Family values Alabama-style
Feel like a little mechanical stimulation? If you're in the mood in Alabama, in the United States' deep south, lock the doors, turn the lights out, get under the covers and try to keep the noise to a barely audible moan. Because if you are caught buying or using a vibrator, you will face a fine of US$10,000 (A$15,800) and a year in jail to contemplate your moral perversity.
A law recently passed in Alabama outlaws the selling and distribution of "any obscene material or any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs", according to the Sydney Morning Herald on March 11.
Alabama assistant attorney-general Courtney Travers claims the law is "about the power of the legislature to prohibit the sale and manufacture of products it deems harmful".
As vibrators, properly used, have never been shown to be harmful, this is all about protecting the minds and hearts of Alabama's women from the temptations of the flesh.
But we're not just talking about auto-erotica. In Alabama (along with 14 other US states), the moral guardians are hard at work saving the masses from oral stimulation. Oral sex between consenting heterosexual adults, even those in legally wedded bliss, remains illegal.
Since many women cannot orgasm without oral or mechanical stimulation, such laws criminalise sexual pleasure for women.
One wonders where this will end. Will high-tech surveillance ensure that the missionary position is compulsory, but only once a week, and not on Sundays? Will there be legally enforced wearing of pyjamas specially designed so that wandering nocturnal hands are denied their mission?
Like attempts by John Howard, Trish Draper and Brian Harradine to protect us from a "paedophilic frenzy" by banning Lolita, a new film version of Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 book, this censorship imposes the morals of the religious right on the rest of us.
The conservative emphasis on "family values" is part of a renewed push to drive women back into the traditional roles of wives and mothers, and away from having political (and sexual) confidence and power. Given the pervasive images of women who have made it big in business, the media and the entertainment industry, one might think that the all-American woman has it all.
However, the reality is that this image represents very few women. That such an outrageous piece of anti-woman legislation was passed in Alabama graphically illustrates that for many women, even in the most industrially advanced countries in the world, the battle for gender equality has still to be fought.
By Margaret Allum