Sometimes it’s hard to believe the things that come out of people’s mouths.
After he blasted a female law student’s political views and called her a “slut” on his national radio broadcast, you’d think Rush Limbaugh couldn’t sink any lower. He seems to enjoy proving us wrong.
ONE STEP OFFSometimes it’s hard to believe the things that come out of people’s mouths.
After he blasted a female law student’s political views and called her a “slut” on his national radio broadcast, you’d think Rush Limbaugh couldn’t sink any lower. He seems to enjoy proving us wrong.
Limbaugh is, well, a jerk. Even the most staunch conservatives have said his views regarding women and feminism are over the top.
Recently, good ol’ Rush made a comment regarding a recent Italian study that showed penises are, on average, 10 percent smaller today than they were 50 years ago. The study, of a scientific nature, cited weight gain, pollution, stress and smoking as possible penis-shrinking factors.
Limbaugh suggested otherwise.
Rather than give way to scientific data, Limbaugh used his usual scapegoat: women. Scoffing at the idea of air pollution as a cause, Limbaugh said, “I think it’s feminism…it’s tied to the last 50 years—the average size of [a male’s] member is 10 percent smaller than 50 years—it has to be the Feminazis, the chickification and everything else.”
This new foot-in-mouth moment acts like a sequel to his horrific critique of Sandra Fluke last February. Fluke, a third-year law student at Georgetown University, had testified about the university’s policy on contraceptives during a hearing led by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
Fluke spoke out against Georgetown’s health plans because they don’t cover contraceptives for women. Without coverage, Fluke said, birth control and other contraceptives were costing women as much as $1,000 a year.
Ever the intelligent one, Limbaugh quickly dismissed Fluke as a “slut,” a “prostitute” and said, “She wants to be paid to have sex, she’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception.”
As awful as he is, in some weird, roundabout way we should be thanking him for bringing slut-shaming into the public eye. It’s a serious problem because, honestly, your sex life, or lack thereof, is no one’s business but your own. Simple as that.
What’s really irksome about Limbaugh’s latest show of idiocy is his continual use of the word Feminazi. He’s made himself famous for coining the term, but his personal diction is problematic in so many ways.
First of all, he’s comparing something wonderful like feminism and the women who support it to Nazis. Something’s inherently wrong with that.
Second, rather than owning up to facts, he’s blaming women for one study’s results. But, hell, Rush is right: Women are the weaker sex, but we’re pretty good at driving men mad with lust and desire by just standing around. As Erin Gloria Ryan stated on jezebel.com, “Asking for equality is so powerful that it can affect the human physiology.” That’s pretty impressive.
This isn’t the first time Limbaugh has publicly asserted his concern for the world’s penises. In 2009, he worried that the Center for Disease Control was going to push for legislation that would encourage circumcision for all baby boys. “If we need to save our penises from anybody, it’s Obama,” he said, validating his own ridiculousness.
There have been recent reports of doctors struggling with how to treat Koro syndrome—what newsblog io9 describes as the irrational fear that the genitals are “shrinking, or retracting into the body, and that when they finally do disappear, you
will die.”
Wow, Rush, you might want to consult a psychologist, or a doctor or something.
Like any other political figure, liberal or conservative, Limbaugh likes to be loud and make sure people get fired up about the things he says. It is, after all, his job to entertain. Viewing him as a serious political commentator isn’t the smartest idea.
He needs to cool it with the antifeminism and misogynistic banter because it’s getting old. If luck holds, maybe he’ll be diagnosed with Koro syndrome and he’ll…well…y’know.
