She's no fluke: is the word "slut" still relevant?

By Selwyn Duke

A woman close to me once characterized the sea change in our society well. "Years ago you knew who the bad girls were," said she. "Now you know who the good girls are."

And the good boys get condemned for not pretending the bad girls are good.

I am, of course, speaking about the dust up involving law student Sandra Fluke and talk-show host Rush Limbaugh. Fluke had said in front of Congress that financing rolls in the hay can be so expensive that it can be a burden on women in law school. So she wants you, dear taxpayer, to foot the bill for her contraception. In response to this, Limbaugh called her a "slut" during his commentary on the matter. And now he's being labeled a "sexist" and misogynistic for it (he has since apologized).

Of course, in Fluke's testimony, she didn't literally say that she was having $1000-worth of sex a year. What she said was, "Without insurance coverage, contraception can cost a woman over $3000 during law school. For a lot of students who, like me, are on public interest scholarships, that's practically an entire summer's salary." Now, I'll leave it to you to determine her implication, but I'll say that if a female law student is engaging in so much sexual congress that she's spending a mint on birth-control, I wouldn't reflexively assume she's a slut.

Because I'd wonder how she was working her way through law school.

Really, though, if such a woman doesn't deserve slut status, who does? Is the word now obsolete? Have we become like a Barbary-pirate nation where the term "thief" may be out of style because its use may offend the majority?

It really is a testimonial as to how we live in that prophesied time in which good is called bad and bad is called good. Undesirable behavior is kept to a minimum through stigmatization, and to this end we have always labeled such behavior and those who habitually engage in it with derogatory terms. Now, however, it is the virtuous who are stigmatized into silence.

As for Fluke, slut or not, she is certainly something else: a slick political operative and willing Democrat human prop. Contrary to earlier reports, which portrayed her as a starry-eyed 23-year-old being picked on by a big bad powerful white guy, Fluke is actually a 30-year-old former president of Georgetown Law Students for Reproductive Justice. In other words, she's an experienced feminist activist — and I suspect she relishes the attention.

Her reasoning ability, however, makes one conclude that helping her become a lawyer may not exactly be in the "public interest." She said that in criticizing her, Limbaugh was trying to stifle free speech, when he was just exercising his. When commenting on Georgetown's unwillingness to pay for her contraception, she said, "[C]onservative Catholic organizations have been asking: what did we expect when we enrolled at a Catholic school? We can only answer that we expected women to be treated equally...." Interesting.

Am I to understand that Georgetown offers men free contraception?

She also said in her testimony, "Forty percent of female students at Georgetown Law report struggling financially as a result of this policy [no free birth-control]. One told us of how embarrassed and powerless she felt when she was standing at the pharmacy counter, learning for the first time that contraception wasn't covered, and had to walk away because she couldn't afford it. Women like her have no choice but to go without contraception." Wow, and I thought it heart-wrenching hearing about South Americans living on garbage dumps or African child soldiers forced to shoot their mothers. But a female law student being left to finance her own decadent romps? I've now lost all faith in humanity.

But you did hit all the notes there, Miss Fluke. "Embarrassed," "powerless," "choice," and lions and tigers and bears, oh boy! Hey, I feel embarrassed and powerless when I have to walk away from the boat show unable to buy a yacht and have no choice but to go without racing in the regatta.

This is more than just a wise-guy quip. Remember that copulation among unmarried people that requires birth control used to be called fornication; now they call it recreational sex. But it's called "recreational" for a reason.

It's done for recreation.

So the question is, why should taxpayers be forced to fund someone's salacious conception of recreation? Hey, pay for my golf, too, okay? That can be expensive also.

With this added perspective, we should ask what someone's advice to me would be if I said I couldn't afford my golf. Would he recommend that I lobby Congress for a subsidy? Or might he mention that hitting the links isn't exactly a survival need?

The problem is that the left has become so libertine that they treat sex as if it's not only a survival need but a constitutional right. But their eye altering does alter all, and their askew conception of rights — and rights and wrongs — should be contracepted. In their way of thinking, calling a woman of easy virtue a slut is out of bounds, but calling a man who dares say the entitlement empress too often has no clothes a "sexist" is fine. They consider offering men and women equal benefits to be inequality if it doesn't satisfy feminist desires. And in their way of thinking it's not a violation of rights to force a private entity to pay for someone else's birth-control at the end of a gun, but it is a violation of rights if someone doesn't pay for your contraception for you.

Meanwhile, oh-so chivalrous Barack Obama placed a phone call to feminist Fluke to offer his support — and increase his among the fairer sex. I guess he's that certain type of man who uses loose women for personal gain.

© Selwyn Duke