first fig

I am instituting a new weekly feature: The Weekly Anti-Woman Wacko.

I can’t tell you the number of times I have been told that the feminist movement is no longer relevant because now women can open bank accounts, work outside the home, get abortions and supposedly receive equal protection under the law. I can’t even begin to tell people how far from the truth this is. So from now on, I will be posting weekly examples of why feminism is still relevant and desperately needed.

Drum-roll please. This week’s anti-woman wacko goes to…Mark Belling.

For those of you who don’t know Mark Belling, he has a right-wing talk radio show in Milwaukee. Belling is known for his outrageous and often incindiary antics, including the use of a racial epithet that got him suspended from the airwaves for a week. I can’t say anymore about him without feeling the need to take a shower, so I think I will just let Mr. Belling speak for himself.

“Without regard to what you think about women who get off by behaving like sows by pulling out their you-know-what in front of everybody else in the world and letting their babies start sucking, whatever you think about that, you don’t have the express it so crudely, well why not? It’s a crude practice, given how adamant some of these sows are, that’s an appropriate term, isn’t it? It’s..it’s what a pig does and it does it in public, right? I mean, I don’t, I – hehehehe…”

And my mother wonders why I despise talk radio? Anti-woman rhetoric doesn’t just hurt feminists; it hurts all women and, in this case, babies. Free speech is important but hateful ignorance only has power if there are people willingly listening and agreeing. This bozo wouldn’t have a radio show if there weren’t people out there who believed that breastfeeding women and babies are more like barnyard animals than human beings.

So Mr. Mark Belling, thanks for being our inaugural weekly wacko and…stay classy.

h/t to Feministing for the quote. You can listen to this lovely little vignette here.