Last night, I’d just opened a new tab, looking to take in Keith Olbermann’s most recent podcast. I’d been a real fangirl of Olbermann twenty years ago when he was on MSNBC with his fantastic show Countdown. I’d been fairly happy that he’d brought the format back in podcast form all these years after he was let go by the network—I always had thought they’d made a huge mistake, letting Olbermann go.
There was some turbulence last year in my fandom when Keith posted at least one story where he called a conservative a prostitute.1 I was a little taken aback—not that I expected Olbermann to be a feminist in any way (not even in the form of sex positivity that I and other advocates of a certain type of feminism may advocate) but he did obviously land on the side of liberalism. One would be forgiven for thinking that adherents of liberalism, at least those in existence past the middle of the 20th century, would be enlightened enough to see women as people. Women are full partners in the workforce (if only that now were reflected in equal pay for equivalent work), full partners in politics, full persons, full stop. One might think he’d place a belief in that.
I personally appealed to Olbermann through the comments section here at DKos on a diary he took the time to pen himself. There, at least, I thought he would have a chance to hear directly from the people who respect him and cherish his voice. I asked him to consider the fact that just that month news had broken about a suspected serial rapist who may have killed scores of victims before he himself passed away (his own daughter corroborated the story, saying she’d helped drag the bodies to a well).
It’s the language, I tried to tell Keith. When you use ‘prostitute’ as a catch-all stand-in for the worst of standards and as the equivalent of evil, you enable a community to turn a blind eye to the murder of these women, these flesh-and-blood, real people.2 When language like that rears its head, it’s open season upon those women—and the ones who are not labeled in such a way conform so that they will not be mistaken for one of those. “Kill her, not me.”
I later expanded upon these themes in my Stormy Daniels diary, “Targeting the sexual woman.” I expressed my hope that denigration of Daniels, which was coming from all corners, would not lead to fatal violence against working women (an apt euphemism if there ever was one). I spoke about the dangers working women face—from police officers and other arms of the law. They are taken advantage of by the very persons charged with protecting them from the threat of harm. Sex workers are in a double bind: they can find no quarter anywhere.
I’d hoped Olbermann had heard me. And I turned off his show for a while. The news goes in cycles and Olbermann, too, cycles through his favorite themes and catchphrases. I came back to the podcast cautiously, in dribs and drabs; when the Clarence Thomas stories came flaring up, I knew to stay away—while Thomas is corrupt and a complete disgrace to the institution of the law, the last thing I needed was possibly to hear a Black man likened to a lady of the evening. Few things would be more grotesque, rhetorically speaking. That’s enough to give a KKK member an orgasm. Such a two-fer!
But the news cycle turned again, more toward Trump and his inexplicabilities, and it seemed safe, or at least safer, to venture onto Keith’s stream. Occasionally, he would not just skirt the line but come right across it and underscore it as he did so. He would use the word ‘prostitute’—but as a verb. And I told myself, “Okay, in that context, in that use, it’s not as egregious.” This was rationalization, minimization—it was the fangirl talking, hoping to absolve the one with the clarion voice.
And all week, things had more or less settled back down and I began to await Olbermann’s posts in full. I would listen to them, setting aside an exclusive part of my end-of-day routine. His commentary would be the last thing I’d encounter, which meant it had a chance to percolate in my dreams and to be one of the first things I thought about first thing in the morning. It was a comfortable ritual in which I was becoming more and more invested each passing day.
Tuesday night gave me the first sign of trouble, though I waved it away. In response to a story out of North Carolina where a Republican lawmaker apparently had sessions of group sex, and in response to the light sentence that befell Hunter Biden, it appeared that Keith had illicit sexual access on the mind. He kept accusing Republicans of being torn over dissing their brother-at-heart, Hunter Biden: here was a man getting his 2nd Amendment rights on and getting on with hookers and blow! Hookers and blow, Keith kept saying like a musical refrain. When I recalled it in the morning, it had the faint echo of kibble & bits! But again I chalked it up to his exuberance. It’s a well-known catchphrase. He was trying to be a comedian.
It wasn’t until I’d sidled up to my computer, plugged in my earphones and got ready to take in my new nightly ritual that I found out how wrong I was.
“WHY DID ALITO NEED A RULE TO KNOW NOT TO BE A WHORE?” was the screaming title that greeted me as I pulled up the list of newest episodes. Stunned? Taken aback?
I flinched, feeling almost physically slapped.
Why does Keith have such a low opinion of the overtly sexual woman? Why does he keep returning to this well?
Surely he knows that the Madonna/whore dichotomy is one of the most entrenched and pernicious enforcers of misogyny our culture utilizes. Despite the fact that such a dichotomy increases relationship dissatisfaction among men as well as women, and despite the fact that the rigid gender stereotypes are cemented in place due to such a stark and unyielding dichotomy, Keith Olbermann was perfectly willing to wield it in service to his need to tear down Samuel Alito, as though no other word could capture his disdain and disgust.
“Neither all the hand-wringing in the world by the likes of Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin changes the fact that we shouldn’t have to have rules [s]aying that it is a bad and corrupt idea and you shouldn’t do it. The issue of SUPREME COURT ETHICAL STANDARDS is important and overdue and maybe, Please Christ, this will scare Dick Durbin out of his stupor, but the REAL issue is SAMUEL ALITO’S ETHICAL STANDARDS and the unfortunate complication is that he CLEARLY DOESN’T HAVE ANY.”
