“Are we beyond those days where a woman can behave as a slut, but you can’t call her a slut?”
Jason Lewis, the US representative from Minnesota’s Second District, said this in 2012: “Are we beyond those days where a woman can behave as a slut, but you can’t call her a slut?”
CNN went through hours upon hours of Lewis’s former radio show, which he hosted from 2009 to 2014 before he was elected to Congress in 2016. Apparently, Lewis had thoughts he wanted to share with his listeners about “sluts.”
“It used to be that women were held to a little bit of a higher standard. We required modesty from women,” Lewis said. “Now, are we beyond those days where a woman can behave as a slut, but you can’t call her a slut?”
Lewis’s comments have come to light during an election year when the #MeToo movement and the wins of Democratic women are defining the campaign. He will face a Democratic woman in his reelection campaign, Angie Craig, which is expected to be competitive after Lewis narrowly defeated Craig in 2016.
Here are Lewis’s comments, apparently originating in the Sandra Fluke-Rush Limbaugh controversy, in full from CNN:
There was more. Lewis brought up Madonna. She’s had a lot of sex and dressed provocatively, he observed and then asked: Would society not have once called her a slut? From CNN:
“This has all been litigated before, and as Congressman Lewis has said time and time again, it was his job to be provocative while on the radio,” Lewis’s campaign manager Becky Alery told CNN.
Lewis narrowly won his first election in Minnesota’s Second District, which covers areas directly southeast of St. Paul. In 2016, he beat Democrat Angie Craig by 2 points. Cook Political Report rates his 2018 reelection campaign as a toss-up. He’ll again face Craig, a health care executive at St. Jude Medical.
The former radio jockey and author has also had some thoughts to share about slavery. He said this on audio commentary for a book he wrote, per the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
That was reported the February before Lewis was elected to Congress. He won anyway. Now he’s up again in November.
