That said, in identifying with Sandra Fluke, the target of Limbaugh’s rant, some women have instead chosen to distance themselves from the term, which perfectly illustrates how complicated reclamation can be.

This week, the hashtag “iamnotaslut” went viral. Jessica Scott, an Army officer who started the hashtag, tweeted, “I am a 35 year old mother of 2, an Army officer who has deployed. I use #birthcontrol to be a good soldier & responsible parent #iamnotaslut.”

Feminist activist Jaclyn Friedman points out that the message here is, “Just because I use birth control doesn’t mean I’m a bad girl” — which might imply that some women are bad. “The problem with the ‘iamnotaslut’ hashtag is that it creates a line,” she explains. “[It says,] ‘I’m a valid spokesperson on this but women who have lots of sex are not.’”

Fluke is such a sympathetic character in part because her testimony — contrary to Limbaugh’s bizarre interpretation — wasn’t about sex; it focused on women who need birth control for reasons other than pregnancy prevention (specifically, polycystic ovarian syndrome and endometriosis).

“It’s a way to categorize and differentiate yourself, that you are deserving of respect,” says Leora Tanenbaum, author of “Slut! Growing Up Female With a Bad Reputation.” It’s not all that different from what she observed among teenage girls while researching her book: The slur was most often used by girls, not boys. It’s a way for girls and women to displace anxiety about their own sexuality. “It’s a classic scapegoating technique,” she says.

The Limbaugh affair is a perfect example of how reclaiming, or rejecting, the term is immensely personal and dependent on context — and it goes much deeper than either SlutWalk or SlutRush. As many have pointed out, the word “slut” comes with different baggage for many women of color. A letter written to the organizers of SlutWalk and signed by hundreds, read, “As Black women, we do not have the privilege or the space to call ourselves ‘slut’ without validating the already historically entrenched ideology and recurring messages about what and who the Black woman is. We don’t have the privilege to play on destructive representations burned in our collective minds, on our bodies and souls for generations.”

How individual acts of reclamation are understood by others is also dependent on context. “If you’re with a girlfriend and you’re like, ‘Yo slut,’ or whatever, everybody laughs and you all understand that you’re being ironic,” says Tanenbaum. “You can be ironic when you’re with people that get the irony.”

One of the major arguments against reclamation at this point in time is that not enough people get the irony. “It may sound funny for me to say, because I did write a book that’s called ‘Slut!,’ but I do have a problem with taking back the term,” says Tanenbaum. “In order to successfully reclaim the term ‘slut’ we need to be in a place where more people have their awareness raised and are cognizant of the sexual double standard and what that means for women’s sexuality and freedom.” It’s still “too much of an in-joke,” she says.

It also means different things to different reclaimers, depending on the context they use it in. Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna once explained her early-’90s performances with “slut” scrawled on her stomach, like so, “I thought a lot of guys might be thinking this anyway when they looked at my picture, so this would be like holding up a mirror to what they were thinking.” It was a way to preempt critics. Friedman gave a similar explanation for why she chose “My Sluthood, Myself” as the title for a personal essay she wrote about her experience with Craigslist’s Casual Encounters.

“Slut” can also “denote an uninhibited, adventurous and celebratory approach to sex for both men and women in all their magnificent diversity,” says Dossie Eaton, author of the classic “The Ethical Slut,” which was published in 1997. She says, “In the wondrously explorative ’70s, I learned that gay men use the word ‘slut’ as a term of admiration and approval, as in ‘What did you do at that party? Oh, you slut!’” Similarly, the organizers of SlutWalk Seattle wrote in a blog post that “slut” serves as a “sex-positive” term for individuals “who have and enjoy frequent consensual sex, especially with multiple partners.”

In reaction to Limbaugh’s remarks, saying, “Yes, I’m a slut!” feels to me like saying, “Yes, I’m a woman!” My comfort in this case might speak to a lack of daring: It’s certainly less bold to align yourself with “sluts” who use birth control and testify before Congress in conservative professional attire than with “sluts” who raucously march through the streets wearing fishnets and bustiers. Maybe on an emotional level I buy into the notion of good girls and bad girls.

