Bernie Sanders' women 'rape fantasy' essay, naked children comments resurface ahead of Super Tuesday
Senator Bernie Sanders' past writings about women's rape fantasies and child sexuality are coming under increased scrutiny again as he and Democratic candidates vie for the 2020 presidential nomination.
The Vermont senator is an Independent and self-avowed Democratic Socialist who caucuses with Democrats and is the current frontrunner for the party's nomination.
In 1972, Sanders wrote an essay titled "Man — and Woman" in the alternative newspaper Vermont Freeman in which he said that when a woman is having sex with a man she "fantasizes being raped by three men simultaneously," The Washington Free Beacon noted.
Sanders also wrote, quoting various studies, that cancer could be caused by psychological factors including unresolved anger toward one’s mother, where hostility is buried behind a “facade of pleasantness” and not having many orgasms.
“Sexual adjustment seemed to be very poor in those with cancer of the cervix,” he wrote, citing research published in a journal called Psychosomatic Medicine.
That essay resurfaced in a 2015 Mother Jones profile as he was seeking the 2016 presidential nomination.
Sanders also claimed that not having sex would lead to breast cancer.
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"The manner in which you bring up your daughter with regard to sexual attitudes may very well determine whether or not she will develop breast cancer, among other things," Sanders wrote in an essay headlined "Cancer, Disease and Society" in 1969, ABC News reported, noting that Sanders' beliefs about the lack of sex causing cancers in women "continued well into the 1980s."
Commenting on the Sanders' writings, Tim O'Brien, an adviser to former New York City mayor and Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, called the Vermont senator "loopy" and "loony."
"Bernie has all of this loopy stuff in his background, saying things like women get cancer from having too [few] orgasms, or toddlers should run around naked and touch each other's genitals to insulate themselves from porn," the Bloomberg adviser said in a CNN interview this week.
"Why has this stuff not been more surfaced? He's written about women's rape fantasies. That hasn't been surfaced. That's the loony side of Bernie."
O'Brien's reference to toddlers refers to an essay Sanders wrote in 1969 in which he criticized the state of Vermont for reprimanding a mother who permitted her child to run around naked at the beach.
"Now, if children go around naked, they are liable to see each others sexual organs, and maybe even touch them," Sanders wrote.
"Terrible thing! If we [raise] children up like this it will probably ruin the whole pornography business, not to mention the large segment of the general economy which makes its money by playing on peoples sexual frustrations."
The South Carolina primary on Saturday is expected to be a pivotal point in the race. Fourteen states will hold their primaries on Tuesday. The Democratic Convention is scheduled for mid-July in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