I don’t even need to start unpacking that—so much is right there on the surface. I’m sure when Olbermann chanced on his word of the day, ‘whore’, why suddenly it seemed like his script wrote itself! It was the easiest theme for his controlling idea. In fact, it was so easy that he should have stopped and thought about it.
How many people are harmed by his use of that word? Well, all sexual women are, because to be a sexual woman is to exist along a continuum of slutness. Not sluttiness, not as a quality; of slutness, of a state of being. How much of a slut are you? How much of a slut lives inside of you? And all men are natural judges of this shade of character, of inherent purity or dirtiness. Because God knows that in 2023, in this vast and amazing present, we should be oh so concerned with the standards of sexual purity of women in society at this time.
— At a time when women—yes, sexual women—are being stripped of their rights of self-determination as exercised in the choice of elective abortion. Yes, sexual women are the ones who have the abortions! It’s rather a logical deduction; it doesn’t take much. It’s conservatives who are doing their damnedest to condemn sexual women, to consign them to carry fetuses whose brains are developing outside of the skull, or to suffer such things as septic shock until nearly the point of death because doctors are too afraid of losing their licenses if they remove the dead or dying fetus. Doctors lose patients all the time, but they can’t afford to lose their livelihood. So women die. Sexual women die.
Nonsexual women, too, are harmed. They are intimidated into upholding this double standard. The double standard worms its way into those women, like Donald Trump’s penis into E. Jean Carroll’s unwilling body; and those nonsexual, perhaps even virginal women are as controlled by the culture as those women who undergo the knife in female genital mutilation. The control is that complete.
Because they for the love of God do not want to be mistaken for one of those women. That’s the cultural bargain: the good girls get put on a pedestal and get protection; in exchange, they obey the rules or forfeit their lives. This is the grand, unspoken bargain, and when feminists point this out, misogynists and sexists say they’re trying to destroy Western culture.
Men, too, are harmed. They too are locked into these inflexible gender roles, unable to fully understand their romantic partners and not able even to comprehend themselves, because they’re playacting at what a man is supposed to be, and everybody knows that the number one thing a man is not is a woman.
To be called a woman or even to hint that a man has feminine traits is a huge insult, one that only exists because men have created such a power dichotomy between the sexes, between two classes of people easily distinguished on sight. This works the same with nearly all forms of socially oppressive discrimination; and it infuriates those at the top of the social pyramid that there would be perfectly camouflaged alpha white males among them who are gay and could not be picked out of a lineup of other white men. The target is hidden and this makes those men invested in enforcing heteronormativity very uncomfortable. “A traitor walks among us.”
To enforce gender norms, males call other males women to get them to fall into line, to accept the social hierarchy. What manner of enforcement would be left if women were truly seen as social equals? The whole system would fall apart. Thus, the denigration of women must continue, so as to keep all the men in line. This is the great irony of the sexual double standard. It actually constrains men as well as women: it’s just that men don’t lose their lives, unless they transgress that boundary where they expose gender not just as an identity but as a performance. Whether it’s being the “recipient” of sex, as gay men are often seen; or being a Benedict Arnold to the role of masculine men in total, as rejecting one’s birthright and voluntarily performing the gender of a woman, as the transgender man-to-woman does, the disrespect is the same and incurs the same penalties, up to and including death.
Keith talks about ethical standards, suggesting that sexual women—whores—are always unethical, that they are inherently corrupt. Where’d you learn that, Keith? I’m willing to bet that he never gave the concept a second thought. In our culture, the sexual woman, whores, prostitutes, just the loose girl, are always suspect, ever so close to this side of evil.
Did it ever occur to Olbermann that maybe whores are the most upfront and forthright sexual partners with which to engage? They tell you terms at the outset, there are no strings attached, and if there is money involved (as in the case of actual prostitution) the transaction occurs between two consenting partners of their own free will. It’s a victimless crime. It’s only made into a crime because of the puritanical, Victorian stereotypes where sex is equated with the Devil and disease; and so laws are constructed around the sexual woman to keep her out of the neighborhood so as to not corrupt the morals of our sweet young women.
It just so happens that slavers didn’t like free Blacks coming near their slaves, either—it gave the latter airs and ideas, made them yearn for freedom.
What will get through to Keith? I don’t know. At this point, I have to wonder what he’s getting from trampling sexual women underfoot whenever the barest suggestion of a chance comes up in the form of a political story. All it takes is some graft or corruption—legitimate crimes with a legitimate victim, the public trust—and Olbermann’s off to the races again, gleefully smearing all women and enforcing the centuries-old sexual double standard as though he were the one getting to look through a peephole.
He’s gaining something from it, and he should really examine his own motives. There’s clearly something there. If he’s as much of an enlightened egalitarian as he makes himself out to be to his ultra-liberal audience, he should re-examine his own use of terms, refuse to hide behind the “right” to use edgy language (shock value loses value over time and with overuse), and really take stock of what he gains from the use of such degradation. It’s like he’s living vicariously—but he can’t engage in such acts himself, so he has to slander and smear all such women. Hookers and blow! Hookers and blow! These are the sour grapes in Aesop’s tale.
I’m harsh because I’m disillusioned. I thought Olbermann better than this. But perhaps he’s just a man, just as unthinking and reactionary as those he would ridicule. And for me, his one-time fangirl, to contemplate such a thing is truly disappointing.
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1 It took me a while, but I found the place where he called a conservative just that. The person was Joe Scarborough.
2 This happens even if the person you’re labeling thusly is a man.