The “Sluts Of America” Are Fighting Back
I am a slut.
Before this week, I didn’t know I was a slut. But Rush Limbaugh set me straight:
What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute.
Sandra Fluke is the Georgetown law student who testified about the necessity of providing insurance coverage for birth control. She spoke about her friend who suffers from polycystic ovarian syndrome, which was being treated with birth control pills, until she could no longer afford to shell out $100 a month for her treatment.
Ms. Fluke did not talk about her own sexual activity. She did not claim that she was having so much sex that she could not afford the cost of contraception. She did not demand that she be paid for having sex.
But no matter—according to Rush, Ms. Fluke is a slut. I don’t know what dictionary Rush is using, so let’s see if we can suss out what exactly he thinks makes Ms. Fluke a slut:
- Maybe it’s because she can use the word “contraception” without blushing. So can I. Guess that makes me a slut.
- Maybe it’s because she cares about women having affordable access to necessary medical care. So do I. Guess that makes me a slut.
- Maybe it’s just because she’s a woman. So am I. Guess that makes me a slut.
And you know what? If you can talk about contraception, care about women’s health, or have the audacity to possess a vagina, you’re a slut too.
When he was called out for his obscene attack on Ms. Fluke, Rush didn’t back down; he doubled down:
It was Sandra Fluke who said that she was having so much sex she can’t afford it. […] She’s spending $3000, $1000 a year, on pills and she’s going broke and wants us to buy it. […] By her own admission, in her own words, Sandra Fluke is having so much sex that she can’t afford it. […] Does she have more boyfriends? They’re lined up around the block. Or they would have been in my day.
Ms. Fluke said none of those things, but you know the Republican rule: When you’re losing an argument, just make shit up and hope no one notices. This afternoon, Rush issued an “apology,” in which he basically said he was sorry if any sluts were offended by being called sluts, but if they weren’t such sluts, he wouldn’t have to call them sluts. Some apology, eh?
Of course, people did notice. Like Republican Rep. Darrell “Vaginas violate my religious liberty” Issa in Congress:
Democrats are largely to blame for the name-calling and personal insults of the contraception debate, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) charged Friday. […]
“While your letter raises important concerns about these inappropriate comments and the tone of the current debate over religious freedom and Obamacare, I am struck by your clear failure to recognize your own contributions to the denigration of this discussion and attacks on people of religious faith,” Issa said in response to Cummings.
You see, if those damn sluts hadn’t objected to Issa’s No Girls Allowed hearingabout how birth control makes Catholic bishops sad, Rush Limbaugh wouldn’t have had to attack those sluts for being sluts. See? It’s all their fault. You might even say they were asking for it.
Bill O’Reilly, who once had to pay millions of dollars to settle a sexual harassment claim, so you know he’s highly educated about what makes a woman a slut—refusing to have sex with Bill O’Reilly and his falafel—also joined Rush Limbaugh in his slut crusade:
“Let me get this straight, Ms. Fluke, and I’m asking this with all due respect,” he said. “You want me to give you my hard-earned money so you can have sex?” (Fluke is actually calling for her university’s private insurance plan to cover birth control.)O’Reilly went on, saying that, since Fluke wanted society to cover her “activities,” the government should also have subsidized his college football uniforms, since an injury might “cost society a lot.” He also said that perhaps taxpayers should pay for gym memberships for men so they could stay physically fit.
But a funny thing happened on the way back to the 17th century. Women Sluts took notice too. Known slut and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called Limbaugh’s attack “obnoxious.” The sluts at the Washington Post wrotein an editorial, “This is not the way a decent citizen behaves.”
Even President Obama, the slut-in-chief himself, called Ms. Fluke to offer his support:
“He encouraged me and supported me and thanked me for speaking out about the concerns of American women,” Fluke said. “What was really personal to me was he said to tell my parents that should be proud, and that meant a lot because Rush Limbaugh questioned whether or not my family would be proud of me, so I just appreciated that very much.”
