The 11 Dumbest Things Conservatives Have Said About Women
>From Rush Limbaugh to the Pope, it's been one of the worst months ever
for verbalized sexism.
February 28, 2012 |
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In Congress this week, the GOP attempted to push through the
vile Blunt amendment, which would allow any employer to deny insurance
coverage to employees for services deemed immoral. While couched in
"religious freedom" terms, this move is a direct attack on women's
health, a backlash to the president's birth control mandate and a
chance for men to impose their will on women. The amendment failed by
three votes in the Senate on Thursday, but not without wasting time,
energy and attempting to move the discourse on women's health further
into the past.
This time around, the GOP and its allies in the right-wing media
aren't even pretending bills like this are pro-women. In fact, if we
put all conservative pundits' thoughts on gender from the past month
together, we'd see women as truly dismal creatures, oversexed
rape-bait dummies who don't understand themselves and their own needs.
This month, as we've been documenting at AlterNet, any facade of
faux-feminism espoused by the right wing has fallen away. Instead,
women have been posited, publicly, as everything undeserving under the
sun -- from the same old virgin-whore dichotomies to insults far
beyond. Even worse, we've been told, public policy should be
reflective of this natural inferiority. Hence, the Blunt amendment,
the patronizing mandatory ultrasound bills, the push to define a
fertilized embryo as a person.
But the verbal assault that has accompanied this ongoing legislative
assault may have the unexpected benefit of prompting a backlash due to
its outrageousness. Our loose-tongued friends on the right may have
done us a favor with some of this bile, exposing the true sentiments
that go along with the bills restricting abortion and contraception
access.
Here are some of the less noted but equally heinous things said about
women in 2012 alone--with video and transcripts where available.
1. "Sex-Crazed Co-Eds..." thus begins the headline on a piece by
right-winger Craig Bannister, about Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown
student who was denied the ability to testify by Darrell Issa. The hot
and bothered Mr. Bannister, by interpreting Fluke's testimony by the
price of condoms rather than the hormonal birth control that she
actually referred to, uses the word "sex" so many times throughout the
piece you'd think it was on his mind. A lot. A small sampling:
"A Georgetown co-ed told Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s hearing that the women in
her law school program are having so much sex that they’re going
broke, so you and I should pay for their birth control...Apparently,
four out of every ten co-eds are having so much sex that it's hard to
make ends meet if they have to pay for their own contraception,
Fluke's research shows."
As we know, contraception has little to do with how much sex a woman
is having, but instead with how protected she is when she has it.
Hormonal contraception can be used to regulate menstruation, control
pain and acne, and protect against unwanted pregnancy no matter how
often and when its user has sex. Unlike condoms, hormonal
contraception puts the control for pregnancy prevention in women's
hands -- and many couples prefer to combine oral contraceptions with
condoms to avoid both STDs and pregnancies.
Rush Limbaugh echoed, and one-upped Bannister on his show of the 29th,
calling Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute" for wanting contraceptive
coverage:
What does it say about the college coed Susan Fluke [sic], 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. She wants to be paid to have sex.
She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. She wants
you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that
make us? We're the pimps.
2. "Lavishly contracepted." "By any reasonable standard, we are one of
the most lavishly contracepted society in the history of the planet,"
Rich Lowry wrote earnestly in his New York Post column. (h/t to Irin
Carmon). This phrase led to a spate of online jokes about
diamond-encrusted IUDs and gold-plated condoms (not to mention birth
control pills spiked with designer drugs). But Lowry's words
underscore the fallacy that is so common to conservative perspectives
on the issue: that legality equals availability. For abortion and
contraception, cost is a genuinely prohibitive barrier--as Fluke's
testimony shows.
A right is a right in name only if it's not combined with access.
3. "What do you expect from a woman driver?" You know you're hearing a
throwback back to another era when a complaint about those darn women
drivers assaults your ears. But king of the misogynists Rush Limbaugh
(yep, him again) wasn't criticizing race car pro Danica Patrick for
her driving chops, of which she has some of the world's best, but for
sticking up for the president on contraception. This one is just
pathetic. Denying the existence of "birth control moms," as though any
woman who has ever had a child would be against birth control.