The truth is that, as a slur, “slut” is used to control the sexuality of all women. It can be leveled at any woman, regardless of sexual experience or dress. There is no strict definition of what a slut is — there is no set partner count, no percentage of exposed skin. Part of the difficulty of reclaiming “slut” is that it’s such a divisive term, but that’s also part of the argument for reclaiming it.

But even weirder was Limbaugh’s proposition: If “Miss Fluke and the rest of you Feminazis” expect us to pay you to have sex, “we want something for it,” Limbaugh said last week. “We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.” (Those words were later erased from Limbaugh’s official transcript of the show; Atlantic Wire preserved them.)

Prudery and prurience often go hand in glove. Prurience and paranoia are fellow travelers as well. Eighteenth- and 19th-century anti-papist authors and pamphleteers turned out a steady stream of stories about the goings-on between priests and young women in confessionals. “The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk,” the ghosted confessions of a nun who was supposedly held as a sex slave in a convent in Montreal, was outsold only by “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in the years before the Civil War. “Anti-Catholicism,” as the historian Richard Hofstadter put it, “has always been the pornography of the Puritans.”

Protestants aren’t the only ones with a penchant for pornography. In the Inquisition era, the Catholics themselves — whose dungeons and torture chambers would provide so many of the lurid tropes of anti-Catholic gothic fiction — filled their witch hunting manual, the Malleus maleficarum, with pantingly precise descriptions of infanticide, cannibalism, bestiality and orgies. Back in the 14th century, the Knights Templar were accused of trampling, spitting on and urinating on the cross, and welcoming initiates into their order with obscene kisses on the mouth, navel and buttocks.

The church father Epiphanius’ horrifying description of the Phibionite Gnostics’ supposed sexual practices in his “Panarion” dates back further still, to the late fourth century. It’s worth quoting, since it contains so many monstrous (and licentious) allegations — and perhaps the world’s earliest depiction of what a right-wing propagandist today might call a partial-birth abortion:

First they have their women in common. … The man leaving his wife says to his own wife: Stand up and make love with the brother. … Then the unfortunates unite with each other, and as I am truly ashamed to say the shameful things that are being done by them. … Nevertheless, I will not be ashamed to say those things which they are not ashamed to do, in order that I may cause in every way a horror in those who hear about their shameful practices. … They have intercourse with each other but they teach that one may not beget children. … And if … the woman becomes pregnant, then … they pull out the embryo in the time when they can reach it with the hand. They take out this unborn child and in a mortar pound it with a pestle and into this mix honey and pepper and certain other spices and myrrh, in order that it may not nauseate them, and then they come together, all this company of swine and dogs, and each communicates with a finger from the bruised child. … Many other horrible things are done by them.

They have intercourse with each other but they teach that one may not beget children — a practice that has come in for some unusually intense criticism this campaign season, considering how commonplace it is.

There are no studies that I am aware of to back this up, no authorities I can cite in a footnote, but while almost everyone worries that their enemies are enjoying more and better sex than they are, programmatic haters are downright certain of it. Most men are mildly anxious about how they measure up sexually, but haters are obsessed with what they fancy to be their enemies’ superior prowess and potency; worse yet, they are morbidly certain that given half a chance, their wives and daughters (or their sons, for that matter) would happily surrender themselves to them. Call it “The Pornography of Resentment.” Though they might put their women on pedestals, there is more than a whiff of misogyny in their chivalry.

