I only object to people who try to promote it as some kind of Holy Grail/cure-all for *everybody.*

I think there’s another side to that coin; people, corporations etc. who promote SEX! as some kind of Holy Grail/cure-all for everybody.

They also are fans of the shotgun wedding. Like you said, the fact that marriage ages are going up is a point of great consternation for wingnuts, because that means that women are entering marriage with much more power over what happens than before. New wives now are much more likely to have their own money, a more formed personality, and self esteem that prevents the men from ruling the marriage with an iron fist. The hope is that by returning the country to a widespread get-pregnant-and-married-at-17 status, women will exit the workforce and largely be a lot more compliant, submissive, and broken than we are now.

Yep, I have absolutely no issues with anyone who wants to practice abstinence for whatever reasons seem best to them either–I only object to people who try to promote it as some kind of Holy Grail/cure-all for *everybody.*

Unhampered by propriety, niceness, discretion, public opinion, ‘morals’, the respect of assholes, always funky, dirty, low-down SCUM gets around… and around and around… they’ve seen the whole show — every bit of it — the fucking scene, the dyke scene — they’ve covered the whole waterfront, been under every dock and pier — the peter pier, the pussy pier… you’ve got to go through a lot of sex to get to anti-sex, and SCUM’s been through it all, and they’re now ready for a new show; they want to crawl out from other the dock, move, take off, sink out. But SCUM doesn’t yet prevail; SCUM’s still in the gutter of our ’society’, which, if it’s not deflected from its present course and if the Bomb doesn’t drop on it, will hump itself to death.

I’ve seen the same sentiment come up in other feminist places - someone called Hecate brought it up on this FSF thread a while ago (can’t link to individual comments there any more, aargh). So the idea’s still out there, and I’ve no problem with women who see abstinence as their feminist option…it just ain’t mine, and I’ll tell them that if they try to tell me it is.

It sometimes happens on the fringes of feminism, notably in the SCUM Manifesto:

Sex is not part of a relationship: on the contrary, it is a solitary experience, non-creative, a gross waste of time. The female can easily — far more easily than she may think — condition away her sex drive, leaving her completely cool and cerebral and free to pursue truly worthy relationships and activities; but the male, who seems to dig women sexually and who seeks out constantly to arouse them, stimulates the highly sexed female to frenzies of lust, throwing her into a sex bag from which few women ever escape.

Apart from that, all you seem to see is what you describe - people who pretend to be secular but aren’t really. :/