The right wing’s pornography of resentment
The right wing’s pornography of resentment
When Rush Limbaugh calls women sluts and asks for their sex tapes, he’s not the first prude who wants to watch
March 10, 2012
By Arthur Goldwag
The sliming that Sandra Fluke has endured — from Rush Limbaugh, of course, but also from his rabid cheering section like Atlas Shrugged’s Pam Geller (‘She is banging it five times a day…. Calling this whore a slut was a softball’) and the blogger Ace of Spades (‘A shiftless rent-a-cooch from East Whoreville’) — is bizarre and over-the-top enough.
But even weirder was Limbaugh’s proposition: If ‘Miss Fluke and the rest of you Feminazis’ expect us to pay you to have sex, ‘we want something for it,’ Limbaugh said last week. ‘We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.’ (Those words were later erased from Limbaugh’s official transcript of the show; Atlantic Wire preserved them.)
Prudery and prurience often go hand in glove. Prurience and paranoia are fellow travelers as well. Eighteenth- and 19th-century anti-papist authors and pamphleteers turned out a steady stream of stories about the goings-on between priests and young women in confessionals. ‘The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk,’ the ghosted confessions of a nun who was supposedly held as a sex slave in a convent in Montreal, was outsold only by ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ in the years before the Civil War. ‘Anti-Catholicism,’ as the historian Richard Hofstadter put it, ‘has always been the pornography of the Puritans.’
Arthur Goldwag’s new book, ‘The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right,’ was published by Pantheon in February. He is also the author of ‘The Beliefnet Guide to Kabbalah,’ ‘Isms & Ologies’ and ‘Cults, Conspiracies and Secret Societies.’
Arthur Goldwag’s new book, “The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right,” was published by Pantheon in February. He is also the author of “The Beliefnet Guide to Kabbalah,” “Isms & Ologies” and “Cults, Conspiracies and Secret Societies.” More Arthur Goldwag