“The black-haired Jewish youth lies in wait for hours on end, satanically glaring at and spying on the unsuspicious girl whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood and removing her from the bosom of her own people,” Adolf Hitler wrote in “Mein Kampf.” American slaveholders, who raped their female chattel with neither compunctions nor consequences (“To debauch a Negro girl hardly injures an American’s reputation,” as Tocqueville famously observed in “Democracy in America,” “to marry her dishonors him”), suffered nightmares about their male slaves’ designs on their wives. Some of the anti-gay literature circulating today has a wistfully lascivious undertone to it as well, premised on the notion that predatory gays can “recruit” confused teenagers, presumably by offering them a better time than they would have had with a member of the opposite sex.

A couple of years ago, I came across a bizarro-world specimen of this masochistic tendency in the writings of the 13th-century Jewish sage Isaac ben Yedaiah. A woman, he wrote, “will court a man who is uncircumcised in the flesh and lie against his breast with great passion, for he thrusts inside her for a long time because of the foreskin, which is a barrier against ejaculation.”

This is because of the pleasure that she finds in intercourse with him, from the sinews of his testicles — sinew of iron — and from his ejaculation — that of a horse — which he shoots like an arrow into her womb. They are united without separating and he makes love twice and three times in one night. . . . But when a circumcised man desires the beauty of a woman . . . he will find himself performing his task quickly . . . he arouses her passion to no avail and she remains in a state of desire for her husband, ashamed and confounded. . . . She does not have an orgasm once a year, except on rare occasions, because of the great heat and the fire burning within her.

Ben Yedaiah went on to propose that it was this very penchant for premature ejaculation that accounted for Jewish supremacy in intellectual and spiritual matters, because their lackluster sex lives left them with more bandwidth for study and prayer — but that sounds like sour grapes to me. Let’s face it: A lot of hatred stems not just from fear but from envy.

If bondage pornography is the preferred genre for the expression of racial, gender and religious resentment, 1950s science fiction movies embodied many of America’s deepest fears about the insidious nature of the Communist threat. A spurious “textbook” that the Soviet Union purportedly provided to aspiring sleeper agents in the 1930s, “The Communist Manual of Instructions of Psychopolitical Warfare,” explained how “a good and experienced psychopolitical operator, working under the most favorable circumstances, can, by the use of psychopolitical technologies, alter the loyalties of an individual so deftly that his own companions will not suspect that they have changed.” The book was widely circulated in the mid-1950s and can easily be downloaded on the Internet today. Almost certainly concocted by the young L. Ron Hubbard, it resonated perfectly with the nation’s paranoid mood.

The young boy in “Invaders From Mars,” who realizes that aliens have possessed his parents’ minds, and Kevin McCarthy’s desperate efforts to warn the public about the soulless pods who were replacing his neighbors in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” both reflected and exacerbated those anxieties. As Jeff Sharlet relates in “The Family,” the movie “The Blob” was conceived by a Christian filmmaker, Irvin “Shorty” Yeaworth, at the 1957 National Prayer Breakfast, specifically as a metaphor for creeping Communism.

The Great Adversary of the right-wing imagination is supernaturally protean; it can take possession of your thoughts and subject you to mind-blowing sexual pleasure, whether you want it or not; it can change its appearance at will. It is not just Satanic. For all intents and purposes, it is Satan — both the object and the reification of shameful and frustrated desires.

And so we come back to Sandra Fluke. Limbaugh’s defenders rushed to prove that she is neither a victim nor even a real law student, but is in fact a professional provocateur, a “plant.” “There is no doubt in my mind, in my investigator’s mind,” Bill O’Reilly opined, “that this woman, from the very beginning, was what they call ‘run’ by very powerful people … So I’m going to say — and I can’t prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, I think I will be able to — that this was run out of the White House. The White House ran this.”

Since this crowd also believes Obama is not who he says he is — if he is not a Kenyan-Muslim impostor, then at the very least he is a Saul Alinksy-style radical — it all makes a rough kind of sense, in a tin-hat sort of way. And I’m not done talking about sex yet, either.

