House of Eratosthenes

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.

My remarks at The Hello Kitty of Blogging stand. Yeah, Rush has to think about sponsors and I don’t, but I don’t care. There is rich irony in the idea that, when a narrative has developed that you are anti-woman because you noted something remarkable, demeaning and accurate about a particular woman, you can somehow bail your ass out of the trouble by insulting all women.

Waitaminnit. Sandra Fluke went up before Congress and made it known — publicly — that with all the sex she was having with guys who couldn’t be bothered to pick up boxes of rubbers, she needed daddy government to open the billfold and make her whole again. An apology is owed if someone points out this is unusual/unexpected behavior for a woman? And Rush…the apology is given?

How insulting to women everywhere. You know, they’re called “the fairer sex” for a reason. Showing a little bit of discretion is what being a lady is all about. Ms. Fluke can’t be bothered to…and it has become culturally impermissible to notice anything is different about her now, like all women are like this?

Sandra Fluke and Nancy Pelosi created the situation. Other women did not. What is Ms. Fluke is she isn’t a slut? The original comment stands; if she went up before our nation’s legislative body and said, I need taxpayers to buy my birth control because I can’t be bothered to…what do we call that? My fiance wasn’t up there doing that. My dead mother wasn’t up there doing that. If one woman is doing that and then we aren’t allowed to notice anything different about her, that’s like saying they’re all like this.

I’m trying to think what could be a worse statement to make against all sexually mature women. Can’t think of anything. What an insult. What a disgrace.

The rules are not surprising to anyone. Because this is The Blog That Nobody Reads, which is very much different from a radio show with twenty+something million listeners, we were able to call it — and we did — nearly six years ago.

Thing I Know #58. To insult a man says nothing about other men, but for some reason, anything said against one woman is perceived to be said against everything female who ever lived.

For reasons no one can coherently explain, but that everyone understands from the elementary school playground onward, there is pressure on women to all be the same. And there is pressure on the rest of us, to think of them as all the same. No one woman can be slutty or stupid, or else the person who points out that she is, is imagined to have intoned that all women living or dead are exactly the same way, even though he said no such thing. That is what is happening here; that is exactly what is happening here.

No, sorry, not buying it. Sandra Fluke is a whore and a slut — because if she isn’t one, then that must mean that all women are expected to do what she did, or have the potential to do what she did…which makes them all whores and sluts. Well, that’s not a real woman. Sorry, it just isn’t. When you go up on Capitol Hill and say, I can’t afford all these contraceptives I’m burning through and the government has to help me with it, you’ve created a situation that defines something unusual and remarkable about you…even if you’re a woman. To say otherwise is to say something against women that is, really, more demeaning than…um…well, I can’t think of anything worse. I really can’t.

Just call a whore a whore and leave it as it is. We really don’t have any choice. Pelosi and Fluke chose to create this spectacle, the rest of us didn’t choose it…and here we are.

Update: Okay, I’m really pissed off, and when I’m pissed off sometimes I use my Hello Kitty account to “filter” my comments, put them up there, see how they look…partly because, Hello Kitty has become something of an “antenna” by which I try to find out how the rest of the world thinks — that part of the world that doesn’t see things the way I do. Not sure if this is a bad habit or not. I’m using a litmus test of “Would the alternative be a better choice?” And the answer for the time being is no, we all need to be making an effort to figure out what motivates the “others” out there, to try to understand, to learn from them when it’s possible…try to grow.

That having been said though, some of these sensibilities we form are derivative of “hard” sciences. I like to use Orwell’s example of two-and-two-make-four to illustrate this. Some things can’t be negotiated just because the majority, or the authority, wants a different answer.

And once again, the media, and the people to whom the media reports, are all doing a rather shitty job of defining the real issue. It’s somehow left to me to explain it.

It’s funny how things look entirely different when you remove tangential elements from a story — things that should be irrelevant anyway, but seem to be more important because they arouse an emotional response. In the case of Rush Limbaugh having to apologize to Sandra Fluke, those tangential, irrelevant things would be: Fluke is a woman, and women have sex.

