Fluke graduated with a major in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies from Cornell University; a lifelong
feminist activist, she was president of the group Georgetown Law Students for Reproductive Justice when
she was called to speak before Congress. When Democrats eventually convened another meeting on the
birth control provision, Fluke was finally heard, and the thirty-year-old spoke passionately about the
importance of contraception coverage for low-income female students who relied upon their student
health insurance to cover the high cost of birth control pills; as she noted during her testimony, the pill is
often prescribed for medical reasons other than preventing pregnancy, including for menstrual
irregularities, acne, and endometriosis.
It was February 2012 when Fluke spoke before Congress, but it might as well have been fifty years
earlier: there were no women on the House panel (all the more startling given that the topic was
contraception), and Fluke was derided for raising the issue of birth control in public. Popular
conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh viciously attacked Fluke, equating the demand to have birth
control pills covered by health insurance with prostitution. Limbaugh asked his listeners about Fluke:
“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.”^98 Putting aside Limbaugh’s lack of understanding of how birth control
pills work—the cost of a month’s prescription remains the same no matter how much (or how little) sex
one is having—his comments were a reminder of how deeply entrenched sexism remained in the United
States, even after decades of women’s movements.
Limbaugh’s crude attack on Fluke—which played out over several days and ultimately led to many of
his advertisers withdrawing their support for his radio program—was only one of a series of sexist,
misogynist, and just plain nutty comments that filled the airwaves during the 2012 election season. A
Missouri congressman insisted that if a woman was “legitimately raped” she couldn’t get pregnant
because “the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down.” Later, a candidate for the U.S. Senate
from Indiana claimed that “even if life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that
God intended to happen.”^99 As they attempted to justify their anti-abortion—as well as anti-birth-control
—views, a number of Republican candidates for office seemed to condone rape, if it led to conception.
The feminist blogosphere immediately responded, using humorous images (spread via Twitter, Facebook,
and other social media) and more serious journalism to fight back. In a Feministing article entitled
“Republican Men Need to Shut Up About Rape Forever,” a rape survivor named Zerlina argued: “I don’t
even know why these anti-choice Republicans think they are entitled to speak about the topic. This is
about the power of women as independent actors to make choices about their own bodies. A rape
survivor has already lost power and control over her bodily autonomy and now Republican men want to
let us know what they think we should be allowed to do after the rape?”^100 When Election Day came in
November 2012, all of the “Republican rape apologists” lost their bids for office.^101
In a repetition of the so-called Year of the Woman from twenty years earlier, the 2012 elections saw a
record number of women elected to Congress. This brought the total number of women senators to twenty,
ten times as many as the two who had been in the Senate when Anita Hill testified before Congress in
- (It also led to a renovation of the women’s restroom in the Senate, which until 2013 had only two
stalls.) The increase in women senators was something to celebrate, as was the election of the nation’s
first openly gay U.S. senator, Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from Wisconsin, and the first Asian American
woman U.S. senator, Mazie Hirono, a Democrat from Hawaii. Women also increased their ranks in the
House after the 2012 elections, filling ninety-eight seats, or 18.3 percent of the total. This critical mass of
women in Congress made its importance known in its response to the epidemic of sexual assaults in the