Remember when everyone was worried Donald Trump and Mike Pence would take away everyone’s free birth control? Well, apparently that’s not an issue anymore because men and women haunted by Trump’s electoral victory aren’t having any sex.
In a column for The Washington Post, Stephanie Land, a single mother of two, explains why she simply can’t bear to date anyone in post-Trump America.
I’ve lost the desire to attempt the courtship phase. The future is uncertain. I am not the optimistic person I was on the morning of Nov. 8, wearing a T-shirt with ‘Nasty Woman’ written inside a red heart. It makes me want to cry thinking of that. Of seeing my oldest in the shirt I bought her in Washington, D.C., that says ‘Future President.’ There is no room for dating in this place of grief. Dating means hope. I’ve lost that hope in seeing the words ‘President-elect Trump.’
Something tells me this lady probably won’t have to try very hard to keep gentleman callers at bay, but I digress. Living sexless in Trump’s America has apparently been going on for quite some time. In October, Laura Beck wrote in Cosmo that hasn’t had sex with her husband in weeks due to their mutual anxiety over the election and her revulsion to Trump’s derogatory comments about women.
I haven’t had sex in weeks. After considering why and how this election is threatening to ruin my previously amicable (even enthusiastic) relationship with sex, I think the problem is twofold. On one hand, the thought of being touched by my husband, a man, after spending day upon never-ending day listening to Donald Trump’s sexually assaultive language, is not a pleasant one. On the other, we are both so obsessed with the election that our combined anxiety is killing our sex drives.
RIP, sex. It was fun while it lasted!
Admittedly, my own love life has been kind of a disaster lately, but I’m not swearing off all forms of affection because Donald Trump will soon occupy the White House. That’s just absurd.
As sad as these confessions are, however, the news ought to be of some comfort to those hand-wringers who predicted that sex wouldn’t be any fun anymore without all those “free” contraceptives available under Obamacare.
When Trump tapped Obamacare-opposer Rep. Tom Price to direct Health and Human Services, Cosmopolitan writer Jill Filipovic had a panic attack and announced that getting-it-on would soon become a huge pain in the neck due to the rising costs of birth control, or so she thinks.
Even if women rely on more affordable methods, like the birth control pill, they’re still looking at a $50 a month payment without ACA coverage. That may not be much to the Trump women sporting $10,000 bangles or the patients Price sees in his tony Atlanta suburb, but to a single mother stretching every dollar to feed her children, or a first-generation college student taking out debt and paying her own tuition for a chance to claw into the middle class, $50 is not pocket change.
Filipovic isn’t the only woman who’s under the impression that there’s absolutely no way to prevent babies from crawling into your womb without birth control, or that all pregnancy prevention methods would suddenly be snatched away under a Trump administration, either. Apparently so many women were worried they might actually have to pay for their own contraceptives, they ran straight to their OB=GYNs to get intrauterine devices inserted immediately after the election.
As Alexandra Desanctis of National Review points out, there’s been an orchestrated effort from the Left to fan the flames of mass hysteria. Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and the like have been telling women their sex lives will deteriorate without Obamacare, thanks to President-elect Trump.
As a woman, it’s a narrative I find to be incredibly insulting. I don’t need to be lured into supporting a failed health-care law with the promise of “free” contraceptives. I’m not stupid; I know that my tax dollars are going to end up paying for it anyway, and at an inflated level due to Obamacare’s massive bureaucracy always getting its cut. Also, it’s condescending for people on the Left to assume that I need some paper-pushing bureaucrats to give me an IUD for fear that I can’t handle my own uterus.
But for these women who are apparently so dependent upon a failing health-care law to provide them with contraceptives, perhaps it’s not such a bad idea to put sexual activity on hold for the time being.
