The language is pretty familiar: “slut”, “whore”, “prostitute” and similar terms are often used. It can frequently be understood to be misogynistic. Sometimes this rhetoric is used in the context of “comparing” rhetoric, where an opponent’s behavior isn’t literally being called, say, prostitution, but is being likened to it.
(This leaves unaddressed the issue of whether prostitution should be seen as morally wrong or offensive at all. Libertarians, for instance, typically argue for it to be legalized.)
The rhetoric of “sexual deviancy” is somewhat in a class by itself, but it’s clearly intended to to be demeaning and disparaging.
EXAMPLES AND ANALYSIS
"Now Secretary Clinton has said Medicare for all will never happen. … Medicare for all will never happen if we continue to elect corporate Democratic whores who are beholden to big pharma and the private insurance industry instead of us".-- Activist Paul Song, April 13, 2016, referring to Democratic presidential contender former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (D-NY).
Comment: In addition to using "sexual deviant" name-calling, Song is using "special interests" rhetoric.
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U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump on Wednesday escalated a fight with Fox News, using the word "bimbo" in a derogatory tweet about anchorwoman Megyn Kelly after pulling out of a debate only days before the first nominating contest of the 2016 campaign.-- Republican presidential contender Donald Trump, January 27, 2016, as related in a Reuters story by Megan Cassella, Susan Heavey and Dustin Volz. Trump was referring to Megyn Kelly of Fox News.
Trump on Tuesday withdrew from the televised encounter, scheduled for Thursday night in Des Moines, Iowa, in irritation at host Fox News for allowing Kelly to moderate after her questioning angered him in a debate last year.
The real estate magnate, who is the Republican front-runner to win the nomination for the Nov. 8 presidential election, followed up with a thinly veiled insult on Wednesday.
"I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo, because that would not be politically correct," he wrote on Twitter. "Instead I will only call her a lightweight reporter!"
Comment: "Bimbo" is intended to be derisive in sexual terms. Despite the fact that Trump says he won't use the word because it wouldn't be politically correct, he's repeatedly declared that he's not bound by political correctness.
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HAYES: Michael [Brendan Dougherty], writing about the Trump campaign, says, "What so frightens the conservative movement about Trump's success is he reveals just how thin the support for their ideas really is. His campaign is a rebuke to their institutions. It says the Republican Party doesn't need all these think tanks, all this supposed policy expertise. It says look at these people calling themselves libertarians and conservatives, the ones in tassel-loafers and bow ties. Have they made you more free? Have their endless policy papers and studies and books conserved anything for you? These people are worthless. They are defunct. You don't need them, and you're better off without them." What do you think of that, Rick?-- Republican strategist Rick Wilson, January 19, 2016, being interviewed by Chris Hayes of MSNBC. At issue was an article written by pundit Michael Brendan Dougherty, discussing Republican presidential contender Donald Trump.
WILSON: Well, look, first off, I think that`s absurd. I think that there is definitely still a very significant portion of the party that is a limited government conservatism based faction of the overall coalition. Now, the screamers and the crazy people on the alt-right as they call it, you know, who love Donald Trump, who have plenty of Hitler iconography in their Twitter icons –
HAYES: They sure do. I can back that up.
WILSON: Who think Donald Trump is the greatest thing, oh, it`s something. But the fact of the matter is, most of them are childless single men who masturbate to anime. They`re not real and political players. These are not people who matter in the overall course of humanity.
Comment: Wilson is name-calling, deriding Trump supporters as being inconsequential and sexually deviant.
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Women who walk around drunk and provocatively dressed should expect to be sexually assaulted, Chrissie Hynde, the lead singer of the Pretenders, has suggested.-- Entertainer Chrissie Hynde, as related in an August 30, 2015, story by John Bingham in The Telegraph.
The former chart topper claimed in a Sunday newspaper interview that scantily clad women were likely to “entice a rapist” and that it is their “fault” if they are attacked.
She discloses in a new memoir how she was abducted and sexually assaulted by a motorcycle gang in Ohio in the early 1970s – but concludes it was “all my doing” because of the way she was dressed and the fact that she was under the influence of drugs.
