This weekend lots of the sort of people who love to hate him are raging about the analogy he used in talking about the ending of the Senate filibuster:
Let’s say, let’s take 10 people, in a room in a group. And the room is made up of six men and four women, okay? The group has a rule, that the men cannot rape the women. The group also has a rule that says any rule that will be changed must require six votes of the ten to change the rule.We've got Carolyn Bankoff in New York Magazine ("a vile, profoundly inappropriate rape analogy"), Amanda Marcotte ("The rape comparison is distasteful and casually misogynist"), and Politico collects the tweets:
Every now and then some lunatic in the group proposes to change the rule to allow women to be raped. But they never were able to get six votes for it. There were always the four women voting against it, they always found two guys, well the guy that kept proposing that women be raped kinda got tired of it. He was in the majority and he said, you know what, we’re going to change the rule. Now all we need is five."
And the women said, "You can't do that."
"Yes, we are. We're the majority, we're changing the rule." Then they vote. Can the women be raped? Well, all it would take then is half the room. You could change the rule to say three. You could change the rule say three people want it, it's gonna happen. There's no rule.
Ana Marie Cox, a political columnist for the Guardian US, wrote that “Limbaugh using a rape analogy to explain the filibuster really takes mansplaining to a level I never imagined” — or as ChartGirl.com founder Hilary Sargent dubbed it, “rape-splaining.” Media Matters research fellow Oliver Willis tweeted that “rush limbaugh really games out how you could theoretically vote to rape women. hes just throwing it out there folks,” while fellow Media Matters colleague Todd Gregory called it “dumb, glib bullshit” that “is such a perfect encapsulation of rape culture, it should be put in a museum.” And The Huffington Post’s Elise Foley and Sabrina Siddiqui also weighed in, with Foley tweeting “Class act, that guy” in response to Siddiqui’s comment, “In today’s edition of offensive rape analogy.”Come on. It's a trap. Don't you know your most basic famous aphorisms about democracy? "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch." Usually attributed, probably incorrectly, to Benjamin Franklin, it vividly drives home the problem with simple majority rule.
I'm virtually 100% certain that on his Monday show, Rush Limbaugh will laugh at his critics for their ignorance of the famous aphorism. He can easily point out that he did not minimize the seriousness of rape. In the aphorism, the lamb is killed by the wolves. His analogy substitutes rape for killing, men for wolves, and women for the lamb. Really, it's men who are getting the negative stereotype, so misogyny is exactly the wrong word. A lamb is the very symbol of innocence. And it is killed by those terrible, selfish wolves. Knowing Rush, I predict he'll pivot to a discussion of abortion: Maybe women don't realize that killing an innocent is terrible. Maybe that's why they didn't understand the workings of his analogy.
If he says all this on Monday, I won't know whether I've figured out his devious plan or if he reads my blog. If you're reading this, Rush, feel free to steal my ideas and you don't even have to say: It should have been so obvious that my analogy was built on that old wolves-and-lamb aphorism, but these idiots are blinded by their perpetual grievance. Well, I've got to say that one female saw what was clearly there, and that was the unusually perspicacious law professor blogger Ann Althouse.
ADDED: I do get why people feel antagonized when Rush — who's been taunting feminists for years — whips out a rape analogy and why they choose to exploit the occasion to attack Rush again — as feminists have done for years. I'm explaining a syndrome of baiting, taking the bait, and exulting. Rush doesn't always win, and sometimes both sides win, each in the minds of different audiences.
I know that many people think that rape should be sacrosanct in a way that murder is not, and that it cannot be used casually in jokes and metaphors and that even serious discussions of the subject require advance warnings so as not to inflict mental pain on rape survivors. We use murder as metaphor constantly in jokes and figures of speech, and murder is an even greater crime than rape. I'll bet some readers feel inclined to say: Yeah, but murder victims are dead. But that's my point: We say lightweight things about murder all the time. (And victims of attempted murder are alive, as are the loved ones of murder victims. These people are around to feel mental pain.)
ALSO: I realize that Rush's analogy deals with a more complex scenario than the old wolves-and-lamb aphorism. The wolves and lamb had only a simple democracy, with no safeguard added to protect the minority. The Senate filibuster rule was a safeguard for the minority, and Rush's point had to deal with the problem of using a simple majority to abolish the safeguard for the minority. So if you wanted to talk about lambs and wolves, you'd have to develop the story so that the lambs had believed they were protected by a system in which they could not be outvoted by the wolves, and then the wolves used their majority to change the system and then they outvoted the lambs.
Of course, in the real life of lambs and wolves, there is no system to lure the lambs into complacency, there is no pre-lunch vote, and everyone knows all along that wolves eat lambs and lambs don't eat wolves. The predator and prey are locked into place, and the wolves should never be trusted.
In the real life of men and women, all are threatened by violence, including violence to themselves and to the people they care about, and nearly all men care about at least some women. Only some men — probably quite few — want to be free to commit rape, and it's hard to imagine any man wanting all the other men to be free to get away with raping any women that they want. It's not helpful to try to think about the damned filibuster in these terms because unlike lambs and wolves — where you totally get that all the wolves want to eat all the lambs — there's no reality to the scenario.
So it is fair to say that Rush selected rape as the analogy in order to get a rise out of his usual antagonists, who responded to his call. They were seduced by his allure.
Now, in real life of the Senate, it's quite different from lambs and wolves or men and women, because the majority position switches back and forth over the years and both parties are equally eager to further their interests as they see them and equally tempted to take advantage when they have the majority. The Senate had a structural safeguard that protected the minority and it was always subject to repeal by simple majority. The rule survived because each party, when it had the majority, could picture itself back in the minority. To use a temporary majority to take away the protection of the minority was to accept a risk and to activate the predatory nature of their long-time opponents. In this setting, no one is eaten (like the lamb) and no one is raped (like the women). All survive in an endless political fight that just got nastier.
Therefore we do need some better analogies.
