Exactly how many times can a woman have sex using birth control to prevent pregnancy before she’s a “slut”? I really would like to know after reading this latest defense by Dana Loesch of Rush Limbaugh’s “slut shaming” of 30 year-old woman Sandra Fluke. Fluke testified before Congress that 1) she chooses to use birth control, 2) has sex and doesn’t want a baby now, and 3) noted the expense of birth control can be out of the reach of many women. The new spin:

This reason right here is why Republicans defeat themselves: It doesn’t matter what Barack Obama’s record is if Republicans so willingly allow the media to reframe a debate about religious liberty as a fight over women’s rights.

More have admonished Limbaugh’s description of Sandra Fluke than admonished a 30 year-old woman embarrassing herself before congress by testifying that she simply cannot stop getting it on and her inability to control her urges constitutes infringing upon everyone else for a bailout.

…The real war on women is being perpetuated upon us by our own sex; women who seek to place us under the control of a pimp-daddy government by demanding it cover all our needs, in exchange for control, or force private entities to do  so in its stead.

It’s a left-wing media conspiracy to make the womb-controlling GOP look like jackasses. The ”slut shaming” story is now “manufactured” by the left wing. This is all they have left.

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It’s pretty clear that most of the men (and some women, like Loesch), conveniently leave the men who have sex with women on the Pill are somehow absent from the equation. I cannot fathom this level of denial that the male partner copulating with the woman has no, ahem, skin in the game. Is every P-I-V encounter meant to create a baby from the man’s perspective? Does he not benefit from sex free of procreative consequences?

Never mind the complete disconnect that Viagra, which has long been covered by insurance/the state as a legitimate medical expense, is designed solely to result in sexual performance. Birth control pills, on the other hand, have multiple uses involving hormonal regulation. Are these folks completely unaware of how a woman’s body works?

The complexity of woman’s body — to produce a child — is quite miraculous, but it’s also (admit it, gals), often dysfunctional. Fibroid tumors, polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), endometriosis, and a host of conditions that screw with your menstrual cycle or cause horrendous pain, are pretty common. The plumbing just doesn’t always work correctly, and sometimes, birth control pills are part of appropriate medical treatment that has nothing to do with family planning.

Take me, for instance, I’m a lesbian, therefore sex with men isn’t in the picture, but I do have PCOS — roughly 10% of women have this condition, many of them have a lot of difficulty becoming pregnant when they want to, by the way. So this horrific, misogynistic debate about public access to the Pill is disgusting. I needed it to regulate my cycle, not as birth control.

But the bottom line for these people bleating that they don’t want to “fund Fluke’s sex life” is that they cannot address the man’s part of the equation because their arguments fall apart.

I had an exchange on Twitter with some fool who objects to birth control pills being covered for het women who are sexually active. When I mention the man having sex with her benefits from sex free of procreative consequences, he objected to society covering the man having sex as well! Well, that’s refreshing transparency. I haven’t gotten a response to my reply:

@barrycunningham Viagra’s always been covered, as have ED devices, and many other “quality of life” matters. Who draws the line?

I feel sorry for anyone this blind and critical thinking-deficient. I usually blow them off. This one guy presented some hilarious bad logic to support his position. I couldn’t resist.

But seriously, the problem for these people is that for many of them, they follow Rick Santorum’s unhealthy fixation on other people’s sex lives and its place in society in 2012. Apparently only straight women and gay folks are the only people having sex, and it’s not with straight conservative men, who exist in their own, strange universe where Viagra is an entitlement, or they are locked in sexless or mandatory procreative relationships and have their faces pressed on the window glass, hating that someone else might be getting it on.

Of course it goes back to my first question — how much non-procreative sex is “too much” sex for these people before a woman is deemed a slut? I don’t think even think they know the answer to this question (but they know it when they [don't] see it). Rick Santorum leads the way, as Charles Blow points out so well in his piece for the WaPo NYT, Santorum and the Sexual Revolution: Rick Santorum wants to bring sexy back … to the 1950s, when he was born.

Santorum may now cloak his current views in Catholic fundamentalism and Constitutional literalism, but, at their root, they are his reaction to, and revulsion for, the social-sexual liberation that began in the 1960s.

…Santorum’s stances are not about our Constitution, but his. He views personal freedoms as a personal affront. His thinking exists in a pre-1960s era of aspirin-between-the-knees contraception and read-between-the-lines sexuality.

The kind of conservatism that Santorum represents has been described as a war on women, but I would rephrase that. It’s a war on sex beyond the confines of traditional marriage and strict heterosexuality in which women, particularly poor ones, and gays, particularly open ones, are likely to suffer the greatest casualties.

It’s not about the funding of birth control — it’s a disdain that there is sex occurring outside of the procreative experience, and science, medicine and society has already decided that its occurrence is a “quality of life” issue — thus coverage for Viagra and Vacuum Erection Therapy Devices exists. For these folks the issue has only been that these dirty, slutty women aren’t entitled to have sex without making a baby. They just shouldn’t have sex that involves subsidized birth control. Well, if that’s the case, then Viagra and penis pumps need to be on the chopping block as well — for the sake of religious freedom, right?

This is absurd. If there’s anything manufactured going on, it’s the conservative batsh*t GOP trying to take the eye off of the obvious ball — they have no jobs plan details, no workable alternative to “Obamacare”, no apparent need for diplomacy abroad, no realistic energy plan, the list goes on and on. Instead they’d rather be up a woman’s vagina, screaming about what’s going in, where, and how, with the penis out of equation.