Can somebody please, please tell me why an unmarried woman’s sex life is still in 2010 the prerogative of upstanding, “moral” male Republican politicians? Politicians like Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina who recently opined that gays and sexually active single women were unfit to teach in America’s classrooms. Actually, his remarks were way more inflammatory: according to the Spartanburg Herald Journal, Senator DeMint said at a church rally that if someone is openly homosexual, they shouldn’t be teaching in the classroom and he holds the same position on an unmarried woman who’s sleeping with her boyfriend – she shouldn’t be in the classroom.

Oh boy.

Paging Dr Sigmund Freud.

Is it just me or does this guy remind anyone else of an eight-year-old who still believes he can catch cooties willy-nilly from the slightest human interaction? I mean, really. Where to begin? Gays out of the closet shouldn’t teach? So what would the good senator have them do? Is there a list of occupations befitting the gay community, of which, in case he’s forgotten, members of his beloved Republican Party are openly and not so openly a part of?

But equally offensive is the idea that a single woman engaged in a healthy sex life on her own time should somehow be disallowed from teaching? Seriously, what’s next? A call for female circumcision for unmarried women over a certain age? Since we’re making ridiculous statements here. I mean, seriously, what kind of pre-feminist, Stone Age time warp is this man caught in? Can somebody inform Senator DeMint that teachers’ sex lives – as long as they don’t impinge on the well-being of their students – are nobody else’s business but their own. I’m sure if some cosmic glitch occurred right now and we were suddenly all privy to the private lives of the people who taught us (let’s not even get started on those who preached to us), we’d all be shocked to discover the awful truth about what these people did on their weekends and days off. OMG! Imagine if Senator DeMint were to discover that the math teacher he worshipped in grade school who perhaps wore glasses and her hair in a bun and patiently taught him his times tables, prayed to Satan and, in the privacy of her bedroom at night, smacked men around with a tasselled whip and instructed them to address her as Mistress Vampirella.

Well, you get my point.

Is the senator saying in some roundabout way that single women who are sexually active are such whores they can’t be trusted to be around minors without wanting to get it on? Yes, there are people like that. But there’s a name for them: PAE-DO-PHILES. And, excuse me, lest people like Senator DeMint don’t understand, paedophiles come in all shapes and sizes – male and female, unmarried and, well, married. Hello, remember Mary Kay Letourneau, the married American schoolteacher who caused a scandal when it was revealed in 1997 that she’d been having an affair with her 12-year-old student, to whom, by the way, she’s today married with children?

The blatant sexism is, frankly, what annoys me. Forget the bigotry; we always knew the gays would be in for an uphill battle – don’t ask, don’t tell, and all that. But wasn’t sexism on its way out the front door? With everything that has transpired in the United States over the past couple of years, really, a Republican senator is seriously going to insult women? A woman, albeit a married one, almost became president, for God’s sake. What about unmarried men who sleep with their girlfriends? The senator didn’t single them out. Do they belong in the classroom?

I’m so sick and tired of the fiction perpetuated by the moral police that single women – aka sluts – are the embodiment of society’s turpitude, and that marriage, somehow, is the answer to the problem. I know that what the senator is implying about single women, a subset within which I happen to fall, goes well beyond patriarchal pathology. It’s so beyond it, I can’t even discuss it. Still, I believe his utterances about single women, who, let me just say, are not all like the Kardashians, present an opportunity for “religious” societies like ours to engage in meaningful discourse about how single women are truly perceived. It’s not just American right-wing politicians who feel threatened by single women. Especially those of a certain age.

But it’s time for the myth about Happily Ever After to be exposed. Tell the largely untold story about what happens after the honeymoon. Thankfully, there are increasingly more and more people who think the way I do. Take the good people at truewifeconfessionsblogspot.com, a website committed to providing a forum for airing what, as they put it, “your wife wishes she could tell you… or not”. It’s one of those newly emerging sites for disgruntled, disillusioned married women to disclose their pain anonymously:

Check out Confession No 3154 from the site:

… Have you hugged me? No. Have you asked how I really am? Not really. It hurts. Really damn hurts. It’s soul-destroying and embarrassing. And you don’t seem to care… Which is why I’ve ended up in an affair. Wasn’t planned – keep trying to end it. Not even sure how he feels about me, which is even more isolating at times. But he makes me feel alive – and he wants me. Really wants me and shows me affection that you haven’t for years. It’s a recipe for disaster, I know it is. But I need to feel something other than desperate loneliness.

Confession No 263: “I rarely ever orgasm with you. I’ve faked it 99 per cent of the time.” And this one: “If you get into bed and want to have sex one more time without gargling [I’m] going to puke. “On a similar site called Confessions of a Wayward Wife, one woman says:

… even the way he moves in bed makes me want to stab myself in the eye with a fork.

Uh-oh.

The entries go depressingly on and on. Obviously not all married women are desperately unhappy. But one can infer that the increase of these websites seems to indicate that many of them are. Instead of expending energy worrying about the sex lives of single women, perhaps the senator and those who think like him might want to make sure that none of their wives are the sad anonymous ‘confessors’ on websites like these.