Imagine Sandra Fluke is a dude. He goes up before Congress to say, I need taxpayers to pay for my headache medication, and occasional perforations of my skull to relieve the pressure of bleeding on the brain, because I like to hit my own head with a hammer. I do it a lot, In fact, I think I’ll do it right now…whee! ++Wham++.

Famous radio personality goes on the air and says, what a fucking idiot.

He’s subsequently forced to apologize.

You can see more clearly from this hypothetical that there are some important issues that aren’t entirely clear in the Sandra Fluke mess. We are individuals; individuals make choices and some of these choices are bad ones. To be a strong society, we need the individuals who make bad choices, to watch and learn from the other individuals who do not make the same bad choices — not the other way around.

Image Credit: The Peoples Cube.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

I think the “sensibility” of it all are the terms themselves. Whore and Slut.

“Idiot” is not so insulting. We all call ourselves idiots from time to time. But slut?
What is the definition? As far as Rush knows Fluke could be having sex 3 times a day with her longterm live in boyfriend.
Would that make her a slut?

She deserves the apology because of the word choice. Rush likes to throw insults around. He could have gotten his point across by just pointing out the 3 times a day (because it’s ridiculous) and called her an active woman or something along those lines.
The whore bit comes because she wants others to pay for her activities, but again. The term isn’t correct and it’s ultra insulting.
By using deliberately crass terms Rush shot himself in the foot and has allowed the left to run away with the narrative that conservatives don’t care about women’s health because they think of women who have sex as sluts. And who cares about sluts.
- tgoon | 03/04/2012 @ 08:09
It doesn’t pass the laugh test — what if Rush just laughed at the righteous indignation, and walked away, so there’s nothing for the critics to do but huff & puff some more.

In all likelihood, Quicken Loans and Sleep Train would not have come back. Okay, so he gave the apology, now are they coming back? Is the outcome altered in any way?

This is not a knee-jerk defense of a fellow conservative. I thought the same thing about Imus. Thought the same thing about Howard Stern. It’s a rather disgraceful thing about radio; your complaint is reduced to, the actual terms deployed were gratuitously and needlessly exaggerated — which is the job. In service of the job, they throw these terms out there, see how it plays out, and then “The Big ‘They'” goes & mulls it over and if the verdict comes back, then the shock-jock apologizes and/or is fired, and everyone acts as if it’s some logical thought process that produced the decision, when it’s really nothing more than a bunch of people all looking at a bunch of other people to see what they’re going to do. The whole business is contemptibly dishonest.

By the way, why doesn’t “whore” fit? Sex, money. Both elements are there.
- mkfreeberg | 03/04/2012 @ 08:43
Oh – don’t worry I understand the Rush has a radio job situation. And I understand why he pushes the limits and goes over the top.

You were suggesting that women are over the top on this – and I don’t deny that – but am trying to explain that some words are far more insulting than others.

Whore and slut are very insulting when used and yes, if I were standing next to you and we were talking about the prostitutes on the corner and you used the term whore, I too would be insulted by the very term.

Whore doesn’t fit because whore = prostitute=women who have sex with men for money even if they’d rather not have sex with that particular man.
It doesn’t mean women who have sex even when they’re tired because a man they enjoy having sex with just spent a lot of time/energy/money to get her excited about having sex.

Fluke isn’t saying she’ll have sex with Rush if only she could get him to pay for her pills.

Whore has become so offensive, it’s just used as a generally offensive term whenever sex and money are involved and you want to be offensive. It doesn’t fit this situation.
- tgoon | 03/04/2012 @ 08:59
Okay, yeah I see that point. Yes, it is a term used to describe a specific thing, and by stretching the periphery of the word Rush is guilty of weakening it.

It does seem to me though that he was making a broader point though, about this recent recurring phenomenon in which some dysfunctional idiot sits at a conference table with a microphone on it and tells the rest of us a story about his or her deficiencies and idiocy, and a new right is born. It is inherently undignified, I think that’s what he was getting at, how far afield we have drifted from what came before. Sandra Fluke, because of her actions, could be called a whore…she’s skating along the boundary of what the word describes…in the age of our mothers and grandmothers, a woman would have set herself on fire to avoid being associated with sluttiness and/or whore-ish-ness. Fast-forward just a few years, and here we are. A woman is making a public spectacle of herself, and her inability to pay for all the birth control she needs, when she’s attending Georgetown. A predictable hoop-de-doo ensues about, what’s up with her math? How much birth control does she need?