The sluts of America are fighting back, and they’re hitting Rush right where it hurts: his corporate sponsors. Sleep Train, Select Comfort/Sleep Number, Quicken Loans, Cleveland Cavaliers, Citrix and LegalZoom have all pulled their support from Rush’s show. [Late today, the CEO of Carbonite announced that despite Rush’s “apology,” Carbonite is pulling its supporttoo.]
So, sluts, you know what to do: Click here to send an email to Rush’s other corporate sponsors, demanding that they stop supporting him and his slut crusade.
And then click here to tell Bill O’Reilly’s sponsors to drop him like a hot falafel.
By: Kaili Gray, Daily Kos, March 3, 2012
“Non-Apology” Apology: Limbaugh Sorry For Attack On Student In Birth Control Furor
In an about-face, the conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh said Saturday that he was sorry for denouncing as a “prostitute” a Georgetown University law student who had spoken publicly in favor of the Obama administration’s birth control policy.
On Saturday, a day after President Obama telephoned the student, Sandra Fluke, to say he stood by her in the face of personal attacks on right-wing radio, Mr. Limbaugh published the apology on his Web site.
“For over 20 years, I have illustrated the absurd with absurdity, three hours a day, five days a week. In this instance, I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke,” Mr. Limbaugh wrote. He then reiterated his opposition to the Obama administration policy, which requires health insurance plans to cover contraceptives for women.
On the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday editions of his talk show, Mr. Limbaugh attacked Ms. Fluke as sexually promiscuous and politically motivated — “an anti-Catholic plant,” he said at one point.
On Wednesday, he called her a “slut” who “wants to be paid to have sex”; on Thursday, he said she was “having so much sex, it’s amazing she can still walk”; and on Friday, after Senate Democrats beat back a Republican challenge to the new policy, he said Ms. Fluke had testified that she was “having sex so frequently that she can’t afford all the birth-control pills that she needs.”
In television interviews, Ms. Fluke said she was stunned and outraged by Mr. Limbaugh’s comments.
In his call on Friday, Mr. Obama thanked Ms. Fluke for publicly backing his regulations mandating contraception coverage.
Mr. Limbaugh’s comments added fuel to a rancorous dispute on Capitol Hill over whether employers should have to provide insurance coverage for contraception. Democrats have said Republican opposition to such coverage amounts to a “war on women.”
Some Republicans also criticized Mr. Limbaugh, including the House speaker, John A. Boehner, who called his comments “inappropriate.”
As the issue gained national attention, liberal activists and other longtime critics of Mr. Limbaugh started to contact his advertisers and ask them to withdraw their ads from his show. By Saturday, six advertisers, including Quicken Loans, said they had done so.
Mr. Limbaugh did not directly address the advertiser pressure in his statement Saturday, but he said, “My choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices.”
After the statement was published online on Saturday, the company that distributes “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” Premiere Radio Networks, also sent it to reporters in an e-mail. Premiere, a unit of Clear Channel, declined to comment.
It was immediately dismissed as a nonapology by some of the groups that have mobilized against Mr. Limbaugh. “I think this attempt at damage control labeled as an apology actually makes things worse,” stated a Twitter account called “Stop Rush,” which wants people to pressure to companies to stop advertising on “The Rush Limbaugh Show.”
The account then added, “You know what Rush’s so-called apology means? Your efforts at delivering real accountability are working! Keep at it! Onward!”
Think Progress, a blog run by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, noted in a post that “Limbaugh often sparks controversy, but it is exceedingly rare for him to apologize.” Lawrence O’Donnell, the MSNBC anchor, was blunt in his interpretation: “Lawyers wrote that apology,” he stated on Twitter.
Reached by telephone, Kit Carson, the chief of staff for Mr. Limbaugh, declined to comment on why the statement was issued. Mr. Carson added, if Mr. Limbaugh has more to say, he would likely do so on his radio show on Monday.
At least one conservative commentator, Dana Loesch, appeared to back Mr. Limbaugh’s original sentiments, writing on Twitter on Saturday, “If you expect me to pay higher insurance premiums to cover your ‘free’ birth control, I can call you whatever I want.”
