Fascism and Sexuality

Life in our country just gets weirder by the minute. Reading the news is a trip. Here's an alarming headline I came across in Raw Story this morning: "FDA official says pill leads to sex cults". They're referring to Plan B contraceptive, here, and reasons for the FDA's reluctance to approve it. (Read the whole article here) Facism again comes to mind...

Fascism and Sexuality

There has also been a revival of interest in recent times, among many academic historians, with regard to the profound cult of masculinity that permeated fascism, the attempts to systematically control female sexuality and reproductive behavior for the ends of the State. Italian fascists viewed increasing the birthrate of Italy as a major goal of their regime, with Mussolini launching a program, called the 'Battle For Births', to almost double the country's population. The exclusive role assigned to women within the State was to be mothers and not workers or soldiers.

According to Anson Rabinbach and Jessica Benjamin, "The crucial element of fascism is its explicit sexual language, what Theweleit calls 'the conscious coding' or the 'over-explicitness of the fascist language of symbol.' This fascist symbolization creates a particular kind of psychic economy which places sexuality in the service of destruction. Despite its sexually charged politics, fascism is an anti-eros, 'the core of all fascist propaganda is a battle against everything that constitutes enjoyment and pleasure'… He shows that in this world of war the repudiation of one's own body, of femininity, becomes a psychic compulsion which associates masculinity with hardness, destruction, and self-denial." (Wikipedia)