Warren Buffett’s Secretary Shouldn’t Have to Buy Sandra Fluke’s Birth Control

Thatisall.

File it away under “Say it and watch liberal heads go pop.”

Update: The Great One caves in. Partially. But it’s still a cave-in.

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 House of Eratosthenes and Right Wing News.