Despite Mr. Limbaugh’s statement, one company that was planning to pull its ads, Carbonite, said it would still do so. On Facebook on Saturday evening, the company’s chief executive, David Friend, wrote, “We hope that our action, along with the other advertisers who have already withdrawn their ads, will ultimately contribute to a more civilized public discourse.”
By: Brian Stelter, The New York Times,The Caucus, March 3, 2012
“It’s Not Entertainment”: Rush Limbaugh Owes Democracy an Apology
Syndicated talk radio host Rush Limbaugh got so upset over the able articulation of an opposing view by Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University Law School student who testified before members of Congress in order to highlight concerns about limits on access to contraception, that he attacked her as a “slut” and a “prostitute.”
This was no slip of the conservative commentator’s tongue. This was an elite media personality with a national media platform seeking to silence a citizen.
When concerns were raised about his vile language, Limbaugh doubled down and restated his attacks on Fluke.
The attacks were so over the top that Georgetown students, national groups and President Obama rallied to Fluke’s defense.
Fluke has ably defended herself in interviews on national news programs. She’s a strong young woman who has proven herself more than equal to the task of responding to a shocking assault on her as an individual—and on her right to speak as an American citizen.
It is the second assault that should concern everyone—no matter what their partisanship, no matter what their ideological bent.
While Limbaugh certainly owes Fluke an apology, the fact is that the radio host owes a broader apology.
Limbaugh attacked fluke for speaking up before Congress on an issue of national concern.
Fluke stepped into the limelight not as an entertainer or a political player. She did not seek fame or fortune. She spoke up as a citizen.
And that’s what is so unsettling about Limbaugh’s crude language and cruder stance as this controversial incident has exploded.
Prominent political players and media personalities can get pretty rough with one another. No one is objecting to the give and take that characterizes electioneering and governing. This is not about constraining the discourse, nor even about promoting civility.
What is at stake here is something that does far deeper, and matters far more.
When political and media figures with national prominence use their positions to attack individual citizens who dare to speak up about controversial concerns, they do not just attack the citizens.
They attack the basic premises of a representative democracy in which citizens do not just have a right to freedom of speech. If the American experiment is to work, citizens have a responsibility to speak truth to power. It is not easy to do that. But it is necessary if we are to keep alive the founding principle, as articulated by Thomas Jefferson: “Whenever our affairs go obviously wrong, the good sense of the people will interpose and set them to rights.”
At a point when political players, most of them men, were going obviously wrong with regard to policies affecting women, Sandra Fluke spoke up.
She performed a necessary duty of citizenship.
Citizens need to challenge their political leaders—and the media echo chamber that amplifies the self-serving messages of those leaders. We have enough of a problem in this country with the media’s casual dismissal of the voices of the poor, of working people, of people of color, of trade unionists, of rural Americans and of the young. When the dismissals turn aggressive and unforgiving, as was the case with Limbaugh’s attack of Fluke, the promise of citizenship is assaulted.
And when elitists so powerful as Rush Limbaugh seeks to silence citizens so sincere and appropriately engaged as Sandra Fluke, with personal attacks, crude language and constant criticism, those elitists attack democracy itself.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, March 2, 2011
“Not Gonna Take It Anymore”: Hold This Between Your Knees, Rush Limbaugh
I thought I’d lost my capacity to be disgusted by Rush Limbaugh. He lives for that; why give him the satisfaction? But he crossed into new territory with his attacks on Sandra Fluke, who used to be a private citizen working toward a Georgetown University law degree, until the Catholic bishops meddled in American politics and in her personal life, and she decided to tell her story.
