Re: "Rush the Entertainer"

This is in response to Will Gryna’s column on March 3.

The definition of a slut is flawed. A woman who isn’t ashamed of her sexuality? A woman who has sex, possibly with more than one partner? They’re not sluts; They’re just human beings. This is common sense.

So of course, when Rush Limbaugh called Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” who “wants to be paid to have sex” because of her views about government and insurance coverage for contraception, everyone was in on the joke.

Hilarious!

She isn’t a slut, she’s an intelligent young woman standing up for her political views and striving to create change — how funny of Rush to call such an upstanding young citizen a slut!

This is the argument that Gryna seems to be making in his March 3 column, in which he compares Limbaugh to entertainers such as Charlie Sheen and Kanye West, both of whom are, incidentally, on the record for saying and doing brashly violent and misogynistic things.

I suppose Charlie Sheen’s history of domestic abuse has been received by the general public as a great joke because he is, after all, just an entertainer.

Rush Limbaugh, although he does say outrageous things, is not marketed as entertainment. His show is marketed as political commentary.

As Gryna notes, “People expect Limbaugh to be more like Wolf Blitzer or Anderson Cooper because he mainly talks about politics.” Gryna then goes on to say that Limbaugh is in fact more like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

However, unlike Limbaugh, both Stewart and Colbert are explicitly marketed as entertainment. What’s more, whether a show is presented as “entertainment” or “fake news” does not necessarily affect what the audience takes away from it.

After all, if Limbaugh is really an “entertainer” and his diatribe against Fluke was merely ridiculous, then all of his millions of listeners must not have taken those comments seriously.

Republican presidential candidates certainly didn’t seem to, as Romney brushed off Limbaugh’s tirade as “not the language I would have used,” and Gingrich bemoaned that the debacle was even in the news in the first place.

But wait — Limbaugh is just an entertainer. So why was it politically necessary for the Republican presidential candidates to (delicately) scold Rush for his comments?

Whether Limbaugh is an entertainer or not, he has real political and cultural impact.

Politically, his comments forced Republican candidates into a tricky spot — they had to please both the general public (who doesn’t consider such odious, regressive language to be “just entertainment”) and be sure not to alienate their support base by denouncing Limbaugh.

Culturally, he is perpetuating the slut myth and the idea that it is acceptable to inveigh against women as long as it’s “just a joke.”

But I know Gryna isn’t alone in his view that this is all in good fun — Rick Santorum summed it up nicely with his comment that “an entertainer can be absurd.”

­— cleahy@indiana.edu