Let Your Vagina Be Your Voting Booth?!
Why is it that so many women's organizations seem like outpatient asylums for idiots? Check out the insulting voter registration campaign targeted at women, with embarrassing sayings like, "Step into your vaginas and get the vagina vote out!" and "Are there are any registered vaginas in the house?" (As opposed to all those renegade cooters crawling the streets at night?) Wendy McElroy addresses the idiotic idea that women vote as one great big pussy posse:
Looking at just one election issue -- abortion -- there is no consensus among women who seem to be split equally into pro-choice and pro-life camps. Only by demeaning pro-life women as being "unenlightened to their own vaginal interests" can the advocates of shared-identity politics explain this schism.Women don't seem to vote on the basis of their genitalia. Instead, they vote for the candidate most closely aligned with their view of the world. Indeed, it seems bizarre for gender feminists to argue that a woman should think and vote as a sex organ. Whatever happened to their anger at the objectification and portrayal of women as body parts?
Nor is it obviously true that women's interests differ dramatically from those of men. For example, it is difficult to see how pivotal election issues such as gun control, Iraq, the price of oil, better schools or terrorism are more important to one sex than the other or have a significantly disparate impact on either one.
Ladies, if you must vote, please use the big organ you'll find directly above your shoulders -- I mean, if it hasn't gotten too dusty due to overattendance of NOW events.
Soon the "hanging chad" will be referred to as drooping labia.
Lena and the Angry Clit at October 13, 2004 7:40 AM
I agree it's stupid but this event was not put on by NOW. It was put on by V-Day (Eve Ensler's group), Rock the Vote and Vote, Run, Lead (the White House non-partisan project). So be mad at them.
http://www.vday.org/contents/vday/press/release/0408181
stephanie at October 13, 2004 3:41 PM
Thanks, Stephanie. I just corrected it. Scary -- it appears I'm now hallucinating the news.
Amy Alkon at October 13, 2004 5:56 PM
It's been too much of women as vaginas ever since The Vagina Monologues. People -- and even Eve Einsler -- forgot the monologues were supposed to be satire. On people who think of women as vaginas.
jazmine at October 23, 2004 1:04 PM