Women from a more elegant era would have expended considerable energy to make sure nobody around would even think about such things.
- mkfreeberg | 03/04/2012 @ 09:10
True that and conversely the hero and gentleman of more elegant times would never point that out to the aforementioned ‘notalady’.
- tgoon | 03/04/2012 @ 10:14
…and if she can’t stand it, the sure-fire remedy is to not get up there.

Sandra Fluke desires to become a mascot for a health initiative that disrespects the individual, in a country in which people are still determined to think for themselves. There are going to be consequences. If Rush Limbaugh isn’t there to call her nasty names, someone else will be there to pick up the slack, and if she can’t see that coming then she’s got no business telling Congress where to direct taxpayer money.
- mkfreeberg | 03/04/2012 @ 10:26
I kind of got into a flame war on the Hello Kitty of Blogging with someone I like and respect but who, for some reason, has swallowed this bilge hook line and sinker. My last retort to her was that I must have somehow missed her screeching and wailing when Bill Mahrer called Sarah Palin a cunt, and that her ability to be selectively enraged was quite telling. I haven’t checked in today to find out if she unfriended me or not. Frankly, I don’t care because I’m tired of the ending stream of bullshit that I’m supposedly required to swallow. Sorry, but homey don’t play that.

Here’s one example from the wayback machine: when Bush the elder was president, he instituted a policy of catching Haitian refugees on the high seas and then returning them to Haiti. Candidate Clinton decried that policy as “immoral”. One of his first acts upon taking up residence in the Oval Office was to sign off on continuing said policy. I was in grad school at a leftist hotbed at the time and I mentioned to a friend of mine that maybe Clinton owed Bush an apology. A bedwetter overheard me and stated categorically that no apology was owed. When I asked her about the Haitian policy, she kind of mumbled, “Well, I’m not that happy with him right now.” Standard boilerplate leftist bullshit: decry some action or opinion as horrific until someone from their side of the political aisle co-opts it, at which point it becomes the greater good.

Uh yeah. Fuck that. I’ve reached my breaking point. I’m going to take the advice of our president and punch back twice as hard.

Sorry to muck up this blog with my dirty mouth, but this topic has made revert to invective laden diatribes.
- Physics Geek | 03/05/2012 @ 10:44
You owe me the same apology that Limbaugh owes Slutty Sandra, PG. Which is to say, none whatsoever.
- mkfreeberg | 03/05/2012 @ 10:51
Hope it’s okay, I re-posted your remarks on a parallel conversation I’ve been having. Because I liked them so much.
- mkfreeberg | 03/05/2012 @ 10:56
Strangely, the FB page gives me a “the content is currently unavailable” message. Any reason that you’re aware of?
- Physics Geek | 03/05/2012 @ 11:17
I think we need to become friends over there. Shoot me a request.
- mkfreeberg | 03/05/2012 @ 11:22
My final thought about my little FB dustup: I had thought to finish off my screed with the following:

“Go grab your tall Saint Thomas Francis University almuni glass, fill it with a nice frosty beverage and drink. Deeply.”

Since my minister is one of FB friends, it seemed like a good idea to NOT do that. But I’m likely to work into more private conversations if anyone else tries to screw with me over this subject.
- Physics Geek | 03/05/2012 @ 11:27
We already are, although I go by my real name, which I prefer not to mention here. Unless you de-friended me for some reason.
- Physics Geek | 03/05/2012 @ 11:29
No I don’t do that much de-friending…I don’t know your real name, can you shoot it to me in an offline? Pretty sure that’s not the problem. FB links are weird and temperamental…damn gremlins.
- mkfreeberg | 03/05/2012 @ 11:30
Will do. Thanks.
- Physics Geek | 03/05/2012 @ 11:34

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Warren Buffett’s Secretary Shouldn’t Have to Buy Sandra Fluke’s Birth ControlSaturday, March 3rd, 2012

Warren Buffett’s Secretary Shouldn’t Have to Buy Sandra Fluke’s Birth Control
Saturday, March 3rd, 2012