She also claimed that pop stars who call themselves feminists but use their sex appeal to sell records were effectively just “prostitutes”.
Charities said her remarks highlighted how victims of sexual assault wrongly blame themselves for their ordeals.
Her comments came in an interview with The Sunday Times, which published extracts from her autobiography entitled “Reckless”.
The book details an incident when she was 21 when she was picked up by a motorcycle gang who promised to take her to a party but instead took her to an empty house and sexually assaulted her.
But she said: “If I'm walking around in my underwear and I'm drunk? Who else's fault can it be? – Er, the guy who attacks you?
“Oh, come on! That's just silly.
“If I'm walking around and I'm very modestly dressed and I'm keeping to myself and someone attacks me, then I'd say that's his fault.
“But if I'm being very lairy and putting it about and being provocative, then you are enticing someone who's already unhinged — don't do that.”
She added: “You know, if you don't want to entice a rapist, don't wear high heels so you can't run from him. If you're wearing something that says 'Come and ---- me', you'd better be good on your feet… I don't think I'm saying anything controversial am I?"
She went on to argue that many women who describe themselves as feminists were anything but in practice.
Asked whom she meant, she said: “Women who sell what their product is by using sex – that's prostitution.
“A pop star who's walking around, parading themselves as a porn star and saying they're feminists.
“They're prostitutes.
“I'm not making a value judgment on prostitutes, but just say what you are.”
Comment: "Prostitutes" is sexual rhetoric, though Hynde leaves open as to whether or not it should be taken as derisive. She is saying that the victim is to blame in many cases of rape.
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"@mstanish53: @realDonaldTrump @megynkelly The bimbo back in town . I hope not for long ."-- A message retweeted by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, August 24, 2015. It referred to Fox News' Megyn Kelly.
Comment: "Bimbo" is rhetoric intended to disparage someone in sexual terms.
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@AnnCoulter Does Trump pay you more for anal?-- Republican consultant Rick Wilson, August 18, 2015. The tweet was directed at pundit Ann Coulter, and referred to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Comment: Wilson is name-calling by saying that Coulter is a prostitute paid for by Trump.
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[Rep.] Alan Grayson [(D-FL)] is Elizabeth Warren without a filter — but he intends with her help to become Florida’s great Democratic hope. Since Grayson first burst onto the national media scene as a first-term congressman from Central Florida with a savage wit, he has generated near non-stop headlines and Internet hits, calling all manner of political opponents “whores,” “vampires” and “knuckle-dragging Neanderthals.” Even some Democrats who agree with almost all of his policy positions want to keep their distance. … After he shot into the national media arena in 2009, Grayson was unbowed, asking me, “Is it a necessary element of this job that I take shit from people? No one gets a free pass if they attack me. I don’t think it’s beneficial to turn the other cheek. There is no reason a Democrat has to be a weakling.” … His strident criticism of the financial system led to an early — and highly embarrassing — gaffe in February 2010, what soon would become just an indicator of what was to come. In a radio interview, Grayson attacked Linda Robertson, a senior adviser to Fed Chairman Paul Bernanke, calling her a “K street whore” and accusing her of “trying to teach me about economics.” He later apologized. Yet once catapulted into the national spotlight for his outrageousness, he never looked back. In fact, he doubled-down, comparing former Vice President Dick Cheney to a vampire bat (“I have trouble listening to what he says sometimes because of the blood that drips from his teeth while he’s talking”), calling the Republican Party a “lie factory” and dubbing Rush Limbaugh a “a has-been hypocrite loser” who was “more lucid when he was a drug addict.”-- From an article in Politico, May 20, 2015, by Mark I. Pinsky.
Comment: What Pinsky calls a "savage wit" and "gaffe" on the part of Grayson is better described as demonizing. "Whore" is name-calling of the "sexual deviancy" sort. Also, Grayson reportedly uses "get tough" rhetoric, according to Pinsky.
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"What does it say about the college co-ed Sandra Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex, what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex."-- Radio pundit Rush Limbaugh, February 29, 2012.
Comment: "Slut" and "prostitute" is "sexual deviancy" name-calling.
(The list above is not intended to be a comprehensive record of all relevant examples.)
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