If you didn’t know it, Obama is a disciple of Alfred C. Kinsey and Playboy magazine. Just ask Dr. Judith Reisman, who has “exposed” his administration’s war on the family — beginning with mandatory sex education for kindergarteners and continuing with the normalization of homosexuality. “Dr. Kinsey said that his mission was to eliminate the sexually ‘repressive’ legal and behavioral legacy of Judeo Christianity,” she says. “[His] mission has been accomplished, mostly posthumously, by his legion of true believers – elitists who have systematically brainwashed their fellow intellectual elites to adopt Kinsey’s pan-sexual secular worldview and jettison the Judeo Christian worldview upon which this country was founded and flourished.”

I will not be ashamed to say those things which they are not ashamed to do, in order that I may cause in every way a horror in those who hear about their shameful practices. It’s almost as good as watching.

Arthur Goldwag’s new book, “The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right,” was published by Pantheon in February. He is also the author of “The Beliefnet Guide to Kabbalah,” “Isms & Ologies” and “Cults, Conspiracies and Secret Societies.”

Writing about the way advertisers have been dumping Limbaugh’s show like it’s toxic waste – exactly like it’s toxic waste, really – Petri had reported that among his new sponsors, “So far, he’s picked up AshleyMadison.com, the site where you go to cheat on your wife, and another web site that is explicitly for sugar-daddy matchmaking.” Except that Limbaugh had done no such thing. Why, it’s as if Petri thought Limbaugh had no integrity or something.

So horrified was Limbaugh at this besmirching of his character that he addressed it at length on his show Thursday, explaining, “We do not sponsor companies that help people cheat on their spouses.” He then added, “It’s an out and out lie complete with your b-i-itchy opinion in it and it is untrue.” He then condemned Petri’s “snarky, lying, full-of-holes” reporting by vowing, “I guarantee you, she’ll run another story tomorrow saying I made this all up.” He guaranteed it! In a totally non-snarky, non-lying, non-full of holes way.

On Friday, Petri did not, in fact, accuse Limbaugh of making things up. Instead, she penned a mea culpa to the noted Viagra aficionado, saying, “In the age of instant deadlines, when the correct time to have written about something is yesterday at 3 a.m., it’s easy to make mistakes, and the thing to do is admit them, fix them and do better.” She even offered to buy Limbaugh a conciliatory sandwich, which proves she may just have the strongest stomach in the Beltway.

What a harrowing ordeal it must have been for Limbaugh — a man who prides himself on being “huge on personal responsibility and accountability” — to have his reputation so falsely tainted. What an awful thing for a human being to endure. It’d be like, oh I don’t know, being called a slut and a whore and prostitute from some whimsical blowhard’s personal sniper tower for three days in a row. It’d be like having someone declare that you’d testified before Congress that you were “having so much sex” that you were “going broke buying birth control,” that you “must be paid to have sex,” and that you “want to be paid to have sex,” even when, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Isn’t it disgusting when people use their platform to spread misinformation? Isn’t it vile when they brag about their blatant character assassination, and then try to act like it never happened? Keep calling it like you see it, Rush, and don’t let the b-i-itches get you down. We’d hate for anybody to get the idea that you’re some kind of whiny, dish-it-out-but-can’t-take-it d-i-irtbag.

The answer to all those queries is yes — but none of those factors is the genuine news of the matter. Instead, what makes Limbaugh’s apology so important is its context. Capping off other similar brouhahas from across the mediasphere, Limbaugh’s mea culpa — however insincere — is significant because it is proof that America may be both setting some basic standards for political discourse and rejecting the right-wing shrieks about “censorship” and “political correctness.”

Consider what preceded Limbaugh’s apology. Only a few weeks ago, MSNBC announced it had terminated its relationship with Pat Buchanan, who had become a television mainstay despite the Anti-Defamation League documenting his long record as an “unrepentant bigot.” Just prior to that, Los Angeles radio station KFI suspended two hosts for calling Whitney Houston a “crack ho”; CNN suspended commentator Roland Martin for his homophobic Super Bowl tweets; and MSNBC suspended liberal host Ed Schultz for calling a competitor a “right-wing slut.” And before that, there was the seminal big-bang moment that kicked off the whole trend: the removal of Glenn Beck from Fox News — a decision that traced its roots to an advertiser boycott after Beck insisted that President Obama has a “deep-seated hatred of white people.”

