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Rush Limbaugh attacked Sandra Fluke, in short, because her voice threatens to reconstitute the nature of the American public: if she were heard — if the specificity of woman’s health were publicly speakable in the hallowed halls of Congress — then we could no longer pretend that this is simply an abstract and legalistic question of “religion,” “government,” and “medicine.” It would suddenly be apparent that the female public and the male public actually have different interests and concerns when it comes to issues like sex and contraception, that contraception means something different to people with different reproductive organs. The fact that (heterosexual) men’s enjoyment of consequence-free sex is dependent on the privilege of those consequences being borne by someone else might become thinkable, if those “someone else’s” had a public platform to speak about it.
This, after all, is why “privilege” is so importantly different from power or bigotry: privilege must remain ignorant of itself, because it’s the right to enjoy benefits which you aren’t even aware that others get denied.
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The Deep Resentment of Having to Think About It: Rush Limbaugh and Sandra Fluke – The New Inquiry
more from Aaron Bady/zunguzungu, whose tweets inspired my little ramble below.