4. Women in the military should "expect" to be raped. Why, exactly?
This gem came from Fox News talking-head Liz Trotta, who in addition
to asking "what do they expect?" when confronted with the upsurge of
rapes in the military, criticized the money spent on dealing with
those rapes:
And the feminists have also directed them, really, to spend a lot of
money. They have sexual counselors all over the place, victims'
advocates, sexual response coordinators... So, you have this whole
bureaucracy upon bureaucracy being built up with all kinds of levels
of people to support women in the military who are now being raped too
much.
Trotta later refused to apologize, that class act.
Meanwhile, Rick Santorum said: "When you have men and women together
in combat, I think men have emotions when you see a woman in harm’s
way.’’
As Jon Stewart asked: Which instincts kick in, right-wing? Rape or protect?
5. In my day, "gals" used to put an "aspirin between their knees" [for
contraception]. This misguided attempt at nostalgia may be one of the
most egregious examples of the kind of talk that's circulating about
women in right-wing circles. It came courtesy of Rick Santorum super
PAC sugar-daddy Foster Friess whose retro recommendation for
contraception is pretty much in line with the candidate's.
Here's the key transcript, with Andrea Mitchell's shocked response:
This contraceptive thing, my gosh it's such inexpensive, back in my
days we used Bayer aspirin for contraception, the gals put it between
their knees and it wasn't that costly.
Mitchell: Um, excuse me, I'm trying to catch my breath from that Mr.
Friess, frankly...
6. Dana Loesch: Women already consented to be penetrated when they got
pregnant. When discussing the Virginia bill that would have mandated
certain kinds of invasive ultrasounds for women, Loesch seemed unable
to process the idea that consent is needed every single time a
person's body is penetrated. "They had no problem having similar to a
transvaginal procedure when they engaged in the act that resulted in
their pregnancy," she said. Fortunately, Loesh was not alone -- her
words were echoed by a legislator working on the provision.
7. Booing birth control at the GOP debate. In response to a rather
mild question from a voter about "which candidate believes in birth
control?" the GOP audience burst into emphatic booing. Whether these
Bronx cheers were due to the question or to birth control itself is
sort of irrelevant. The GOP, after all, politicized the birth control
mandate issue.
8. Democrats and Republicans sitting together is "like date rape."
>From Stephen A. Moore of the Wall Street Journal, responding to the
State of the Union address's unorthodox seating arrangement. As Kelsey
Wallace notes in a sharp rejoinder to Moore: "Jokes like these
contribute to rape culture and trivialize the experiences of victims
of actual date rape. Having to sit next to someone you don't like is
something we all learn to live with starting in kindergarten...."
9. My wife won't sleep with me because of this ultrasound provision.
Isn't that hilarious? From lawmaker Dave Albo of Virginia, who went on
a long comedy-like routine about how he couldn't get laid thanks to
the "transvaginal" (which he called trans-V) provision. It was one of
the frattiest moments ever filmed in a long history of fratty
lawmaking moments. I'll let Erin Gloria Ryan's takedown stand on its
own: "Telling a story about the implications of abortion legislation
on your personal dick is completely tone-deaf and assy, not to mention
a disturbing testament to just how unaffected by abortion restrictions
the middle-aged men who make laws actually are. For Virginia women,
it's a matter of having something inserted into their vaginas...for
the men making the laws, it's just another catalyst for a hilarious
anecdote told over a game of golf."
10. and 11. And two bonus round comments. The Pope says couples who
conceive using in vitro fertilization are arrogant while a DC blogger
notes that lady journalists who are nice-looking in their Twitter
avatars can't be serious.
The silver lining to all this obnoxiousness? "Pro-women" posturing
from the GOP's extremist members has gone out the window. The fact
that they hate us, and that underlies their policy, is now out in the
air for all to see.
More:
http://www.alternet.org/story/154335/the_11_dumbest_things_conservatives_have_said_about_women?page=entire
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
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