That's right, unavoidable. In one way or another, we've been trying to avoid it for centuries.

A long time ago, that is, just before the beginning of recorded history, there were actually equal rights for both sexes--nobody saw a reason for it to be otherwise, you see. Rather like the Garden of Eden; the Innocent Age. But then men, after all that time goddess-worshipping and whatnot, got scared of the power that women held over them--yes, by making them horny.

Along came St. Augustine, and decided that sexual feelings were unnatural (they were one of the punishments God gave us after that Garden fiasco, he said). He condemned women as instruments of the devil, and the entire Holy Mother Church quickly followed suit. Hey, we all know about this long period in history: All over the place, women were treated like shit, often worse than slaves. In fact, historians have often suggested that Augustine's revolutionary idea of subjugating women might have led to the thinking that produced the slave trade, a few centuries later.

The women's lib movement began for real with one of the best Queens of England, Eleanor of Aquitaine. She refused to feel ashamed of her beauty or feminity--especially her breasts--no matter what the (male) priests of (male) God said to her. Among other things, she is said to have ridden topless through the city of Jerusalem as a message to the oppressive male Church. Unfortunately, her husband was the jealous type and eventually put her under house arrest (not in *his* house, either), forbidding her to take part in the movement she'd begun.

Everybody groan, because here come the feminists we know today. Somebody managed to convince these blighted creatures that not only should they be ashamed of their femininity, they should fight it, because they were obviously being used for it. The new radical/Marxist feminists, interestingly enough, seem to propogate and espouse the old anal patriarchic rules of the Augistinian regime: Repression, mistrust of science and research (which was "satanic" to Augustine, and is "male" to the feminists), and a bad opinion of sex. The actual matrist societies were all into sex, worshipful rather than mistrustful or resentful of the female...um, endowments, and all-in-all, pretty nice guys.

Now, today. At this point, the mass concensus is still that sexual feelings are somehow sinful; we still have quite a glut of Augustine-worshippers in the world, and Holy Mother Fucker hasn't gone away. However, the one group of people in this world who don't have to obey any moral laws are those in search of money, which has solidly beaten morality in the minds of most Americans. Thus, advertisers of every walk throw sex around like dog bones to drug dogs, and we all follow--of course; we're so desperate for "OK" sex half the time that we'll suck up a babe in a bikini on a beer commercial like its free candy from the gods.

Except that god, or the gods, gave us real sex to play with, in the beginning, and we threw it away. Because it scared us. Because it pissed us off. Because it forcibly made everyone equal, irrevokably so. That, true believers, is the undeniable power of sex.

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