In all of these examples, as with Limbaugh’s “slut” comment, the speech in question set off a firestorm not just because it was ideologically extreme, but also because it was indisputably inappropriate. To paraphrase the jurisprudential terms surrounding pornography, it crossed the line from merely offensive to overtly obscene.

Of course, this kind of slander was tolerated for decades without so much as a peep of objection from the media powers that be. Thanks to that silence, talk radio and cable television came to be wholly defined by such political obscenity — a development that made spectacularly lucrative careers for hate-speech demagogues.

That downward spiral seemed destined to continue because any time there was even a hint of protest, the conservative movement’s powerful media intimidation machine trotted out self-righteous rants against “political correctness” and odes to the First Amendment. Looking to manufacture its own insipid version of “political correctness” that crushes dissent, this machine typically portrayed conservatives as victims, marshaling anti-censorship arguments to insinuate that bigotry, anti-Semitism, homophobia and sexism are somehow entitled to a constitutionally protected place in major media outlets.

Not surprisingly, this same argument is now being made by conservatives in defense of their disgraced heroes.

“He has every right to his ideas, as we all have the right to our own,” wrote conservative Cal Thomas in an emblematic screed criticizing MSNBC for firing Buchanan. “It’s called free speech.”

It’s certainly true that all Americans have a right to their own ideas and to advocate for those opinions on their own. But having one’s ideas broadcast to millions of Americans over the public airwaves by major media corporations is not a right. It’s a privilege.

Limbaugh’s apology, made under pressure and designed to safeguard his privilege, concedes that indisputable truth. In doing so, the talk-radio icon is implicitly acknowledging a welcome change — one in which media executives, advertisers and the larger American audience are finally declaring that privileges can be withdrawn from those who violate the most basic standards of decorum.

Maher, of course, is a professional provocateur, a guy who views himself as an equal opportunity fly in everyone’s ointment. But he’s also the man who recently gave a cool million dollars to Obama’s super PAC and once suggested “don’t ask, don’t tell” be overturned purely “because it will make Rush Limbaugh explode like a bag full of meat dropped from a helicopter.” As such, he no doubt felt uniquely qualified to appeal to the left’s sense of justice. And no doubt there are plenty of talking heads – the ones who erroneously keep insisting that liberals and feminists have no problem with Maher’s track record of offensive remarks – who’d go along with him.

But as a matter of fact, lots of us were revolted when Maher called Sarah Palin a “cunt” and a “dumb twat,” and were grossed out by his ill-timed assessment of Lara Logan’s “intrepid hotness” last year. We actually don’t find sexism adorable just because someone lets Marc Maron on his show.

Maher has, quite rightly, said that “When you are a public figure you’re out there and you’re fodder for comedians to make comments on you.” And when you’re a comic and a genuinely smart guy, you can probably do it without reducing a woman to her genitals. Women can take criticism and satire just fine. It’s the misogyny that gets old.

Moreover, here’s a reminder. Limbaugh’s remarks about Sandra Fluke were not about a “public figure” –- they were about a relatively unknown law student. They were made again and again, dozens of times, over a full three-day period in which he called her a whore and a slut and demanded she post videos of herself having sex. They were followed by a deeply unsatisfying statement that “my choice of words was not the best.” Since then, the marketplace has asserted itself, American style, with both consumers and advertisers deciding what form of conversation they choose to support with their time and money.

Rush Limbaugh may still have a road-to-Damascus moment and express some genuine contrition for his three-day hate binge. But until that time, what we don’t need is another smug, condescending, overpaid white dude telling us to accept a phony olive branch, suggesting that our disgust makes us “look bad.”