It is 2012, and Rush Limbaugh is still defining a woman’s worth by her sexual purity.
Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University law student, testified before an unofficial hearing organized by House Democrats on Feb. 23. Fluke criticized Jesuit-affiliated Georgetown for not covering contraception in its health insurance.
It is important to mention, as the Huffington Post’s Jim Abrams points out, that the Republican-controlled House Oversight and Government Reform Committee had prevented Fluke from testifying at the official hearing on the Obama administration’s contraception-coverage policy.
This policy would require religious-affiliated institutions to offer their employees access to health insurance that covers birth control, much like the rest of the country’s employers.
The House committee had invited five religious leaders to testify against the policy, but allowed only one man, United Church of Christ minister Barry Lynn, to argue for it. Let me emphasize that the House Republicans allowed one man—man—to testify on behalf of women’s reproductive health. The Democrats on the committee attempted to point out that if only one person was going to be allowed to testify before them, shouldn’t that person be a woman? Fluke was still not allowed to speak.
After Fluke’s testimony, which occurred in front of about 10 people while most of the committee was at lunch, conservative bloggers immediately went on the attack. CNS News ran a headline reading, “Sex-crazed co-eds going broke buying birth control, student tells Pelosi hearing touting freebie mandate.”
I won’t even comment on how factually wrong that assessment is, seeing as how women who take contraceptives must take the same amount daily no matter how much sex they have (or don’t have). Sometimes I have to wonder if people who think otherwise are purposefully twisting everything they may have heard about contraception and presenting the opposite as fact.
On Feb. 29 Rush Limbaugh, king of the purposefully-misinformed, called Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” on his radio show for arguing that religious institutions should not force their views on their employees, especially when it comes to those employees’ health.
Even better, when Limbaugh started losing sponsors for his radio show after the remarks, he issued an online statement in which he apologized for his “choice of words.” The word-choice apology is one of the biggest cop-outs in today’s media, as a way of saying, “Sorry if those words offended you, but I still think what I thought before.” When the furor still did not stop, Limbaugh issued another apology insisting that he did not think that Sandra Fluke was “either of those two words” that he had used.
The radical right appears to be so petrified of women who have sex that they are doing everything they can to stop it. Whether it’s introducing “personhood” amendments that attempt to give a fertilized egg in a woman’s uterus the same rights as a human being (Mississippi), forcing women by law to have an ultrasound before an abortion procedure (Oklahoma) or trying to prevent women from purchasing contraceptives cheaply (everywhere), far-right conservatives seem to be doing everything in their power to keep women from having sex. Not to keep them from having unsafe sex, or irresponsible sex—just sex, period. Women apparently should not be having sex. Even married ones (believe it or not, sometimes married couples don’t want any more children, but would like to continue having sex as husband and wife).
By keeping contraceptives expensive, the far-right either thinks that only rich women should be having sex (or are they “job-creating” women?), or that no woman should have sex.
What the efforts of conservatives like Rush Limbaugh lead me to believe is that as a culture, we still must widely believe that women having sex is a bad thing. Otherwise, being called a “slut” would not be something to be enraged about.
Plenty of editorials came to Sandra Fluke’s defense after Limbaugh’s attack. This reinforces the fact that the word “slut”—in other words, a woman who has a lot of sex—is a hurtful word, an insult and something that is meant to offend the targeted woman. That said, Sandra Fluke has every right not to accept Rush Limbaugh’s so-called “apology,” due to his apparent ignorance about contraceptives and his public libel.
Taking back the word “slut” was the objective of last year’s “SlutWalks,” in which women across the English-speaking world marched to protest the use of “slut” as an insult. In general, these women were ridiculed or ignored, much like women were in the past. Taking back words traditionally used as insults have rarely been successful, and it is impossible to fully erase the historic meaning of most hurtful words.
We don’t need to “take back” the word “slut.” We need to get rid of it. We need to stop, in the days of space travel and particle physics and global connectivity, defining women’s worth by their sexual purity and publicly humiliating them for having sex. Equality can only be reached when we realize that each person has value whether they have a lot of sex or none at all.
Kelsey Allagood can be reached at kelsey.allagood@spartans.ut.edu.