Not Good Enough

Yesterday, Mitt Romney said, of Rush Limbaugh's despicable comments about Sandra Fluke, that they were "not the language I would have used." Today, Limbaugh himself issued an "apology," again for his choice of words. Meanwhile, the better part of the outrage I've been seeing about Limbaugh's comments themselves has been about his use of the word "slut." That's not the point. I'm not saying it wasn't offensive of him to use that word, because it was. What I am saying is that focusing on that particular word, on that quirk of language, means you miss the actual content of what Limbaugh said.

WARNING: The following post both refers to some extremely vile attitudes that were expressed by Rush Limbaugh recently, and gets quite heated in condemning them and the mindset they represent.



In the first place, he invented out of whole cloth the idea that Ms. Fluke was testifying about her personal sex life, except to mention that she uses contraceptives (which hardly narrows it down!). The substance of her testimony was that the cost of contraception, $1000 per year, can impose substantial hardship on students if not covered by insurance, and the anecdote she used was of a friend who needed birth control pills as medicine for a health problem. From that, Limbaugh invented the notion that somehow she had testified that she has, somehow, too much sex, such that it makes her own birth control unaffordable. From there he went on his deluded rant about how this makes her a slut, and how her desire to have her sex life paid for by the public* makes her also a prostitute.

Then, a little while later, he went further into the land of perverted right-wing fantasy (in several senses of the world). First he proposed that, while he objects to paying* for the sex lives of college students, he would be happy to pay these same students to not have sex. Aha!, one might say: there's the real point, that he objects to the whole concept of young women having sex. But even this is a smokescreen, as Limbaugh then revealed. Because he then said that, if these women want their birth control, and thus their sex lives, paid for* by the public, they should, in return, let the public watch.

There's the real issue. He doesn't object to women having sex. Not at all; he's all for it. Just so long as it's done in a way that lets Rush Limbaugh get off on it.

And this is the point of the entire right-wing crusade against sex and all things sexual. These men, and I am talking about men here because it's a factional male ideology, have a fervent objection to any sex that is not entirely about providing pleasure to these men. The very idea that women might want to have sex, and then might actually go ahead and have sex, simply because they themselves will enjoy it, offends them. It suggests that these women do not exist merely for the pleasure of these men. Meanwhile, the idea of two men having sex is just disgusting, so we can't allow that, obviously, and as for lesbianism, well, it's alright if it's just getting to watch hot actresses make out. But actually allowing two women to have a mutually fulfilling romantic relationship? God no, that almost sounds like empowerment. We can't have that.

(Oh, and they're not exactly fans of straight men who have a feminist relationship to sex; they're in the position of white abolitionists in this worldview, traitors to their sex who encourage the oppressees to think they are deserving of respect and equality.)

That's what's wrong with Rush Limbaugh's remarks about Sandra Fluke. They represent one of the boldest recent expressions of this mindset that women exist to be the sex toys of men. This would be no less offensive if he had left out the words "slut" and "prostitute." Those words are a distraction. His apology for those words is insufficient and irrelevant in the extreme. Mitt Romney's refusal to condemn anything beyond those two specific words, and that only mildly, without really suggesting that Limbaugh himself was particularly in the wrong to use them, demonstrates his utter lack of anything resembling moral courage. The same goes for the entire rest of the Republican Party. Well, that's not quite true: one part of the Republican Party has just demonstrated that it lacks any semblance of moral courage, but the other part, the part Limbaugh belongs to and speaks for, has showed us how truly sick it is, how fully it believes in the oppression of women.

Over the past few weeks, as first the Komen controversy and now this whole insurance-mandate controversy have erupted, I've increasingly noticed myself having thoughts along the lines of, "the Democrats really need to make sure Olympia Snowe's retirement doesn't contract the ranks of women in the Senate." It wasn't a connection I made consciously, but I think this whole thing has just been gradually illustrating to me exactly how unacceptable it is that our country is largely run by men who believe the country should be run by men. It's really unacceptable. It needs to change, and it needs to change soon. If there's a viable progressive woman running in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary (where by "viable" I also mean electable), we should nominate her. Whenever there's an open Senate seat or Congressional district that looks like a likely Democratic hold, we should try pretty hard to nominate a woman. We should try really hard to nominate and elect women to minor/local positions, so that we'll be in an even better position to nominate strong female candidates in another few cycles. There should be 51 female Senators on average. That there have never been more than 17 is a disgrace. It needs to change, it needs to change now, and the Democratic Party needs to take the lead on making it change.



*I didn't want to keep saying this in the body of the post, but Limbaugh did keep talking about how he'd be asked to pay for the birth control of these young women. This is just completely false. Nobody's discussing any sort of government subsidy here, just a requirement that employer-provided health insurance cover contraception. If you want to put things this way, you could say that in an insurance scheme, everyone puts dollars into the pot, the pot is then stirred up and homogenized, and then when the pot pays out coverage it's doing so using the dollars of everyone who paid in the first place. And in a sense that's true, descriptively, and insurance schemes definitely do redistribute money from those who don't need the insurance to those who do; in the case of health insurance, from the healthy to the sick. But I don't really feel like, when you pay an insurance premium, it's particularly standard to view yourself as paying a little tiny bit of the health care of everyone else on your same plan, or that your company covers altogether. Rather, you're buying a service from that company. Those dollars then belong to the company, which uses some of them to provide the services that you and others have purchased and some of them lining their own pockets (as is their capitalistic right).

In any event, I'm pretty sure Rush Limbaugh is not on the same health insurance plan as Georgetown Law School students. So nobody's asking him to pay for Sandra Fluke's birth control, or anyone else's for that matter. Yet another bit of his view of this issue that's purely a product of his twisted mind.