We're Still Having This Conversation Because Stupid, Insecure Men Still Think Confident Women Are Going to Cut Off Their Dicks

It's the year 2013, but due to the rhetoric uttered by old men who still can't stop saying dumb things about rape even after losing two Senate races because of it, it can be easy to forget that and scribble "1970" the next time you need to date something.

See, in case you haven't figured it out already because the world hasn't completely ruined you yet, "pro-life" is a complete, intentional misnomer.  It's the candy they hand out the back of their windowless van; once you figure out the far more insidious truth, it's a little too late.  And no, the analogy really isn't that far off.

Because if it was really about the babies, these people would be all over birth control.  They'd be putting it in vending machines right next to the green M&Ms and giving out complimentary condoms like a steakhouse hands out after-dinner mints.  They'd be doing everything humanly possible to encourage people to practice that which prevents the need for abortion: safe, responsible sex.

But they don't do that.

These are instead the same people who pitch the -- oh yes -- mother of all hissyfits over making insurance companies cover contraception, but are tellingly silent about why Cialis and Viagra need to get put on the corporate tab.

What the "pro-life" movement is about is not saving the lives of fetuses, but controlling female sexuality and punishing the women on whom those fetuses would depend, because how dare a woman step outside her historical place.  How dare a woman be in charge of her own body.  How dare she think sex is something she gets a say in.  And, horror of horrors, how dare she enjoy it without asking a man's permission or begging his forgiveness.

Because yes, it's 2013, and the very idea of a woman realizing she has agency and not being afraid to use it is something a significant -- but thankfully shrinking -- number of men find utterly terrifying.  Because just like their bowels in a rented tux, they're losing control and they know it.

And it should come as a shock to absolutely no one that the men most afraid of this eventuality are those who have the most to lose.  But in a self-fulfilling prophecy straight out of Minority Report.

What these men have to lose is the power they've enjoyed over women since before we started writing this stuff down.  The salve they've been taught to put on their bruised egos since birth that no matter how much they might get kicked around by other men in various posturing power struggles, there is always someone they count on to respect their authority, and that someone is women.

Not having anyone to easily reassert power over at the end of the day?  Means they'll have to start -- and this is the really scary part -- being respectable instead of assuming people think they are.  They'll have to start earning respect through something other than fear and force and manipulation.  And, what with this form of respect being completely new to them and all, they'll have to learn it like a yuppie learns how to tip at a nightclub in Overtown: by screwing up, and getting told in excruciating detail just how you screwed up and why you should never screw up that way again.

For the man who is typically just hitting that point in his life where he blows his life savings on a Ferrari to cruise around town and pick up a date young enough to be his daughter, this is the absolute last candle on the sanity cake, and it's just been blown out.

The real irony, of course, is that he would not have anything to lose if he wasn't so damned scared in the first place.  But that's just it: men who are decent people and know they're decent people don't need to prove it by basing their entire identity off maintaining a place in some perceived pecking order.  Men who are decent people don't feel threatened by sharing equally with women power and respect, because they're already doing it.

If you remember The Neverending Story and the Magic Mirror Gate that Atreyu had to pass through in order to get to the Southern Oracle?  It's kinda like that.  These are kind men discovering that they're cruel.  Brave men discovering that they're really cowards.  They're confronting their true selves, and running away screaming.

And the decent people of the world are all too content now to just let them run.  The further, the better.