No one is surprised that Tucker Carlson is a misogynist.
For proof, you can watch him shriek that writer Lauren Duca should go back to writing about thigh high boots rather than politics.
If that wasn’t enough of a tip-off, maybe the time he called Joan Walsh, the editor of Salon.com, the c-word should have been.
And if you think that isn’t degrading to women, you don’t have to take my word for it. You can take his. After Sam Bee called Ivanka Trump a “feckless cunt,” Tucker Carlson claimed, “I don’t know any man who uses that word because it is kind of the one word that is actually degrading.”
Turns out, in some recently publicized interviews between Tucker and Bubba the Love Sponge, Tucker definitely uses that word a lot.
But it’s not just offensive that he calls women “cunty” and “whores” and “extremely primitive.” I mean, all of that is obviously offensive if you are a woman. And it’s extremely weird to see anyone take the moral low-ground in comparison to someone named “Bubba the Love Sponge.” But Carlson’s comments go beyond the average woman-hating tripe you’d expect from a Fox News personality. You can hate women and still assume they have (dumb, inferior) inner lives. Carlson’s comments go to a place that assumes that women are not people so much as property.
The part that should really jump out for listeners is when Carlson defends child rape. Specifically, Warren Jeffs, who was arrested for facilitating sexual assault on girls, some of whom were as young as eight. Throughout the ritualistic abuse, the girls were told that if they cried, “God would punish them.” When the women became teenagers they took part in a “ladies class” where they supposedly learned how to be good wives—while being abused further. In the radio clips, released by Media Matters, Carlson says of Jeffs:
CARLSON: Look, just to make it absolutely clear. I am not defending underage marriage at all. I just don't think it's the same thing exactly as pulling a child from a bus stop and sexually assaulting that child.
CO-HOST: Yeah, it's -- you know what it is? It's much more planned out and plotted.
THE LOVE SPONGE: Yeah, it should be almost -- you almost should put a premeditation --
CARLSON: Wait, wait! Hold on a second. The rapist, in this case, has made a lifelong commitment to live and take care of the person, so it is a little different. I mean, let's be honest about it.
Oh, by all means, let’s be honest about it. Honestly, it was horrific. That was rape. It was the most horrendous kind of premeditated child rape.
It may seem strange that a group of people who bought into the "pizzagate scandal" (in which high profile democrats were, wrongly, said to be trafficking children through the non-existent basement of a pizza parlor) seem non-plussed by Carlson’s defense of a man who really did facilitate the rape of many young girls. Sadly, they don’t. Carlson’s comments play into a certain part of the conservative-sphere that sees women not as humans, like men, but merely as soulless vehicles for male sexual gratification.
This is an idea that’s been around for a long time—Aristotle considered women to be lacking souls because they were incapable of rational thought and should serve primarily as incubators. Or, as they’d be called by modern conservatives, mere “host bodies” for a man’s children.
If you see a woman as a human being of infinite potential, with unique skills and talents to contribute to society, then the trauma and likely psychological setbacks she’ll suffer as a result of ritualistic childhood rape are horrific beyond words. If you see her as a piece of property, well, nothing bad happened to men in this story. Besides, if women are “extremely primitive” and all they can hope for is for a man to marry them, then saying that men in this story “made a lifelong commitment to live and take care of the person” is, well, good enough.
To see that commitment as no more than a grotesque mockery of what ought to be a joyful partnership is to assume that the women involved might have feelings, and to sympathize with those feelings. To assume that it’s fine, because their rapists offered to marry them, is to assume that a woman is, at best, an animal who can be passed along without compunction to any man who promises to feed it.
But Carlson’s comments make it pretty clear that he finds women’s inner lives, at best, irrelevant. Women can either become mothers, if they’re lucky (like those victims of Warren Jeffs) or, if they’re single and secure in their sexuality, be dismissed as “whores” who will quickly outlive their usefulness. To become a Supreme Court Justice, like Elena Kagan, is to inspire pity, as Carlson says he “feels sorry for ugly women.” Hillary Clinton, the first female Presidential candidate nominated by a major party, is “anti-penis.” As far as Carlson is concerned, intellect itself may be a bug when it comes to women, not a feature. When discussing a Miss Teen USA contestant who flubbed a question, Carlson declared, she would "probably be a pretty good wife."
He then went on to talk about how the 30-something pageant host Mario Lopez probably had sex with the girl because, “He gets a pass. The normal laws for that kind of thing don't apply to him.”
Living with someone who seems to genuinely feel that women’s accomplishments are secondary to the sexual pleasure they inspire in men is probably as troubling to Carlson’s daughters as hearing her dad say that, “If it weren’t my daughter I would love that scenario” regarding 14 year old girls having sex.
And that isn’t (just) a dig on Tucker’s parenting abilities. It’s thought that the focus on girl’s looks rather than their other, less physical traits leads to depressed young women. Being thought of as merely a pretty thing isn’t all that much fun, especially in a world that will constantly remind you of your bodily flaws. But, again, that line of thinking implies caring about a woman’s emotional and mental state as well as her physical one.
Carlson has refused to apologize for his comments, presumably because he’s just echoing sentiments Fox and his fans are onboard with. To anyone offended, Carlson has stated that “I’m on television every weeknight live for an hour. If you want to know what I think, you can watch. Anyone who disagrees with my views is welcome to come on and explain why.”
They’re probably not, of course. When people come on Carlson’s show to disagree with him, he doesn’t air their interviews. But don’t worry. You don’t need to try to go onto their territory to have an impassioned argument with someone who defends child rape.
As Angelo Carusone, the President of Media Matters explained, “The reason we released [these radio clips] is precisely because the things you say on your Fox News show echo the misogyny displayed in those clips. We were actually helping people better understand just how vile your current Fox News show is by showing what that worldview really looks like."
And for women out there, at least those of us that don’t wish to be consider things, it’s a very dim worldview indeed.
