Yale freshman Elaina Plott puts things in perspective:
In Saudi Arabia, women are forbidden to drive or use public facilities when men are present. If their bodies are not completely covered, they face verbal and physical harassment from the religious police. Jordanian women live in fear of honor killings from their husbands. In Egypt today, women wonder if they will see their hard-fought rights removed when the new constitution is drafted by an Islamist-majority parliament.
On International Women’s Day, these people were victims of the real war on women. Any misogynistic filth pervading our national dialogue is indeed inexcusable, and it should rightly be exposed and its perpetrators reproached. But the comments of people like Limbaugh and Olbermann should not take on the formal title of a War on Women. In giving them that name, we only fuel the perception that Americans remain ignorant of their standing relative to today’s global landscape.