My (former?) Jezebellian gal pal, Robyn Pennacchia (otherwise known as NotesFromTheUnderground) wrote a blog post on Monday that got me thinking about why Rush Limbaugh’s current rank foot-in-mouth incident is making bigger waves than usual – or perhaps more accurately, making bigger waves among his advertisers than usual. (At the time of this writing, Think Progress has the number of advertisers that have dropped Limbaugh at 43.)
I saw a comment, somewhere, in which someone pointed out that he’s been saying vile racist things about Obama and his family for the past four years – asking why we’re only trying to destroy him now that he’s attacking a white woman going to a fancy college. Good fucking point. And one I would vehemently agree with, normally. Except that – well, this is hardly the first time he’s done it (He certainly went after Chelsea Clinton’s looks for enough years.). I also think that we sorta just now realized that we could actually take him on and win.
While most of us never quite give up on our feminist defiance and hollering for fair treatment and justice, it’s always felt like an uphill battle and Sisyphus just gets so tired sometimes, you know? Or at least, it always felt this way for me and many of my young female cohorts. So why now? Why is Rush Limbaugh getting dropped like a shitty ex-boyfriend by his incredibly rich corporate patrons?
Tom Watson published an article on Forbes pointing out some of the very same things that my pal Robyn did. Both of them contend that the match was lit when Susan G. Komen famously pulled funding from Planned Parenthood (as I’m sure we all remember) and I absolutely agree. When has our outrage ever culminated in decisive action so quickly? It was head-spinning and gloriously shocking.
Even Don Imus – he of “nappy-headed hos” fame – blasted Limbaugh’s “sustained, vile, personal attack” on Sandra Fluke! Damn, that’s cold. When one of your asshole, misogynistic loser ilk is calling you a “fat, gutless, pill-popping loser,” you’ve got some serious PR problems.
But it isn’t just PR, is it? Because try as the old-schoolers might, PR cannot be contained anymore. According to CVP Marketing Group’s analysis of 2011 Facebook Demographics, the average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events and the average user creates 90 pieces of content each month. Think of your Facebook friends – how many times have you seen a news story spread like wildfire through your News Feed, from different places, from different people who don’t know each other? And now this other important factor according to that demographic research: 48.8% of Facebook users are female (though my own anecdotal experience gives me reason to believe that women are much more likely to be active users – if you have a statistic that shows that, please let me know). In other words, and obviously but it apparently needs to be stated, women are not a minority, no matter how much assholes like Limbaugh try to denigrate us.
What he doesn’t seem to realize is that his sexist mouth-dribblings won’t go quietly into the ether that is the conservative brain anymore. He may have Clear Channel, syndication, and a microphone, but I have 200+ Facebook friends and 300+ Tumblr followers – and I’m just an utterly average unemployed 27 year old woman. And there are millions of people like me (though I hope that they’re employed, for their own sake). Watson agrees – “There was a powerful, decentralized social venture lurking on the digital network – totally empowered and working with a toolset as potent as Clear Channel’s microphones.” Did we become angry about Rush Limbaugh’s newest bile because some multi-billion dollar company told us to be outraged? No. That doesn’t work anymore. We get to choose what makes us angry and we can, with a single click, tell everyone we know about it if they’re willing to listen. That’s the beauty of it:
The campaign was almost instantaneous, coordinated by no individual or organization, and entirely free of cost. Prominent feminist organizers told Forbes that it was social media’s terrible swift sword, led once again by Twitter and Facebook-savvy women, that dealt Limbaugh the worst humiliation of his controversial career, and in many ways, revealed the most potent “non-organized” organization to take the field on the social commons in the age of Occupy Wall Street and Anonymous.
The Komen debacle showed us that suddenly, very very suddenly, our voices are magnified. Magnified until all of the ear-covering in the world won’t shut it out. Angry messages to advertisers work. Boycotts work now because we don’t do it silently – everyone can see us and everyone can hear us.
It’s great and all, having all of these Scrooge McDucks pull their gold out of ol’ Rushie’s pockets, but let’s keep this going until that piece of shit is left sweaty, ugly, mean, and alone, talking crazily in his bed to his cold lunch and bottles of Oxycontin. The only things left to hear his pathetic thoughts.
