Don't Forget to Vote– and to Ejaculate Responsibly
In defense of radical imagination, impractical art and activism, men controlling their dicks, and don't forget to vote today, did you vote yet, did I mention voting
In a few weeks, I’ll be teaching a class on Silvia Federici, a thinker and activist I mention a lot in this newsletter and who has been central to my work and research for years. One of the topics that often comes up when I teach Federici’s work, and in discussions of Wages for Housework, which Federici co-founded, is whether it’s practical to suggest that the government pay for mothering and keeping house. Federici responds to such questions and criticism in a number of ways in her writing, including arguing that paying for domestic and maternal work would mean reckoning with the idea that work doesn’t begin or end “at the factory gates,” eventually letting us out of the wage—i.e. the idea that we must work to earn our right to live— altogether.
The ideological shift that would have to occur to pay unwaged care workers, in other words, including dismantling gender, Work, and the presumed separation of public and private life, would produce an altogether different society. This is the point.
This point is also, in part, what makes Wages for Housework and other domestic labor movements fundamentally different from feminist calls for more general financial freedom or power for women but assume otherwise unchanged economic, political, ideological etc etc systems.
To dismiss such a vision as impractical—the kind of thing I heard a lot pre-pandemic, before care had so visibly collapsed—is to miss that crucial point. Wages for Housework is a project of radical imagination, the kind of critical and creative thinking necessary for pushing forward a new world.
This is not to say that the movement—Wages for Housework—has not also had tangible short-term aims or political goals, or that other domestic labor organizations don’t also advocate for provisioning everyday rights under a flawed system. The current Wages for Housework Campaign, for example, has joined a coalition in favor of the Green New Deal in Europe, which “includes provision for a Care Income (CI) — based on the recognition of the necessity of the activities of caring, which are often undervalued or invisible in our societies and overwhelmingly performed by women — especially mothers.”
Pragmatic politics—the kind that agitate for immediate and incremental policy changes, or Democratic control of Congress, say—are necessary and valuable. I’ll be voting today, and so should you. Peoples’ lives depend on it. Your life depends on it. But so often in contemporary political discourse these two kinds of political action—the immediate and the more long-term, revolutionary imagining—are presented as oppositional or in conflict.
“So often in contemporary political discourse these two kinds of political action—the immediate and the more long-term, revolutionary imagining—are presented as oppositional or in conflict.”
Recently, when two protesters for the climate activism group Just Stop Oil tossed tomato soup on Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” at London’s National Gallery, then glued their hands to the wall, the question of activist pragmatism flooded the ol’ discourse yet again. Aja Romano wrote for Vox that “much of the media and public attention was negative, with many questioning the efficacy of the protest and criticizing the protesters for hurting their own cause.”
The term efficacy is key here. I continue beating my little drum on why “productivity” and politics make dangerous bedfellows, and why uncritically encouraging such a relationship is not only a losing game, but also intertwined with the disavowal of all sorts of protest (and, I’d add, all sorts of art). As I’ve written for this newsletter before, political anger and rage are often met with the charge that they are only valuable if made “productive,” even as we rarely question how productive or meaningful frantic political action is, when compared to sitting with one’s rage.
What sorts of conversations and perspective shifts did the tomato soup action arouse? Is cultural instigation always less meaningful than political legibility? Why was no one talking about Warhol? And what is worth more, art or life? (The painting btw was covered by a pane of glass, so it’s fine!)
The line between art, politics, and activism has also long been thin and porous, precarious and unstable, especially in feminist art. Activist feminist art, especially second wave feminist art, which frequently invoked pedagogical tools, often viewing art as a kind of educational gesture, shares a papery border with the conceptual—with art in which, as Lucy Lippard put it, “the idea is paramount,” and the emphasis is not “productivity” but “dematerialization.”
“The line between art, politics, and activism has long been thin and porous, precarious and unstable, especially in feminist art.”
Manifestos also have a complex feminist, political, and aesthetic history, one similarly squatting on the threshold between the conceptual and the pedagogical in an effort to birth something new. Which brings me to Gabrielle Blair’s slim now-bestselling manifesto, Ejaculate Responsibly— a visionary text that grew out of Blair’s viral 2018 Twitter thread. The book asks readers to rethink the labor girls and women have always had to perform around warding off pregnancy and to consider how men could pick up some of the slack with a little basic respect for women, for their own dicks and their own personal agency, and for basic reproductive processes.
Blair positions her manifesto as “a new way to think about abortion,” but the book also offers perspective-shifting thoughts on sex, pleasure, and birth control. These subjects are, of course, timely and interconnected. A few months ago, Utah Republican Karianne Lisonbee claimed—in response to a message she received saying the government should control men’s ejaculations rather than women’s pregnancies— that women can “control that intake of semen.” Drawing on warped feminist rhetoric, as many conservatives now do, Lisonbee said she had enough “trust” in women to take up that work of managing where men ejaculate—calling on women “to control when they allow a man to ejaculate inside of them,” rather than on men to assume responsibility over when and where they cum.
Lisonbee later apologized—finger twirl—but couched her apology in her elision of unwanted pregnancies caused by rape or incest, rather than in any awareness of how her appropriation of a feminist rhetoric of agency—i.e. women have enough power to close their legs, to control what men do, to set boundaries in sex, etc.—doesn’t actually imply power at all, but rather offers men an abdication of responsibility over their own decision to ejaculate into women without considering the consequences—therefore offering men more power!
