Marie Stopes was a leading British campaigner for family planning, and Marie Stopes clinics are a major provider of family planning services in the UK. Like many early advocates of family planning, Stopes held some appalling eugenicist views, even disowning her son for marrying a near-sighted woman and breeding inferior stock. That’s well-known. What’s less well-known is her view on the ingestion of semen. Crucial for a woman’s sexual health apparently. A woman who doesn’t get enough semen into her body from her male partner is at risk– her sex drive will run wild, and she may even turn to the vices of lesbianism or masturbation.
Can anything be done? Of course, self-stimulus, or masturbation, is extremely common… Masturbation is always unsatisfactory… Another practical solution which some deprived women find is in Lesbian love with their own sex…
But these will never satisfy:
…homosexual excitement does not really meet their need for the physiological fact (I have never yet seen it clearly stated anywhere, but it is of the greatest importance in a consideration of this problem) is that… a woman’s need and hunger for nourishment in sex union is a true physiological hunger to be satisfied by the supplying of the actual molecular substances lacked by her system… the chemical molecules produced by the glandular systems of the male.
Fortunately:
It has been found possible to prepare some at least of the very molecular compounds really nourishing to the woman’s system, and which she lacks and requires.
That’s right ladies– artificial semen for you, in capsule form! And she even gives a recipe (though sadly it’s not made from ordinary household ingredients).
(Many thanks Stella, for passing on this wisdom! Quotes are from Enduring Passion, 29-32.)
Feminist Philosophers 