Anna Krohn: Pop culture icons realise folly of 50 years of the pill
Anyone older than about five during the 1960s or 70s remembers THAT film poster which launched Raquel Welch, former beauty contest champion, former weather girl, former retail model into a “bombshell”.
The film was called 1 Million Years BC (1966), and it must be said it was no high minded version of Walking With Dinosours.
In fact the movie was just a filmsy excuse to depict Miss Welch in a rather flimsy fur number with matching Ugg boots.
At the time, she was notoriously hailed as the most “desirable female” of the 1970s by Playboy Magazine, that great arbiter of male auto-erotic taste.
It was said at the time that Raquel was the new “Marilyn” (Munro to you Gen Yers) – but unlike that tragic blonde, Raquel was already aware of the excesses of Hollywood and its carnivorous taste for female flesh.
“Being a sex symbol is like being a convict!” she noted. She turned down the more pornified Barbarella which went to the more “progressive” Jane Fonda and instead took to minor (and less lucrative) parts in such G-rated favourites as McHale’s Navy.
Who would have thought, however, that the former Miss San Diego would also prove to be more like a post-liberal feminist than Jane Fonda.
Though sounding like a rough diamond, she thinks more like Pope John Paul II.
Like him, she has a bone to pick with those dubious heroines of eugenics and population control, the American Margaret Sanger, the spiritual founder of The Planned Parenthood Foundation and the British Dr Marie Stopes (both were influenced by the neo-Malthusians and the despisers of the poor, “unfit” and coloured.)
This year Marie Stopes’ clinics have hailed 2010 as the “Year of Contraception”.
They opened the year with this heartening message: “A lot of women and men make New Year’s resolutions to give up smoking, lose weight or get fit” why not opt for any one of the rubberised or chemical combos of contraception or abortion recommended on their page “to ensure you avoid any unplanned surprises in 2010.”
Margaret Sanger is touted as the prophet preparing the way for the Pill (50 years old this year) and the great liberator of female sexuality.
During the 1920s Sanger embraced a number of extra-marital lovers along with half-baked psychological justifications for female sexual “joy”.
Supposedly free from the “fear of pregnancy” women would be free “to own and control” their own bodies.
As Dr Michael Waldstein notes in the introduction to his excellent translation to John Paul II’s Theology of the Body – there is a big catch to this “control”.
He cites the dizzy terms in which Sanger writes of this: “Through this mysterious initiation (of contracepted sex) he (her husband or any other bloke she fancies) becomes for her a veritable god – worthy of her profoundest worship…”
Miss Welch wonders about the legacy of contraception, in fact she wonders aloud about especially Margaret Sanger’s legacy: “Since then the growing proliferation of birth control methods has had an awesome effect on both sexes and led to a sea change in moral values,” she writes.
The freedom offered by Sanger’s revolution, has in Raquel’s opinion lead to a new and deeper form of female slavery than even she recognised in her pin-up days: “As a result of the example set by their elders, by the 1990s teenage sexual promiscuity – or hooking up – with multiple partners had become a common occurrence.
Many of my friends who were parents of teenagers sat in stunned silence several years ago when it came to light that oral sex had become a popular practice among adolescent girls in middle schools across the country.
What she has spotted is the replacement of responsibility, dignity and self-respect, the marks of true “freedom” with the desire to be desired, the worship of the male lust which was so blithely advocated by Margaret Sanger and with which teenage girls are ensnared (even while they think they are being desirable).
While on tour promoting her autobiography Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage, Raquel Welch has become quite a voice of contradiction.
She describes her book as an attempt to “get behind the image and beyond the image” .
“… For young women of childbearing age (I was one of them) there was a need for some careful soul searching – and consideration about the long-range effects of oral contraceptives.” Far from accepting the Emily’s List mantra of “my body, my choice” or the Marie Stopes website boasting of same day abortions, Raquel Welch reflects upon her awkward and unexpected pregnancy.
With the support of her then husband she decided that “the choice” was “not mine alone to make”.
“During my pregnancy, I came to realise that this process was not about me,” she said. “I was just a spectator to the metamorphosis that was happening inside my womb so that another life could be born. It came down to an act of self-sacrifice, especially for me, as a woman. But both of us were fully involved, not just for that moment, but for the rest of our lives. And it’s scary.
“You may think you can skirt around the issue and dodge the decision, but I’ve never known anyone who could.”