women and men should only have coitus when they wanted children — Voluntary Motherhood. Sex was not important to them, which makes them favorites of the anti-reproductive rights movement.

Sociologist Dorothy Roberts reported in her 1997 book, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty:

Even in her most eugenical book, The Pivot of Civilization, Margaret Sanger did not tie fitness for reproduction to any particular racial group. It appears Sanger was motivated by a genuine concern to improve the health of the poor mothers she served rather than a desire to eliminate their stock. Sanger believed that all their afflictions arose from their unrestrained fertility, not their genes or racial heritage.

Sanger believed that women had to control their own bodies before they could afford to worry about for whom to vote. Many people who appreciate history admire her for that. They also stand up for her inarguable role in gaining that right for women around the world. Read more about Sanger in Book Two. Or read Ellen Chesler’s Woman of Valor — Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America or Jean H. Baker’s Margaret Sanger — A Life of Passion. Let’s do what we can to keep Sanger’s memory alive and true.

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