Fluke tried to testify on behalf of President Obama’s contraception coverage requirements at Rep. Darrell Issa’s Inquisition; excuse me, his hearing on the regulations, which featured an all-male panel to lead off. But she was denied permission, on the grounds that Issa was interested in threats to religious liberty, not women’s lives. That was bad enough. After the GOP congressman shut her down, she told her story to House Democrats as well as journalists. Limbaugh called her a “slut” and a “prostitute,” and promised to buy Fluke and Georgetown women “as much aspirin to put between their knees as they want. We are paying her for having sex. We are getting screwed. So Ms. Fluke and the rest of you feminazis, here’s the deal: If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it, and I’ll tell you what it is: We want you to post the videos online, so we can all watch.”
I’m not making this up. I’ve been attacked by Limbaugh before; it’s an honor for liberals. But his remarks about Fluke are unbelievable. Literally. I had to hear it twice to believe it’s what he said. (After I wrote this, President Obama called Fluke to commend her courage and tell her that her parents should be proud of her.)
Limbaugh’s behavior is just the far-right edge on a continuum of conservative misogyny that’s gone beyond trying to outlaw abortion, moved into the once-unimaginable realm of contraception, and mocks women in a way we haven’t heard since my childhood, I think. His “joke” is based on the remark by Rick Santorum’s moneyman Foster Freiss, on the same day as Issa’s “hearing,” recalling the days when gals didn’t need birth control because they put aspirin between their knees. But it’s not just for fun: The entire GOP presidential field has endorsed a “personhood” amendment that could outlaw most non-barrier forms of contraception. On Thursday, Sen. Roy Blunt’s shameful attempt to give employers the right to deny health insurance coverage for any treatment they didn’t approve of – targeting but not limited to contraception – was tabled in the Senate, but not before it got 48 votes, including every Republican except the departing Olympia Snowe, plus three cowardly Democrats, Nebraska’s Ben Nelson, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey.
I’m happy to say, though, that women – and the men who care about them – are fighting back as never before in my memory. We forced Susan G. Komen to rescind its decision to cut funding to Planned Parenthood. Despite the frothing of conservatives, the Obama administration is still requiring insurers to provide cost-free contraception. The president’s courage on the issue is bringing women back into the Democratic fold, according to recent opinion polls – and has them running away from Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum.
But we have to do more. I’m putting my energy into two causes in the coming months: a grass-roots effort to turn out the women’s vote called #usethe19th – you’ve seen a lot of it on Twitter today – and helping to promote Salon Core. Salon has led the way in covering news about women, by women, since our founding in 1995. We stand out in a world where men’s voices are still dominant – after the discouraging news this week that the nation’s best magazines still overwhelmingly feature men on their table of contents page, ThinkProgress produced a list of 10 women writers they should hire – and two of them, Tracy Clark-Flory and Irin Carmon, work for Salon (and several of the others freelance for us).
Over the years we’ve featured an unmatched array of smart women; Arianna Huffington, Tina Brown, Anne Lamott and Camille Paglia as leading columnists; on the culture side, Laura Miller and my former colleagues Heather Havrilesky and Stephanie Zacharek, some of the smartest writers anywhere; Rebecca Traister is one of the bravest, clearest writers on feminism and American politics that I know. And Mary Elizabeth Williams is one of my favorite writers on everything she writes about. I couldn’t have done the work I do with total freedom and support any place other than Salon.
The only good thing about this assault on women’s rights is that the women writers I know are becoming even more active than ever before. A whole lot of people have jumped into the #usethe19th fray – join us! We need to elect better leaders. We need to tell our stories. And we need to put our money where our mouths are – behind media outlets that tell those stories, as well as politicians who listen.
Over the years Salon has often turned to its readers for support, and this year we’re developing a new membership program to support our work – and support yours, too. I’ll be out on the road during this election season covering the candidates but also meeting Salon Core readers at a new roster of events we’re putting together for our members. When my book comes out in November, we’ll have a special offer for Core. We’ll be hosting members-only chats and other political convenings through November.
Republicans like to say this is the most important election year of their lifetimes. I agree. Make noise. Lobby. Campaign. Run for office. Raise money. Write. Vote. Join Salon Core – support those who support you. And piss off that angry old misogynist, Rush Limbaugh.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, March 2, 2012
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