ABSTRACT
During the first week of March 2012, there was a tempest in the United States over remarks made by talk-show radio personality Rush Limbaugh about a thirtyyear-old law student, Sandra Fluke, who had testified to a congressional panel about the need for religious universities to cover the cost of contraceptive health care for women within their insurance plans. Ms. Fluke related the events of her roommate in law school, who ultimately had to have an ovary removed because of a medical condition that could have been prevented with the use of birth control pills. The pills cost $3,000 a year and were beyond what Ms. Fluke’s roommate could afford. Limbaugh went on a three-day rant on his radio show-impugning the reputation of Ms. Fluke, calling her a “slut” and a “prostitute” and demanding that, in order to have her birth control pills paid for by the American tax-payers, in exchange Ms. Fluke should make videos of herself having sex and make them available for the viewing public. This contretemps went on for quite some time,
and in the process there was a galvanizing of demands that advertisers pull their ads from Limbaugh’s radio show. Many advertisers did so.1 But one of the lingering questions, especially throughout the unprecedented boycott by the show’s advertisers, was why the conglomerate that owns the show, Clear Channel, had not fired or suspended Limbaugh for going beyond the bounds of what is even acceptable for him to say. Alyssa Rosenberg, a writer and popular culture analyst at the ThinkProgress.com website brought up this point as she concluded a column on the topic, explaining that Sandra Fluke’s reputation has been priced by the advertising market for the Limbaugh Show: “given the profits Limbaugh rakes in, Clear Channel established the price of a woman’s reputation.”2 Rosenberg concluded that the radio show’s owners had done a valuation of Fluke’s reputation in comparison to the profits from the Limbaugh show and had decided that Limbaugh’s show was “worth more.” The long-term profits from a fairly popular radio show with one of the best-known conservatives in the country is certainly a different commodity than the “reputation” of a thirty-year-old law school student. But this comparative valuation is not new, and it continues to contribute to our cultural understanding of the place of women within society, and the reified societal confines of gender and sexuality.