Media outlets were annoyed at the inaccuracy of Lisonbee’s statement, but also squirmy and deflective, calling her statement “gross,” “icky,” and just “not true.” Few commentators dug into the nuances of what she said, what she did not say, and how she said it— and how that discourse implied a more than lopsided vision of sex and pregnancy prevention.
We could write this off as just another dumb thing one conservative said. But Lisonbee’s statements—her storying of the flow of semen from men’s to women’s bodies—speaks to a collective, cultural inability to talk about 1) sex and 2) control and consent.
Blair’s book, on the other hand, is blunt and mature. There’s no teeheehee-ing about ejaculation, precum, birth control, sex, or reproduction in the book. Instead, Blair painstakingly outlines why men’s ejaculations should be men’s responsibility (!), apparently a thing women still have to explain not just to men, but to ourselves, because we’ve been taught all our lives to internalize responsibility for every unwanted pregnancy.
Blair writes:
Men can control when they ejaculate. Men can control how often they ejaculate. Men can actively choose to remove sperm from their body and place it into someone else’s body.
In fact, it’s the only way in which sperm can get into the body of a person with a uterus!
I internalized responsibility for unwanted pregnancy early, spending hours of my teenage years in Planned Parenthood waiting rooms, flipping through magazines and observing with girlfriends how few men frequented those rooms. I know not one man who spent his youth worrying about pregnancy, much less sitting in hard clinic chairs, studying the women beside him, as they rocked baby car seats that were shrouded in muslin blankets.
Growing up in a male-dominated sexual culture rife with blue balls, insatiable male desire, normalization of rape, and the primacy of male ejaculation in intercourse, the idea that men are ultimately the ones responsible for their own ejaculation is still something on which I have to check myself, even as a feminist who writes and thinks about how men’s pleasure and power is privileged in every corner of society!
“I know not one man who spent his youth worrying about pregnancy, much less sitting in hard clinic chairs, studying the women beside him, as they rocked baby car seats that were shrouded in muslin blankets.”
But just because women have shouldered this burden does not mean we should, nor does it mean that when we consent to sex, we are consenting to a man cumming inside of us, or to unwanted pregnancy. As Blair writes, “A woman’s consent to sex does not force a man to ejaculate in her vagina.”
Put another way, if a woman let a man “put his penis in a waffle iron, he wouldn’t.”
As Blair wrote on Twitter, echoing her writing in the book:
I don’t know any women who beg men not to wear a condom. I’m sure they’re out there, but they’re certainly not the norm, precisely because women and girls have always had to the carry the labor of preventing unwanted pregnancies—which have much greater ramifications for women than frying a dick in a waffle iron would have for men. Women carry the effects, as Blair notes, of unprotected sex, unwanted pregnancy, and parenthood disproportionately, but this does not mean we cause them.
Blair’s book debunks a number of other myths surrounding sex, unwanted pregnancy, abortion, and reproductive responsibility as well. She stresses, for instance, that men are “fertile every single second of every single day” and that ejaculation into a woman is a voluntary and intentional process, while ovulation for women is completely involuntary and unpredictable. She writes of the many side effects of female birth control (including the startling statistic that the risk of experiencing blood clots from birth control is higher than it was for the paused J&J vaccine), about period and IUD pain, and about the reliability and safety of vasectomies, which are highly reversible.
“We don’t mind if women suffer,” she writes, “as long as it makes things easier for men.”
Blair explores cultural norms around sexual pleasure too, such as the “stereotype of men trying to avoid using condoms,” which “is basically a given in our culture,” even though the difference in pleasure a man may feel wearing a hat on their dick is minimal and not wearing one puts their partner’s life at risk. This is just one way in which sexual culture prioritizes men’s pleasure over women’s health. As Blair writes, it’s sickening that a momentary and minor increase in pleasure could win out against women’s lives.
Ejaculate Responsibly reminds me a bit of Valerie Solanas’ revolutionary SCUM Manifesto. Though not as militant or adversarial as Solanas’ text—Blair’s book is well-reasoned and clinical—Ejaculate Responsibly similarly calls for “a crucial refocus” on men, which for many readers here may seem like an obvious and modest proposal; for others, the call may seem so radical as to border on the impossible. Blair has encouraged readers to mail her book to Supreme Court justices and lawmakers, and some on social media have criticized the campaign as not in line with the work of on-the-ground abortion providers.
It’s also more than worth noting that the book doesn’t talk much about abortion rights, or that women have always had abortions, or that people with uteruses need access to abortion right now and to be considered full citizens—and while men debate with their buddies whether they should be held responsible for their own cum.
These critiques are important to consider, but there is also reasoning here that implies art, activism, and electoral politics need always to be completely aligned. If those in power are unlikely to agree that men should carry more responsibility over unwanted pregnancies, and are likely to continue legislating and making judicial decisions according to that objection and their misogynistic desire to control women, does that make Blair’s work less worthwhile? The assumption that men just won’t is evidence enough of the need to push forward larger questions around sex and reproduction.
In an increasingly misognyistic, fascist society in which Republicans have openly declared intentions to criminalize parents, doctors, and teachers who support gender-affirming care or even discuss LGBTQ+ rights, to starve universities of public funds as a means to censor critical thought, to overturn no-fault divorce, and to legally equate all abortion with murder, short-term pragmatism remains necessary and not enough.
